19 Mar MOTHER EARTH TO PEOPLE: CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?

photo by Oscar Houck.

You seemed like such a good idea at the time
It took me a while to figure out where to put your hair, but i think it worked out pretty well —
A little bit on top,
and on the special bits

And clever! you really knew how to ask questions.

I made the woman, Eve, extra smart, over there chatting with the snake while Adam ate fruit and dropped the skins pleasurably upon his own body

After Eve came home from some small scale botanical studies in some shrubbery, Adam said, “I’m really tall, plus brave, so  I’ll be the boss.”

She nodded and sort of tuned him out. Being beautiful seemed good. And if he wanted to do his boss thing, fine.

A tiny pain sprung up under my arm just then — not even a one on the pain scale. Just a tickle. But, being an optimist, I brushed it off. I was so entranced by your beauty, which, of course, was my beauty too.

But then, oh my, things progressed. The crops from the fertile crescent, the Assyrians, the pyramids, the Chinese with their abacuses — it was a thrill, to tell you the truth, what a parade! And Hafiz and a lot of the Chinese mountain mystics really thought I was beautiful, which I appreciated.

And then the cities of Europe. So wet and cold. I felt sorry for the people, so I sent the plague to give them more room, and I made some pirates so at least someone could have fun in warm places, and there could be stories about distant lands, and parrots shouting, BACKTRACK, CAPTAIN! WE’RE GOOD AND FUCKED NOW!

Oh, the pirates made me laugh and laugh.

And we galloped onward, and those huge wars, gracious, the smoke! — and the smog in London in 1952 where people. Just. Choked.

And Rachel Carson* — another woman in the garden, wondering why things were dying. I sent her to you to tell you the truth. But, design flaw! Even in the most bashfully grinning super powerful country ever, no one listened, because she was a woman. And just like that, out of nowhere, my pain hit a four. I limped and gasped for a week.

A few people started moving to communes in upstate New York and New Mexico, and I really liked them — they ate bulgur and tofu — so much hair, and bicycles, and sex under the trees! (This was what I had in mind, people!) And sometimes the women would put extra herbs in the men’s tea so they could talk among themselves, about whether everything on the outside, (ME!) was how they felt in the inside (FEMALE!)

But the horse had left the barn. And cities sprawled outward and the cars were a lot bigger than they needed to be and a wave of money crashed over the heads of the very small portion of you who actually make decisions around here.

This was just two human generations ago. The Nixon years. I did not like that man. No, I did not. He pained me. He gave me a Class V headache.

I thought, I’m going to really have to turn up the heat. It was just a figure of speech at first. So I took a deep in breath (while rivers burst into flame and offshore drills were plunged into my ocean floor) and, well, I turned the heat up.

No one really noticed at first. And then a few people in universities pointed at graphs, tore at their dry hair. Electric cars were invented. But development was delayed, then stopped.

And MY pain? Did anyone ask? No they did not. My pain, since you’re asking now, was at a six.

And then I burned some forests. It was the wrong move, and I apologize. It victimized a lot of innocents. I don’t want to talk about that. You paid a lot of attention to these things if they were near you, but only then. Then you instagrammed a lot of dog pictures because you are very easily frightened.

I hung my head because what I once thought was my greatest creation has a built in destructo-gene, which I didn’t mean to put in there. Like the American Chestnut tree, that glorious being, that unspeakable canopy, the unbroken forest, which makes it to adolescence, gets a fungus, and dies. That was a mistake. But you may have been a bigger one. The American Chestnut only kills itself. You kill everything else too.

I sent another girl to tell you what was up: Greta Thunberg, and she is fierce. She doesn’t care who gets mad or thinks she’s a bad girl. I love Greta. She’s a new kind of female. She feels my pain, neuron for neuron. She looks ignorance in the eye and does not blink. She was a stroke of genius. I’m taking my cues from her now.

Now my pain’s at a 7. I’m right here, tugging on your sleeve. No you can’t go out to TGIF’s for chili fries, and 32 ounce beers. No you can’t make money on the stock market, now you can’t, can’t, can’t. I’ve wised up. I know the only pain you respond to, really, is your own. So I’m right here. Tugging at your sleeve. Listen to me.

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*Rachel Carson, biologist and author of Silent Spring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson