Morning meditations on the state of the world.

Reports have surfaced that women in immigrant detentions center are having forced hysterectomies. This is not new to human behavior, but we did imagine that it would not happen again, especially here in our own country again. The entire West Coast is on fire. Hurricanes are ravaging the Gulf Coast. Our human species is suffering through a plague and some are so angry that they have to wear a mask for protection that they’re storming schools. Black people continue to be lynched by the police and vigilante racists, which has happened for over four hundred years. There have been months of protests demanding an end to police violence and at these protests people are shot; in one instance, by a young, white seventeen year old carrying a large gun did the shooting and the police did not think of him as a suspect when he walked by with this large and illegal gun.

This is my report from the end of the world.

I live on the edge of a field that leads to a forest that leads to a pond where beavers rule. It is a kind of heaven to know a landscape intimately and to watch it turn with each season. The earth, if we can see, offers immense beauty and worthwhile joy.

I want you to know that human beings did love the world. They loved nature and animals. They even loved each other. But we could not evolve quickly enough to save ourselves and because we became a disease that destroyed everything we touched, earth dispelled us. I like to think of it as an eviction.

We spent so much time planning elaborate schemes to lock each other in cages where we tortured and abused the encaged and called it justice. We looked into the eyes of those that looked like us except for some minor detail we’d created, and called them beasts, told them they deserved to die. We took those that sought refuge at our border and stole their children and locked them up or gave them away. We did not feed or love or offer compassion. We cut their bodies open and stole their histories. We lost all empathy, the one thing that might have saved us. I cannot really begin to explain the problem of greed, the desire for power and control, the disease of dominion.

The way we abused each other will remain the single most extraordinary feature of our species. The intricacy and intimacy of it. The blindness of those who called themselves good, whatever that meant. They were all too busy making money to pay the mortgage, the student loan, the car, the insurance… the list is endless, truly. It was hard to get out from under that yolk. It seemed that every day there was something to be bought that might make our lives almost good enough.

I can only speak for the America I know. We did not love but for the shimmer of something we called wealth, which also, somehow, equated to self. We longed to create the image of this in all that we did and on whatever scale we had access to–whether large or small–and at any cost whatsoever. The body of a woman, the face of a child, the square photo boxes we all looked at daily, the poisoning of water and air and food sources, the destruction of land–forests, oceans, deserts, frozen tundra, all of it, destroyed by us. The earth dug out and eviscerated.

There was love in all of us. I am certain. But the disease was too strong and we had years–centuries–of genetics that led us to abuse, to harm, to hoard. Each needed something we called an identity, and this identity was individual in that it did not exert itself in solidarity or for the good of the group, at least not often or this was never encouraged except in the form of something we called “charity” which seemed to only perpetuate those who needed it and perform a sense of superiority for those who offered it. It became an easy comfort for those who felt bad about the state of the world.

Identity seemed to require a sounding board in the form of a body onto which all bad thought was flung. Without this other, the identities of Americans floundered and they began to feel things–bad feelings of fear and anxiety, which were in fact just the normal feelings of human existence, but were entirely intolerable for most Americans.

They could not cull these feelings, nor learn to live with them, so off they ran to find a whipping boy. The psychology of it was rather obvious, but still powerful.

~

If you were here, if you are, then you know about the beauty. Everywhere the earth offered beauty and life. The abundance of creatures and plants and landscapes and water and sunlight and stars and moon phases. The feeling of wet grass on your bare feet on the first cool day of September or the lick of salt water after swimming in the ocean, the sun hot against your skin, the water cool. The smell of deep forest. I am certain there are many that know this beauty with great intimacy. But the darkness took us. We could not free ourselves, once entangled. We evolved into our own end and many, many human beings saw that end and tried to change it. I could tell you all the ways they tried. But in the end, they failed. So they lay themselves down against the soft and balmy skin of earth and knew the end would come and took comfort in hoping that without us, the earth would survive and it would be beautiful.