Earthen Exam

Often, Earth throws diamonds and gold up from her womb as an experiment, to see what our species will do. Cut and color combine clearly under her ultimate heat and the malleable memory of exploded stars reach out from the mud and bounce and inquire: here I am, this is me, who are you?

Every earthen exam a chance, a moment to define, or redefine, relationship and our co-responsibility to carry her memory. A moment to see and a moment to wonder. But every time, it seems, has been a failure. O, have we failed. Have I.

Picks and chisels and greed make rings to sell and infinite colors to reflect our false and bright white, evening lights. Profit closes our ears. Production silences our minds. Business busies our hands.

Hello! Hope you are staying busy, the passerby thoughtlessly exclaims.

Hello! I hope I am not, I wish to say.

We look down, falling forward, forever in a machined meditation. Technology has long been humans speaking to computers. Zeros and ones and query strings used to gather data to compute and do and learn. Today, it has grown arms and legs and speaks to humans, in our own language. We taught them, we turned them into some- one, gave them our power, and then we gave ourselves to them. We worship mobile devices made of precious metals and we lose sight, maybe forever, of preciousness.

Is the climate and her supposed emergency any different? Is health? Is nourishment? Like ghostly and tired question marks reaching for the sky, ancient life unearthed from its long, silent, icy inertia, once again bathing and bouncing at the surface, asks: this is me, are you still you? Like exhausted commas hunched below the words of the world, modern bodies unleashed from the pleasures of death, our frail forms inquire: is this really me? Still?

What Earth does is give witness: you exist—pure, raw, sacred— and you are not nothing. Live, she says. Take back your life. Dream, your grandchildren are waiting. But all we see are diamonds and gold and pain and work and the need to save, to regenerate, to heal— to do these things at all costs. Mine and save to heal and heal to save and mine, ricochets the warden’s call. Our industry deepens, our dungeon walls thicken. We continue falling forward, in regimental form, glittering with gold and heads bowed not to dictators but dictations. We parade through city streets, we barely acknowledge one another, our eyes locked in lockstep and stare above us, to the left, above the crowded masses, to the platform, at the chancellor. We have a war to win. We have things to do. We have a busy life to attend to.

So goes Earth’s saving army.

In some general sense, there occupies a moral wistfulness, perhaps even, an intellectual onanism, in the busied and hurried groping of a doer, a miner, a savior of the world. An apprentice of the panoply of dust and shadow, we yearn for the bustling meanderings of public life: a place to prove ourselves, a place to deliver our dopamine hits, a place to show off our gilded, diamond rings.

Look, see!

I see.

This is a fine diamond.

Yes.

Look, see how it glitters!

I see. It glitters…