January 29, 2023
Nature knows that people are a tide that swells and in time will ebb, and all their works dissolve… As for us: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves… And become confident as the rock and the ocean that we are made from.
- Robinson Jeffers
The earth upon which we stand is a roiling sea whose currents move in slow motion. The rise and fall of the earth’s crust arches through deep-time, rising and falling in subduction zones whose very existence is a recent arrival in our human understanding. Our sense of self and how we fit into the world and the cosmos shifts with each new insight into the natural world and the life systems that are constantly unfolding. We live in an imaginary bubble of self: our skin and consciousness protecting us and enveloping us in an evolutionary safety net.
Our search for stable homogeneity is a mirage. Like Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, the ruins of our anthropocentric hubris surrounds us, yet we build dreams upon these ruins, determined to hold onto an anchor of permanence in the slipstream of our shape-shifting world.
