A MESSAGE FROM THE FUTURE
I heard a message from the future
that came to me like a chorus.
Future ancestors sang back
the following 13 verses.
1.
When the poles melted,
it deterritorialized humanity.
It was the hurricane
of consequence
that left us with floodwaters
for mirrors,
the earthquake that erased all borders
and undressed the empire,
our once full-proof shield
against the Earth.
It left us bewildered and running
towards the in
between
spaces
in search
of what we had given up
for our conveniences.
Turns out modernity provided no nutrients
and magic was in abundance
when we turned off the lights.
2.
A being set on knowing doesn't travel far.
We traded mirages of certainty for a compass
and found that a season of unlearning
will make for a year of unearthing
good soul soil.
After the storms,
we harvested mysteries
found below
the surface
worth the sky entire.
3.
Grief is a ceremony,
a site for another kind of power.
It is the sacralization of sorrow
in order to make room for a world beyond wholeness.
What was the promise of bodies
bent into question marks
and necks underfoot?
We laid on the Earth,
until we emerged as open mouths
in a collective ritual of unbecoming
the violence we had become.
4.
When the activist in us
finally entered the home of imagination,
the inconspicuous beingness once caught below the chaos
began to emerge from the stillness
of our return.
It awakened the remembrance of interconnectedness
modernity had tried to co-opt and replace
with deadlines,
demands,
deficiencies,
all wrapped in a righteous form of doing.
When the wondrous child in us put down the resistance
for the first time, we could hear a world
inside,
behind,
and through the cracks.
It was there,
within the burning of a world on fire
where we first heard the chorus
of our own futures
singing back
to us.
5.
We were born for everything that was to come.
We were born for everything that was to come.
We were born for everything that was to come.
6.
We learned from the Oaks.
After Hurricane Katrina, in the lower 9th ward,
the only thing left standing was the Oak tree
because instead of digging roots deep
and solitary into the ground,
it digs them wide and interlocks with surrounding Oaks.
Woven, they withstood the winds and floods.
Interwoven,
so did we.
7.
Through their galactic dance,
trees become storers of sunlight.
In this bewildering cosmic exchange
they gift us back our closest star
in measured
volume
so we may experience the warmth of the universe
right here
inside our Earth.
8.
Interconnected Reciprocity:
Paper Birch trees send carbon to Douglas-fir seedlings,
especially when shaded in the summertime,
enhancing their survivability.
In spring and fall
the Douglas-fir returns the favor
when the Birch has no leaves.
Interconnected and sacred reciprocity
We learned from those who came before us
about not throwing
each other
away.
9.
Life is the Earth, thinking out loud.
Life is the Earth,
thinking out loud.
And we,
as her latest creation,
almost forgot her language.
With every passing day,
we were loosing our ability
to understand
what life was communing about.
We realized
we were missing out
on the most extraordinary tale
and started to listen.
That’s how we learned that trees in a forest fire
stop releasing oxygen
and instead release CO2
to dampen the flames around them.
They taught us how to control our breathing
to not add to the flames of conflict
when they arose like wildfires
between
us.
Our commitment to love
taught us that conflict
is the soul of the relationship
begging to deepen,
so we deepened.
10.
If we were to take a clock
and use 24 hours as the indicator for the evolution of life
up until now
and start that clock at midnight,
the hours between 12-3 in the morning:
a meteorite bombardment.
At around 4 am, the origins of life begin.
By 2 in the afternoon, single-celled algae appear.
Jellyfish and seaweeds come out around 9 pm.
Land plants join the party at 9:52 that night.
Dinosaurs show up at almost 11 pm.
Mammals enter the stage 39 minutes later.
Anatomically, modern humans don't come on the scene
until the last 4 seconds
before the clock
strikes midnight
again.
We are the Earth’s latest act
of ecstatic co-creation
with the universe,
a beautiful train wreck of a species.
In our convenient continuity,
we almost destroyed in milliseconds
what had taken
24 hours: 4.4 billion years
to create.
11.
99% of all life that has ever existed on Earth
has gone extinct.
And maybe the role of life on Earth is to die.
If so,
the question that begged to be asked was:
As a species, how do we learn to die with dignity?
Our journey into that inquiry
made us good future ancestors.
12.
Beauty is something nature repeatedly refuses to see itself without
and for it,
nature resonates in the key of courage.
When we finally heard the harmonic convergence,
we too became courageous,
and all of life began to conspire with us
to become
more
life.
We became unafraid to sacrifice
when we remembered the word’s meaning was
to make something sacred.
It was then
that we began to sacrifice our conveniences
for the resacralization of life.
13.
We learned that
the wound was the portal
and awareness is committed to wholeness.
When we invited awareness
into an imagination practice,
our imagination sought wholeness.
It was there,
behind the ethnographic journey
toward wonder,
where a new cosmology cracked
into existence.
Leaving behind the reductionist,
the easy arrival,
the answer
worth
giving.