Sometimes I wonder if this is really all I was every meant to be. After all I was the first Girl Guide in my pack to get her conservationist badge. I wonder how my life might have been if I went for the obvious choice. I mean after all way back in the mid-nineties global warming, the ozone layer and pollution in all it’s many forms was all anybody was every talking about.
You see we live in a beautiful world and I suppose as much as I care about the environment what really distresses me is the destruction of beauty. I’ve often taken a long look at society and wondered what people value when they decide to destroy something beautiful? For so many of us our environment is what nurtures and comforts us. Whether it be our human relationships or the place that we live, our village, neighbourhood, our community. As I deep delve further and further into what it means to be human I wonder how landscapes and human relationships inform us. That’s probably a really good reason to be studying human geography right now. It’s a fascinating understanding of how the world interacts with itself (even if it is overly academic). You see we can’t separate the human from it’s environment, no matter how hard Elon Mush tries to get us to Mars. Besides Earth is beautiful.
This thing is though when we look at the world from a human perspective even the name of the planet is wrong. I am sure that I have said this before. Our planet should be called Water. I wonder who it was that decided that it should be called Earth? Who all voted on that? Every so often I like to get lost in Wikipedia and I think the closest I’ve ever got to an origin story for the name Earth is Terra (I can see some decolonisation happening there). The latin for ground. It makes me think hard feel hard and in fact it make me feel quite masculine. All this when we talk about Mother Earth. You see nothing moves without water. The oceans don’t move. The skies don’t change. The plants don’t grown and in fact everything dies. Too much water washes, drowns and swamps. Yet as humans we have learned to live almost anywhere. When actually if you think about it our greatest challenge is always water based. Just the other day I was musing about how someone from off planet might try to describe life on Earth. That we have massive water storms that move across the planet and fizzle out on land. That the coast are usually very wet. That dust storms and these days fire storms shouldn’t be that common. That the rainy season and snow can be seasonal if we bothered to get with the programmes and stop the idea of endless summer. Things can’t be good all the time. Yet here we are.
Dust storm sand fire storms upset me, as our weather systems become more volatile. I wonder still why isn’t out planet called Water. More than this I wonder what other names she goes by other than Gaia? There can’t on be two names for our planet? Yet they are the only ones I know. Then I wonder why is that? We might know all the varietas names of god, or even the gods, without knowing the names of the Earth. There is something suspect in that I am sure. That we seem to always be looking outwards in our need for answers. That somehow we all seem to acknowledge that something beyond us is in charge of the story. What has all this got to do with Environmental Activism? It’s a good question. Over the last year or so I’ve been caught up in a story of Earth worship. Hmm is this opposed to Water worship I wonder? I’ve been asking big question about culture beyond the interconnectivity of all beings. Where I’ve been left triggered about ideas of Beltane and Ibolic. Wondering what the fuck is all that about? In fact wondering how dissociated people are about the realties of human existence. That maybe we should be delving much deeper into nature worship rather than Earth worship and that nature should include human behaviour. After all it is very telling. You see as I find myself once again advocating for the value of christian history. I wonder why people become so fixated with the ideas of desecrating what was and in fact what is? More than this why they are so committed to devaluing of their own ancestry. After all few of us can state that we grew up with a family of Pagans, Druid or Wiccans. Why is that? I wonder if maybe our anscestors were smarter than we like to think, that in fact maybe they were subversive. Can you imagine such a thing. All that human history being deliberately integrated and assimilated into a power as mighty as the Catholic Church or indeed a kingdom that was intended to subsume the power of the individual. A community or even a belief. You see our land rituals live on. Our sacred places live on. It’s the ways in which we desecrate ourselves that give us the final say on what we value.
Lately I’ve been sitting a lot with plant medicine and for sure it feels like a craze at the moment. Like that party you went to where someone downed a bottle of absyth for fun. Even now I am amazed that alcohol is demonised in the ways that it is by the holistic community. When it’s true most of us would have died without it. Even though we know if we drink enough of it it will create hallucium tremors. So still why is that we are all caught up in the hulllcianagen than the collective delusion? All these plant activists driving plant consumption as a way of disconnecting.
Anyways it seems like I have gone way off topic or have I. What are we consuming and why? What is consuming me and why? What if I just sit still and think about it for a bit. Even in my last blog post I talked about the art of in-action. I’ve been feeling a lot into that too. I have to swim ever more deeply into alignment with the idea of purpose. It feels to me that I have to be ever more steady with my hand on the tiller if I am ever to arrive where I think I might belong. You see the wind will catch you. We get blown up into a terrible panic and waylaid in places that we never intended to. As I fall ever deeper into my activism journey and my understanding of what it is to be Enviro-Mental I see that my immediate environment has to increasingly inform me. That more than this without listening and hearing one another how can we ever impact and deeper our understanding of that? What are we listening to and why? What are we creating and why? What are we acting on and why. Yet at the same time there is so much work to do it’s hard to know where to begin and how it finish. You guessed it Environmental Activism is part of the systemic. All we can ever do is keep returning to self.
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