Hello Earth #20

Hello, dear Earth

Here I am, sipping black coffee and nibbling an Anzac biscuit. My second coffee for the day; unusual to be having another so early (late morning) except when I go out for cuppa and cake with one of my friends – which of course hasn’t been happening lately, while we’ve all isolated. But I'm celebratory. The sun is shining, I just restrained myself from making a silly online purchase, and today I get to read some more of a friend’s poetry ms that she asked for an opinion on. (Making time between other occupations has been tricky, but that’s not the fault of the poems.)

Earth, you deserve poems, and music, and all the visual arts — so wondrous you are, so astounding, so huge and rich and generous. I could assert that you’re not so kind when it comes to firestorms, cyclones, floods ... but in fact, in recent decades, that might have been our doing, the human race, and you simply reacting, inevitable cause-and-effect.

Leaning in, I think I hear you whisper that you have laws, the Laws of Nature; and they’re not so hard to figure out by observation, by paying attention, by learning from our mistakes. I think it astonishes you that we cling to our mistakes because of motivations like greed and power. You gave us all we could need: what reason for greed? You put us in position as part of a functional ecosystem: what need of power? Why was it so hard for us to rejoice and accept? 

Offering gratitudes, those many of us who do, are we enough? Haven’t we all been corrupted, even though some only a little, by short-term comfort and the entertainments that dull the mind? Are we a hive organism, and if so what is the overall impetus of the hive? Where are we heading? ... Nevertheless, I have been here; I do offer gratitude.