A Conversation with Gaia

"My Goddess. Gaia. My earth mother."

"My child."

"My people are lost."

"Yes, many are. Almost all."

"What can be done?"

"What do you imagine can be done?"

"I imagine the earth again, a garden."

Silence. No response.

"You do not answer, my Goddess."

"You have a good heart. What do you imagine the likelihood that the garden you imagine will become the way of your people, in your lifetime?"

Silence. No response.

"Are you prepared to be born again here, until the garden you imagine is the way of your people, my children?"

"Will my kind survive long enough for me to be born again, here, on your surface?

"If not, will you return the many millions of times it would take me to arise a another species of your 'intelligence'?"

Silence. No response.

"What is this service you speak of?"

"It is hard enough to contemplate that I would be born again here, knowing nothing of any past life and even that such a thing is possible; to then imagine being born here many millions of times as something not human, after we have gone extinct."

"Then do not ask what can be done, if you are not prepared to hear the answer."

A pause. "I am in service to more than you, my Goddess."

"Then perhaps you have no choice but to return again, perhaps next time as a slug."

"I am in your service, my Goddess," bowing.

"Then perhaps you are ready to prepare your people for the garden you imagine. How has that worked thus far?"

Silence. No response.

"I ask again. Are you willing to be born again, here, to help make the surface of me the garden you imagine?

"I am."

"If it takes a million lives and never happens, and every life is something 'less' than human?"

"I want humans to live in joy and wonder on this earth."

"There is no joy nor wonder on this earth without suffering."

"Suffering will be eased if we treat this earth as a garden. By garden I mean, balancing the garden with the wild."

"That is accomplished quite nicely without humans. I was very much like the garden you imagine, before your kind planted seed deliberately."

"And I refuse to believe planting seed was wrong. Or that the course of events then 'till now were anything but inevitable."

"Yes, more regulated abundance and a sedentary life, in the advent of the planted seed, made many of your kind monsters. Why do you believe, if you continue to plant, you will not continue to grow monsters?"

"I believe there will come a time when the type of planting will not be conducive to the consolidation of power."

"Your kind have a curious conception of power. I could wipe you out completely in a fortnight. Without any great difficulty. The Sun, likewise."

"But you would not spend four billion years birthing us, to blot us out in a night."

"We might rather make you go extinct than have a few of you survive in an utterly desiccated toxic landscape, that would take us a million human generations to fully heal. We could birth another comparable to human, in the time it would take a human couple to birth a child. Would you think me wrong, to have had enough of human 'intelligence'?"

"You would not kill your child more readily than a human mother or father."

"Well, rest assured, your kind are capable enough to engineer your own extinction, without any help from us."

"So what is the point then, my imagining a healed, lush, vibrant planet with people still on it, if between yourself and humans there seems no destiny but fire and ash?"

"Fire and ash is what will become of my body, eventually."

"But not for a long time! What of my people, between now and then!"

"You are more than your kind. You know that."

"I know what I have experienced in this life: joy, wonder and suffering. I believe a time comes when humanity will live mostly at peace on this earth."

"Perhaps peace is not the way of your kind, or the point. Perhaps it is as they say, there is only a perpetual battle, between good and evil forever, with lulls between conflict?"

"I think in cycles of time. Though it seems at times evil has triumphed among my species, and there is nothing to be done but to prepare for the death of us."

"Why do you care so much about the fate of your kind, when you intuit there is so much more to you than being human?"

"Because I love this earth and this body."

"So what is to be done?"

"That is what I am wondering."

"Are you unhappy with the path you are on?"

"No. But I expect to see ever increasing war, pestilence, famine and death, the remainder of my life."

"And you are wondering what is to be done about that?"

"There is nothing to be done to prevent it. I only want help building a community, and a garden to sustain us, whatever happens."

"For that you have my blessing. And that of the Sun."

"Thank you, my Goddess. Gaia. My earth mother. I am in your service."