Something is broken in the relationship between Hurricane Helene and the humans. Something is definitely fatally broken between the Los Angeles fires and you and me. And how couldn’t we get the message? How could we not see?
Background: The Earth is a medium. They are everywhere all the time. (The Earth is non-binary.) And they communicate through our bodies as well as everywhere all the time, vibrations through the air & water & soil — this medium can carry a song a long way through horizons but it is hunted, sometimes scraped clean of all the messaging music – by the Devilish Monoculture.
After Helene and LA the survivors are utterly and completely radical for a moment, maybe for more than a moment. The Earth stops the disaster but they are shaking everything everywhere. Then the Earth waits and gazes at us. Will we blow it again? The Earth keeps waiting, making laughing music in the trees. The Earth waits in Altadena & Cherokee & Palisades & Mars Hill & Eaton…. they see us consoling each other and next comes the no-nonsense communistical gift economy – working hard, holding each other as we try to walk, feeding smashed food, sharing, helping & helping & helping. Survivors unwind from the shock with surprise love.
You see the Earth has arranged for a shadow fire, an echo of the flood. The disasters go drowning and burning in new ways, not just or not only with bitter sorrow. They push practical figuring out what to do. The question, “What can I do to help you? What do you need? I found some nails but I don’t have a hammer.” That’s an Earth thing, it is how nature moves forward into time. (A scientist and artist named Lynn Margulis argued for a ‘cooperative evolution’. She observed species working together to survive and evolve.)
The media try to pull it all into the Christian charity / human interest story, packaged in one-emotion-fits-all 2 minute news items. But we are in a revealing moment in Southern California and North Carolina. The uprising of the Earth needs our attention. This scary clarity. They are here. What do we hear and what do we see? The Earth is asking to cooperate in a way that we are unprepared for. This is an unfathomable erotic shift going on. There is a common knowledge shared by the plants and animals who are witnesses. This is “epochal” – the Earth has given us something that reaches out across the decades. Someone who refuses to change dies fast.
If you throw a thousand tiny microphones at a neighborhood or an ecosystem, you will get back a thousand songs. All the beings are singing. Life is everywhere all the time singing songs, even the rocks, even the rubble and ashes. Throw a thousand mics down into the disaster’s devastation and the songs will rise. We have instructions for our tasks of radical love. In the echo of the crackling sound of fire we can grow change and be change.
We know climate change is shouting messages that are like an undiscovered element that government scientists are refusing to notice. We know we can stop our fear and turn and walk into the shouts that seem to be coming from death. We can turn and walk that way if we walk together. Over 200 people were taken miles down the valley by rivers named Pigeon & Saluda & French Broad & Swannanoa. These folks are dead as humans but as Earth they are alive and they sing the message like a big choir. They rose up into the THEY. The survivors carry the memories of river picnics & making cars work & and falling head over heels for the wrong person & coming home to children after a long day or long years. And now the dead and the living mesh these memories in cooperations of souls. They become the new climate.
We are all the natural world, yes? And we are spreading. The corporate temperate zone, full of the ruling isms, is suspicious of how the Earth is acting-out in the global south. Helene and Los Angeles are like Derna, Libya and Lahaina, Maui . They are like the city that washed away and the city that burst into flames but this Helene and LA happened here. They came to life right here! The institutions above us are constricting in fear as we feel the new climate coming into our bodies. The fossil banks, the drilling scraping bombing corporations, are trying to put out the flames and waves with their saturation advertising, fundamentalist religions, militarized lawyers. Industrial silencers…
The after-disaster gift economy is part of the Earth-wide evolution. Human culture runs parallel to the gigantic project that we fearfully call the Sixth Extinction. What is the best thing we have to offer the Earth in the time of its radical change? Put our best foot forward like some kind of radical change dance – or our best feet forward like a group dance. How we are together after the Earth has their disasters…
Oh Earth, bless us with disasters that make us change! Earthalujah!