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...it was a warm overcast day in spring when she emerged at the end of the road where the pasture met the woods. She had been eating garlic mustard, violets, spring beauty bulbs, and fiddleheads. The rags she wore were colored with the blood of the Earth. There was a wild look in her eyes as if every moment was more unbearably beautiful and daft than the last. At that point I wondered what it all meant as she rambled up the old gray gravel road, but I realized it didn't really matter when the unstoppable radiation of life burst forth from the clouds in the form of our sun's rays. We may have both taken a deep breath at the very moment a trout lily opened, a chickadee sang, and a maple bud broke open to unleash another seasonal whirl of vitality...

Consanguine

Let’s say you have a field. This field has a lot of grasses in it. Every blade of grass is slightly different in texture, color, shape, size, smell, and taste. There are also a lot of herbs in this field. Some are flowering, some are dead, some are low, and some are high. There are sparrows, blackbirds, wrens, and a hawk here. Shrews, woodchucks, mice, and rabbits dig up soil that is inhabited by millions of ants, beetles, mites, spiders, nematodes, earthworms, centipedes, and microscopic single-celled creatures. A big furry beast with sharp teeth was seen feasting on what once had antlers and hooves. This is a mind-boggling assortment of cells, proteins, molecules, atoms, electrons. This is a field.

Language is the abstraction of reality into discrete “things” represented by words. As humans we have abstracted our existence to oblivion. Only in rare moments do we perceive the world without our language filter lens. It is these times of great clarity or emotion that our mind chatter turns off and we purely experience our surroundings without abstract interpretation.

Existence is messy. Everything is connected to everything else. We use fertilization to draw the line between living organisms but do your sex cells belong to you or your offspring? We all begin as a single cell with the information necessary to multiply into these complex trillion-celled structures. If you trace your lineage back there is no clear dividing line between Homo sapiens and Homo erectus, no line between our common ancestor with chimpanzees or our common ancestor with plants because every living being has come from another living being since the first organic molecules began to replicate and organize nearly 4 billion years ago. Species, populations, and individuals are artifacts of our arbitrary decisions of where the lines are drawn. The lines bleed. There are no divisions, no walls.

Ataraxia

We don't understand ourselves yet... and we never truly will.
Egotism has led us astray. Accept the other: the nonself, the nonhuman.
With humility comes tranquility; new ways of being and seeing are revealed. Let go...

Fuel

“Progress” is prominently manifested in the concept of economic growth. This "growth" has completely altered the face of the Earth, transforming wild lands into croplands and cities. This has resulted in a mass extinction and significant alterations in the climate, water, and soils of the planet. It has brought about technological advancements in human food production, transportation, and medicine that are available exclusively to the first world minority. The global economic system depends on growth for its existence and maintenance. This growth is subject to diminishing returns, leading to inevitable collapse.

This explosive growth of one species has been made possible by the energy harvested from fossil fuels. Petroleum, comprised of the accumulation of marine organisms over millions of years, and coal, remnants of the carboniferous fern forests, are the big ones. The homogenous agricultural food factories of wheat, corn, and rice now account for 40% of the Earth's primary productivity. These crops are able to produce temporarily enormous yields through the application of petroleum-based fertilizer, before the intensive system depletes the land's topsoil. We are effectively eating oil, consuming the energy of millions of years' worth of biological energy in a few short decades. When cheap oil peaks, global civilization will accelerate towards the collapse it has laid out for itself.