It's important to remind ourselves today of our ancient ancestral heritage, of the time when people were wild, free and happy, a time before profits and plunder, a time before finances and fences, a time when we still realized we were a small part of the greater whole, when we still saw the fairies. As Richard Reese says, “At our core, we long for freedom, for a life without clocks or jobs, cars or cities, master or slaves - a life of love, hope, and celebration." he continues, "The ancestors talk to me in my dreams. It saddens them to see how we suffer in the modern world. Their message is simply this: Come home! We miss you! Let the land heal!"
Doubtless in time, in 'deep time' as geologists call it, the Earth will heal, in deep time the wounds caused by our hubris will be reduced to a thin shiny line in the multi-billion year old sedimentary record. As the Sufis say, "The sea will be the sea, whatever the drop's philosophy." which does well to describe how intoxicated vanity fuels our present worldview.
Deep time, though it offers a respite for my angst, offers no solace for the things i love here and now, or for the dreams of my grand children and theirs. They deserve to have dreams and loves and losses just as i've had. There are solutions that even now we humans could adopt that would allow the next generations to have their dreams. Bio-diverse organic farming and allowing the perennial grasses to return instead of using irrigation and chemical fertilizers to maintain unsustainable annual grains, for instance, would return the balance of life sustaining greenhouse gasses, literally sucking excess greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and sequestering them safely in the soil, where they belong.
There's many other viable solutions to the environmentally unsustainable lifestyles that we could undertake, the problem with all of them is that they don't make the rich richer, they require hard, dirt under your fingernails, work, they don't return quarterly profits, they return quality. Instead we attempt to defy nature, to run faster each day, by stealing our descendants dreams, with subsidies, plows, petrochemicals, fences and self-deception.
Finally, there are many good people working very hard on this Earth Day and every other day too. Giving their time and energy to resist the forces causing those wounds to our Great Mother, people like Sandra Steingraber, an activist from upstate New York, who's moving article 'From Jail on Earth Day' is so clear and perfect that reading it allows a person to believe there is hope nearer at hand than deep time, hope for the faeries and for our grand children's dreams.
