We Are Ready!

The Earth is our government. The Earth is our economy. The Earth is our church. We listen to the Earth and then go to these institutions with what we learned. We go to the president and the generals and get no response. Then we return to the Earth and await further instructions, knowing that life itself is the best strategist.

The Earth speaks to us every day. The quakes and typhoons are hard lessons. Sunlight and laughter encourage us. The silence of extinct life is a sorrowing Earth.

When a Wall Street analyst wants 400 mountaintops removed in West Virginia, then 2 mile-wild tornados never before seen in nature - rage across the plains. Somehow in this great debate the Earth can only be cast as bad weather. What led us to think that the Earth is not an articulate, educated speaker?

While all of our language and knowledge originates in the Earth, something in our language and knowledge needs to delete the real author. No, we must hero on alone.

The Earth is encrypted in the dust, in the sting of electrons and humming of the universe. What the Earth knows will always be unknown to us, but we can start by accepting that the unknowable Earth is most everything that we believe. It is all the commandments; it is common sense and where compassion comes from.

We reserve our most outrageous performances for the Earth, betting that it is in the audience. We put personalities on Mount Olympus with soap opera scripts. We sing Puccini to the watery fire that creates a child in our loved one. We dance all night for the thing we must sensually understand, but never control.

The Earth is our celebrity. The Earth is the only famous being that matters at all. In this time of ultimate emergency, any media that doesn’t translate the Earth to the human species is frivolous. The Earth is writing human history. The Earth has found it necessary to make history without asking for our permission.

Or is the Earth reaching out to us by example? It is dawning on us humans that the Earth is like what we hoped we would be.

We can’t cover up the fire and drought and melting ice. The Earth isn’t sending wind and rain as an ominous soundtrack for kissing actors, or for sports gods, or for financial charts and talking heads in suits. The Earth is the foreground and the background and if we’re dizzy we’re on the right track. What leader will show us the strength of the necessary sensation of loss of control? What champion for the living will lead the charge against Consumerism and Militarism? The Earth is our leader. The Earth showed up at Copenhagen, pouring over the streets, so the corporations and governments had to make their deal in secret.

The Earth is our teacher. The Earth is full of deeply serious demonstrations. Songbirds with vibrating hearts navigate by glints of light that travel through space for millennia. There are rocks that have a way of cradling infinitesimal Edens that become Sequoias. All the animal personas on the land and the sea are streaming with meaning. They roam the Earth and love and die and become the Earth and the meaning streams on.

And some day soon we will find the intelligence in climate change. It is there. There are messages swimming toward us from the ends of the Earth, rising toward the shore...

The Earth won’t tell us if we can survive. The Earth might be pulling for us, although natural disaster seems to be a part of what we need to learn. The tragedies are teaching us. And all the old friendships and riveting miracles and ordinary good mornings are teaching us, too.

Each of us is made of the Earth, after all. How we got to be anything else is hard to fathom. Are more of us waking up, with our own Earth breaking through?
Will our own Earth stand up, throw open the window and shout: “Yes, I’m ready!”

Rev Billy Talen