A Prose Poem or Ecosophic Meditation
Look: Civilization ended in a post-midnight place named Auschwitz; with the terminal moment of anti-event, at the irreversible dropping of The Bomb on Hiroshima. The ultimate supermall of death. The ultimate militarization of ideological and scientific progress.
There has been, of course, throughout the history of human crime, much deception, betrayal, atrocity. Suffering has always been at its worst wherever presently afflicting. In the immediacy of traumatic experience, suffering is not a numbers game. And inhumanity has always, always been justified by power and complicity. And yet, on the diagram of the advancing psychosis of Apocalypse, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Hiroshima-Nagasaki, are Absolutes. The standards of cruelty, horror, the civilizational terminus of life having any chance at recognized personal and interpersonal value.
And yet, and yet…sputtering and resuming since the end of civilization, we practice, we propagate, we go on. Continuing in the pretenses of illusions. Continuing to invest in the metaphors of rape. Pervasively covering up, trying to forget what should never be forgotten, struggling anxiously under the daily surface to remember what we chose not to remember. Barely avoiding vertigo. Craving the drugs of artificial happiness to avoid the nothingness of the fallen, shattered image of a failing species.
Unable (as well as unwilling) to find an exit, a path out of ignorance and impotence, through nature, to rewild and to ignite liberation from our cybernetic nightmare (today no more than a thin 90 seconds on the doomsday clock), we settle into the fentanyl of comfortable despair, uphold the culture of apathy, participate in the cult of victimization. How to escape, without being threatened or even bothered, from who we are, how much we have lost and expended, and what we keep becoming, in order not to return to what we naturally are. We exalt brute force and dominating, if not destroying technology, while clinging to the conveniences derived from moral weakness.
Look: We are desperate to the point of additions. Our horror is everywhere. It breathes in us – feeds, clothes, entertains us – and is always. But truth (that violated, archaic word), truth is radical. Because truth is at the root of life.
Life came long before us on this distressed and ICU directed Earth. On Earth for billions of ages, everything is about the achieving of life. And life is about evolution. These are the parameters of our existence and there can be no help and no hope for us if we do not stop willfully playing dumb, sabotaging life to assume superiority, change our species direction, and evolve *.
Now look: How much changes and becomes possible, when we stop abstracting the realities and real dynamics of what on Earth is given and return to honestly looking. Every solitude of awakening (every revelation of eye-brightening) can and should be seeded to grow into a solidarity of conscientious action. Action into practice reconditions the Grounding Dimension, and reidentifies those who sustain the reconditioning practice.
So look: I will show you my hands. My hands are empty. My hands are open. Together we can, through choices, change the shape of my hands. We can make a cup for sharing reviving. We can make a bowl for the communion of nourishment. We can fashion a gift of integrity from one soul to the next.
It is simple to get started. In the beginning is the keystone, without which there is nothing further. The keystone is trust. And trust is radical. Trust is at the root of culture **, of being human, aligning, and living with the Earth. Not merely on, but within the Earth stream, the relationships circuitry of biodiversity.
*To evolve as invoked in this prose poem and focused on in other of my writings is reference to an interior condition, which, through qualitative development and practice, eventually becomes cellular and the basis for an alternative, innovative species identity. As such, inner evolution treated seriously is, simultaneously, an emerging of a new humanoid type, which I name the Avatar-Human, with eco mature rather than ego adolescent character., and the reclamation and rehabilitation of our collective ancestral future.
Listen to what environmentalist Paul Shephard, author of NATURE & MADNESS, had to say on the subject of conscious evolution in an article from 2015: “Perhaps hope lies in going back over our human history to our beginnings to refashion new approaches to living on Earth that conform to how the world was made. Clues to choices before us are spelled out in precious genetic codes that contain the wisdom of millions of years of evolution, in healthy and harmonious ecosystems, and in traditions of place-based cultures that have survived the test of time.
The past is not a place of obsolescence but a tracery to the present where the constraints of choices before us become evident and we choose a path that is spiritually and ecologically based.” (The Trumpeter, a Journal of Ecosophy, volume 31, #2)
**In future cultures of Avatar-Human communities, memory, especially the transmission of passages, retrievals, and relationships will be touchstones of communion and continuum, and of transformative art for educating generations in the creative miracles of nature magic and the stress-free ease of belonging with, to, among, and within the context of life.
David Sparenberg – An international essayist, eco-poet, and storyteller, David Sparenberg is author of four books: EARTH KEEPER: an Ecosophy of Poems, EARTH CRISIS HUMAN CRISIS: Urgent Essays, BEING HERE & BELONGING: Visions, Talks & Meditations, volumes 1-3 in the Grassroots Reader Series, and CONFRONTING the CRISIS: Essays & Meditations on Eco Spirituality from Moon Books. David lives in Seattle, WA in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
