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Earth Crying for Joy

By Conrad T. Greenston
Wednesday December 30, 2009 - 08:56:00 AM

In the longest dark, ensconced in my cozy electrified urban habitat, this Winter Solstice, Year 2009 of the Common Era, alive on Turtle Island, planet Terra, the boob tube just gave me a brief glimpse of a ravaged rain forest segment in Indonesia cleared for palm oil production. I’ve seen this before. Watering this human male’s face, I begin crying for Mother Earth. 

High mountainous, indigenous settlements existing for centuries just below melting glacier lines in the Himalayas, the Andes, and elsewhere will soon have to migrate; water is scarce and gardens are difficult. Nomads and agrarians on the edges of vast deserts, the ribs dominating chest-scapes under their flesh look to the skies for rain without hope. Monsoons in India have lost their gentleness and flood the land, washing away the soil. Hurricanes mount their winds with unheard of strength. Rising waters are threatening to drown island-nations; vast coastal regions and their populations will pack up and go. The Arctic polar ice will soon disappear in the summer, robbing the polar bear of its habitat; the Greenland glacier is melting, dripping fresh water into the North Sea, disrupting the warmth from the Gulf Stream, likely bringing on a mini ice age in Northern Europe whose peoples (according to a Pentagon study) will have to relocate, with many moving to the southeastern United States. Nature does not see the artificial boundaries of nations and private lands. Dignity is not a commodity available for a price. 

Global warming is at work regardless of the propagandistic naysayers of corporate stooges spending hundreds of millions of dollars spinning lies into the minds of the innocent and the ignorant, looking only to the bottom dollar and protecting their turf. The recent gathering of the United Nations of the world in Copenhagen, called to come to an agreement to end the threats of global warming, ended in disarray, and, thus, has created a time delay from which humankind may not recover—we are that close to the end of the human experiment. 

And yet, the Earth, the universe, flora, fauna and the elements are full of grandeur, creativity welling forth with harmony—quelling the violence of the Big Bang, exploding stars, colliding planets, and having sequestered high energy radiations not conducive to life through billions of years of evolution to flourish in the beauty of life on Earth we can still experience today. Yes, there is a poignant joy made all the more precious in our mind’s eye by the contrast between the potential and misery humans have created within their spirits and on the Earth. 

Why do women cry? Is it because they bear our children? Because their relation with the soft flesh of life they bring forth is blissful proof of the grace of humanity, which they witness with a certainty of wisdom, and, yet, they weep when that is laid low? Do they weep in the face of fulfillment of promise because the beauty they manifest is testimony to the falseness of the suffering we continue to inflict on ourselves and the other? Is this not also the same with our Mother Earth? What is this remarkable thing called a flower? Panoramic vistas? The tree of life? 

There is no greater joy in the universe we are aware of but that which we can experience here on this planet, which we now see is made fragile by our human actions. And these scars are Earth’s tears, offering us the realization that at our core is a basic goodness, which we can nourish and actualize out of the ashes of our folly. Yes, the Earth is crying for our joy if we have the courage to experience its bliss, to build a new world that supports human potential in all its glory.