The Overview Effect

as vast as the leg-like fins of a tiktaalik roseae

Friends of eARTh. There are times when only poetry can express the strangeness. I feel we have crossed over into such a time. Although I have been working on a nerdy ethnobotany piece looking at the anthropocentric idea of feathered “invasive species”, the mournful hipster that resides in the angstier, avant-gardeier corridors of curiosity hiding in those creepy dormant shadow-ways at the rear end of my dusty right-side brain just wouldn’t allow me to finish it. Not for today anyway. Hard tellin’ now if that article will ever surface. And good riddance, for there are far better writers and researchers than I who can do a much finer job speaking to such topics of origins and social absurdity. (((As ever, I can’t encourage you all enough to read the works of humble, dedicated, eloquent and heartfelt devotees of plant kin like

Rowen White

,

Kelly Moody

, and

Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

… and there are more. We are fortunate ones.))) It all may surface soon. Time will tell. But not today. For this week my head and heart collided and what finally erupted from the beautiful mess was not an essay but a thousand different poems. Below is one of them.

…

Modern people have become so fragile.

It takes so very little to anger a civilized man.

Just a couple of lifetimes and that’s it,

They give up.

How many millennia, I wonder,

Did it take the Tiktaalik Roseae

To flop out of the ocean and grow legs?

How long did it take the wind

To carve the Antelope Canyons of Arizona?

How many ancient plants,

Under the might of pressure and heat,

Did it take to coalificate Time into peat?

Hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen.

Things modern men take for granted.

Too enamored with our powers of ingenuity

To re-member how our ancestors’ bones

Metabolized into this brave new world of not needing to know.

Hard tellin’.

All that seems to matter is tariffs.

Not The Mother who is matter

But stock options and power,

Being right. Being strong!

Not being weak. Not giving in.

This too shall pass, some like to say.

But change takes forever,

Happening instantly,

All at once, in the blink of infinity.

The failed investments in silly experiments in biological dominance

Eventually caused the butterfly’s wings to trigger a tsunami.

And off we go!

The mud births another lotus.

How lovely!

Three wrong turns make a right.

No, I haven’t lost faith, my dear friend.

There isn’t anywhere to go anyway.

You know that, right?

You did see the view from heaven, didn’t you?

From the window of Jeff Bezos’ mighty rod.

Over the glittery shoulder of that legendary climate change activist, Katy Perry.

Bless her generous heart.

Pure gold. Lot’s of it.

Well, it was just as William Shatner observed.

There’s nothing there but a forever loneliness.

Terrifying. Wonderful. Complete.

Just like here.

Just like where we come from.

Same as it ever was.

And ever will be.

Eventually we all briefly blossom an intelligence I suppose.

After billions of eons of eternal unfoldings.

But when we finally do,

We fall asleep again.

Just like the mountain.

As quickly as snail juice.

As obvious as apathy.

So don’t be so hard on yourself!

For having no qualms with casually supporting all the things that kill us.

For never tipping the tremendously talented musician performing for you in the subway.

For telling your children that being an artist isn’t a “real job”.

That everyone can pick themselves up by the bootstraps!

We all know this can’t be done.

But heck, it makes for a nice meme on “X”!

We all know we shouldn’t buy books from amazon.

We need the trees.

No one reads anymore anyway.

It’s ok.

Forget about it.

Go back to sleep.

God is found in the irony after-all, isn’t she sweetie?

And what’s it matter anyway?

We all fall after all.

After all.

Down down we go.

Into that infinite abyss from whence we came.

The place Gilgamesh feared so greatly.

And felled the forests because he too could not accept defeat.

Who needs Harvard and writers and thinkers and doers?

Such a waste of resources.

“It’s good to be king.”

The river will eventually find the sea regardless of what we do here, right?

Right?

It will go on, right?

Right???

Of coarse it will, my dear.

I have faith.

Like they always told me back in Sunday school,

“God don’t make no junk!”

I’m sure He will be here soon

Wearing Trumps sneakers

And posting selfies on instagram of Himself

Inside one of those trendy slot canyons in Utah

That use to be under water

Long before that noble ancestor of ours,

That cute, courageous, forward-thinking, lobe-finned fish

Who allowed vertebrates to colonize land

Came flopping out of the sea.

What a beautiful world.

Let’s just sing to Her,

Shall we?

Everything’s gonna be ok.

🍉

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Recommending Listening:

• On Singing to the Beloved in Times of Crisis The Emerald Podcast with Joshua Schrei

• Jesse Welles: The Voice of America’s Guilty Conscience

• green dreamer kaméa
  has a fantastic podcast where she interviews the most beneficial voices of these in-between days of becoming.

Further Reading:

• William Shatner experienced profound grief in space. It was the 'overview effect'

#mayallbeingsbehappyandfree