“the wound of possibility”
Soren Kierkegaard
Earth is our home; Earth is our origin. There is not now any more than there has ever been a single, sane human being who can or could have claimed otherwise.
Over billions of years, Earth has been in the process of evolving into a robust, living planet—a life place, abundant with intricate interweavers of diversity. Under the impact of human misuse and misconduct, Earth is being reduced to a trauma planet.
Reality and necessity are on a collision course. Consequences of this collision already occur and will continue in frequency and severity unless comprehensive changes take place throughout global humanity.
Our reality is the variant dynamics of the Earth in crisis. The necessity impressed upon us is the transformation or elimination of the agents responsible for bringing the crisis about—imperiling evolutionary diversity and even the planet it- (or her) self. We, the human species, are these agents (or must we descend so far into identity-darkness to proclaim ourselves pathogens?).
Such words as used here can be maligned; such words as used here can be denied. The prognosis of science can be reviled, maligned; can be denied. The prophecies and warnings of eco-poets, eco-theologians, ecosophic visionaries and healers, maligned, denied. Even the urgent, insistent, heart distressing challenges of the world’s children (Greta Thunberg being but a bold solo sounding from a global chorus), can be belittled, marginalized, dismissed, can be denied.
Nobody alive can deny a monster hurricane making landfall close to home. Nobody alive can deny a half mile wide tornado flattening their community. Nobody displaced by drought, swept up in record breaking fires or floods, or swept away by tsunami, can deny the traumatic reality of these increasing catastrophes. Catastrophes mounting relentlessly, year by year, toward a critical stage of environmental cataclysm.
Let me frame this in other terms. We, the human species, are at war. Earth-Crisis is our Now-War. Yet mobilization for this Now-War is not for a war of violence but of non-violence countering the pathological history of human violence. The Now-War is not to be another war of aggression, but of empathetic compassion and biotic justice correcting generational patterns of aggression and injustice. It is not, this Now-War, of bloodletting but of light sharing. Not a campaign of criminal propaganda serving pernicious interests, but instead a way of life recovering and re-working into dialogue the terrestrial integrity of the language of love.
Regardless of age, of gender, ethnicity, or location, we are at war with ourselves. We are at war with who we have been; so as to provide the breath, the space, the science, the ecosophy, imagination, and the time, to become who we must grow into being. So very long we have been complicit and implicit in betrayal, proudly identifying humanity as a breed apart. Consequences intensify and are terrifying. We must change direction, shift, and become avatars of relationships.
As such, it is to us to resist inertia and apathy and helplessness, to resist disempowering guilt and anti-humanitarian hatred as passionately as we resist the politics of forced extinctions (premature extinctions), toxicity, deception, pollution and the normalization of malignancy as human definition.
In war, warriors are necessary, fighters who have the courage and determination to achieve what must be achieved. A call arises from tensions between reality and necessity, sounding among all peoples to awaken, to stand together, to make a warrior’s choice. Vastly superior are our possibilities by attaining the identity of Earth affirming warriors, rather than maintaining the passive status quo economically and culturally imposed on 99% of the world’s human population as anxiety oppressed, somnambulant victims-in-waiting.
Those who make the warrior’s choice do so out of a deeply personal yet simultaneously transcendent awareness of the “wound of possibility.” Out of our affliction alternatives emerge, possibilities materialize to work into content.
To make the warrior’s choice is not to choose guilt and depression (which are widespread), but rather to participate in joyous repentance; not to choose consumerism, hording, greed, the prosperity of possessive-possessions (which is especially pandemic in the soul-exilic, mind controlled centers of capitalism), but rather choosing in freedom of conscience a prosperity of appreciation. Both joyous repentance and prosperity of appreciation, becoming experiential and concretized for us to cultivate as touchstones and common ground, stabilize a sustainable alterity for coming and belonging generations.
In the Now-War of increasing Earth Crisis warrior choices are choices to be warriors of the Spirit. Armed with the power of truth, maturing and evolving through acts of beauty, Spirit-embodied engages and confronts the problematic complex of traumatized Earth and traumatized/traumatizing humanity for the sake of life.
With this, be firm, far seeing, confident, unyielding: Earth Crisis is not a conflict for control between humanity and nature, not of collective human domination verses a ruined and subjugated Earth. That is wrong minded, misdirected. That approach is how we got to where we are. Remember instead, we are both homebodies and guests in this life place, we are not alien invaders or missionaries to dogmatically enforce conversion of oceans into plastic flotilla, wildness into asphalt, habitat into profitable resources. While stewardship may eventually be workable for us, parasitic domination does not hold up. Parasites devour their host and in doing so condemn themselves to death.
Instead of voiceless silence and narrative endgame, oblivion, victory in the Now-War is for a livable future on a habitable planet. Victory is not in the nihilistic surrender to Earth without humanity (although ignorance, apathy, neglect and submission to Earth negating power, can lead to this), or, absurdly to say, a semblance of humanity without Earth, on the edge of nothingness in the location of desolation, sterility, and nowhere.. Rather, the way out of the Earth Crisis and attaining a victory of mutuality in the Now-War is a dynamic, sustainable reciprocity, a living dialogue, between Earth AND Humanity.
Are we able to face the unprecedented? Are we capable of unifying mobilization? Do we, who are deluded and weakened by isolation, infected with suspicion and distrust,
corrupted, corruptible and collectively buried alive, still gifted with the tenacity, courage and tough love of being human? Being of one family and committing to biotic, transnational, interracial and interpersonal democratization? To answer: look in a mirror, look out the back door or through an open window, watch young people playing sports or falling in love, observe gestures, cultural mannerisms and the features of a passing stranger, or look quietly into the trusting face of a child.
David Sparenberg is a world citizen, environmental & peace advocate & activist, actor, poet-playwright, storyteller, teacher and author.
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