IS THE EARTH STILL YOUR HOME?
Though I have come to believe that it is the earth itself that is the ultimate source and repository of all life and value, not until recently did I understand that this controls all human systems of wealth and money. All profit is made from the surface of the earth as food and mineral resources, as energy from water or air movement, and as identity drawn from place. But is also a marker of money.
Trump and his mafia has drawn our attention to the use of land “ownership” as markers of money amounts, both concrete in really existing and launderable as in variability according to demand and stipulation. Buy a mansion for a lot of money, sell it for pennies — or vice versa. Bookkeeping type money has become easy to trace electronically and both too intricate and too bloated to keep in a ledger, even if you are clever Manafort.
Even the “name” of a land feature can be treated as a real commodity, like Trump towers and hotels that are not physically owned — just the right the use the name. Luckily, this makes it easy to vanish the word off the front of the building, the gate of the golf club.
Using the trope of “religion” it is bracing to consider that as a system the earth itself can serve as a synonym and substitute for the terms “God” or even “Jesus”, an intercessory who lives with us, loves us, and is crucified by.us. This experiment works better than the “process theology” that was supposed to translate quantum mechanics and advanced physics but got stuck when it came to Jesus or Mary. (The sea has always been a metaphor for Mary the Mother.)
But it’s pleasanter to think of the earth as a potential cathedral in its more enchanting aspects (the Grand Canyon, deep forest) than it is to think of the earth as a bank, which is popularly considered crass, grasping, and illegitimately hoarding money it’s supposed to be guarding. A bank is a function that must be disguised by grand buildings and fancy names. It entwines itself in governments and tries to guarantee something that cannot be guaranteed, which is the earned value of lives.
A bank reveals that money is sex, a supposed measure of human involvement with the world, when all along the earth had the real sex — the replication of life through creatures.
Who gets to be where on which land was once settled by war. If a powerful king “owned” the soldiers, then he decided who got the land and if he was happy with you, he might give you a nice fat valley or he might give that valley to a monastery to protect his soul or he might take it back to prove a point.
At once place and time the land belonged to whomever used it by occupying or growing crops or grazing livestock. That was a time and place when human work and identity got a little closer to the land. Now we are in a time and place when many people never see or feel the earth. Many have work that is entirely imaginary, only virtual and depicted in graphs on a glass screen. This allows brains to lose contact with reality altogether and we’re discovering the twisted grasp of what matters.
We now understand that human beings are formed by pushing against and interacting with the life around them. If there IS no life around them, only machines and depictions, they go quite mad. Nor can they tell what the trouble is.
Sleeping on the sidewalk is not being in touch with the earth. But if you can find a little hobo camp and manage a little hooch of plastic and cardboard near growing things and possibly even achieve a kind of solidarity with the other humans, then you will find yourself. I hope.
People read all about relating to the earth and note the glamorous photos of famous places. Then they go there, exclaim “how beautiful”, take a photo, and get back in the car so they can go “home” which costs them a lot of money. “Home” means a lot of electronic equipment, separate bedrooms each with its own bath, one car per person, infinite water, and weather defiance whether hot or cold. Until they are too far into monetary debt to sustain it.
Or unless there is a volcano (if you live in Hawaii or Portland) or a drought or a global climate change. Because the earth is always in control. We are simply phenomena who have risen as humans from the humus but forget that.
(PS: I’m not using the email option.)
