In search of HOME
Once upon a time, there were a young species. It evolved long after their home planet gave birth to multitudes of other species. It learned to walk erect in the Savanna where the grasses grew tall and billowed in the wind. There, this young species would learn how to create tools to gather the seeds, roots, and fruits of the land. They learned how to hunt with tools they fashioned from rock, wood, and leather. They would tell each other stories of where the best water is, which fruits and seeds to gather and what time of the year they should continue moving, onwards, always seeking. Seeking the place that wasn’t too cold, or too hot. The place that had enough cover and enough food to gather. The place that was just right.
They traveled away from this place, where the tall grass sang in the wind, following herds of animals to different parts of the region. Small groups of them started venturing out of the area. The Middle East was one place a group of them settled. It was just right for them. Others went all over the world. They went through Siberia and the Bering Sea during the last ice-age. Some of them stayed because for them the cold was just right. Others went down the coasts and into a new land which stretched from ocean to ocean, from north to south. A few of the tribes settled in the plains. Others made their ways into rainforests as for them the great river that lived in the skies, the beautiful fruits and multicolored four-legged and six-legged, winged and swimming people were just right.
See, this species got to every place on this blue planet. They had a great ability to adapt to their surroundings. To mold and change it to fit their needs and the weather.
They ate from the land and fished from the sea. They built buildings so massive and tall that they towered the skies. A lot of them forgot how they gathered together in small huts to get through the winter when the cold in the North was quite harder to endure. Now they had huge shelters, protecting them from the elements. So protected were they that they forgot that they were part of the elements that made up this place. That they were nature. They started looking into the skies and looking for other planets that reminded them of this place. That place that wasn’t too big, or too small. Wasn’t too hot or too cold. That place that was just right. That place called home.
Reading the news and seeing humanity’s behavior on this planet — how we treat each other, how we treat our environment — it seems like we’ve forgotten that we belong to this place, this blue planet Earth.
How do we now wake up, grow up, clean up and show up? How do we remember that our home planet is perfect for us? That it’s the planet in the GoldieLocks Zone.
[The Goldilocks Zone refers to the habitable zone around a star where the temperature is just right — not too hot and not too cold — for liquid water to exist on a planet.]
Have we forgotten that this is our home? Or do we not care?
Our mote of dust suspended by sunbeam…
THE PALE BLUE DOT OF EARTH
This image of Earth is one of 60 frames taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on February 14, 1990, from a distance of more than 6 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane. In the image, the Earth is a mere point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Our planet was caught in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the Sun. This image is part of Voyager 1’s final photographic assignment which captured family portraits of the Sun and planets.
This is the furthest out we have seen our planet — ever. As Carl Sagan said — this Dot is us, it’s home.
Twenty-two years before the Pale blue Dot image, Stewart Brand published the first “Whole Earth Catalogue” with the first ever color photo of our home planet, Earth, from space, a composite of images taken in 1967 by the ATS-3 satellite.
Inspired by luminaries such as Buckminster Fuller, who published his book “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth” the same year, Brand would go on to co-found and do many other projects including the Well, the oldest virtual community founded in 1985, and the Long Now Foundation. This photo and catalog became a catalyst for the environmental, counterculture, new philosophical trends, and whole system approach.
Every time we launched a spacecraft outside of our planet we’ve learned more about ourselves.
I believe, that for the human species to survive the coming age, and even the coming 30–50 years, we need to embrace a new form of storytelling and a new understanding of our place in the Universe and on this planet. Now that we have seen ourselves from the outside in, even to the furthest reaches of our solar system, it’s time we grew up.
Carl Sagan mused that “Science has carried human self-consciousness to a higher level. This is surely a rite of passage, a step towards maturity.”
But he also talked about how “[Science] contrasts starkly with the childishness and narcissism of our pre-Copernican notions.”
Though I agree with almost all of what Sagan says, I will argue that with the age of rationality and enlightenment we also lost something else. And that thing that was lost to us was not “Childish nor Narcissistic” but our connection to the Earth’s rhythms and cycles, the seasons, the natural world and to the whole living planet.
And the people of the modern world lost a lot of it, not because we “matured.” On the contrary, we have been killing off the sense of awe and wonderment when looking at nature. We built cities that completely abandoned any sense of connection to the land. We perpetuated the myth of “Them.” We burned medicine women at the stake and blamed them for “witchcraft” and destroyed nations of people by calling them “savages.” We created a value system that looks at a tree and measures it values only as cut down wood and not as a living forest. The Western World has spread many Colonial narratives. Raping and pillaging, burning down others villages and homesteads, cutting down trees, building dams, conquering peoples, all in the name of a delusion of self-importance and myth of superiority.
We, the people of the modern world, continue doing this en masse in a more extractive and horrific way. Allowing multitudes of sentient beings to be imprisoned and raised in inhumane conditions; only to become our food. Killing full ecosystems. Polluting our rivers, air, oceans with things that we don’t need. Polluting our minds with feckless dribble on social media and adhering to the dominant narrative without ever questioning if that is real or in the highest good of all of us. Waiting for someone else to take the blame on why our world is in such disarray. Waiting for someone else who will clean up. “Not my problem. I’ve got other things to worry about.”
How did we evolve to be so cruel? To not care?
What happened to us as a species that we forgot how to care for each other? How to care for the environment we live in?
I once heard of a study that was conducted [I have been trying to find it for years but to no avail] about feelings of nostalgia. Nostalgia is that romantic feeling to a place or a time one used to feel happy in. As I recall, those conducting the study showed different groups of people a photo of the Savannah in Africa at dusk. The golden light setting on the rolling hills in the distance, the light shimmering through the tops of the grasslands. A path through the meadow split the photo into an elegant rule of three symmetry. Beautiful puffy clouds hung above the horizon and were lit up by the setting sun.
When asked, people who looked at the image reported feeling a sweet sadness pining for a place they’ve felt like they’ve been to before, but have never actually visited — a yearning for a familiar place to which they long to return.
I’ve often wondered about that pining that we all feel to a familiar place we’ve never been to. And that image struck me, as someplace so familiar — someplace that feels like home.
Could that place be the home where we all belong? Humanity?
Are we longing to go back home, to those simpler times, gathering amongst the tall grasses of the Savannah?
We all came from there, from Africa. That’s the cradle of humanity. Could our cells, our DNA, hold the memory of that place for all of us?
Whether this study was real or produced real results its poetic strings have always struck a chord with me.
It led me to ask this philosophical question:
Is humanity trying to find the way home?
Have we forgotten that this fantastic, Goldilocks Zone planet is HOME?
The great Nora Bateson talks about the importance of embracing the complexity and ambiguity of our times and our complex earth system.
“The work of the coming decades is not the work of manufacturing, of software development, or of retail seduction, it is the work of caring. Caring for each other and the biosphere. In that care, there is the hope of finding new ways of making sense of our own vitality. The ‘my’ in my health is not mine; rather it is a consequence of my microbiome, my family, my community, and the biosphere being cared for. “
I believe it’s time we start telling stories of caring for the planet.
I believe it’s time we genuinely treat Earth with the caring it deserves.
We need to remember:
We belong to each other.
We Belong here.
We’re home.
We’re All Just Walking Each Other Home — Ram Dass
