I have amended the post I put up some days ago regarding the myths we are sold by the commercial world. I have added the lines “Along with the mesh of mycorrhizal net that Life has cloaked the Earth with. These not only allow but actively encourage Life on Earth.”
I want to unfold that statement a little further.
The idea prevalent in the modern scientific world is that this is the only planet with life on it. Others simply do not have the conditions that will allow for this, we are assured. A deluge of water in which life has the chance to bask before it clambers on to the land in the form of lung-breathing fish who can withstand drought and bury themselves in the mud during the dry season.
However, as I have pointed out on more than one occasion, Life colonised the rocks in the form of fungi first of all. These then spread across the shores and form the mycorrhizal network that constitutes a large part of the humus of the soil.
It is on this mesh of living membranes that the later plants evolved and allowed the evolution of insects and animals to live off them. Nowhere in all of this is money mentioned. It took several million years for humanity to strangle itself with the concept of possession, ownership and wealth. Through thousands of years, following the recording of shipments from Sumeria to India, money has come to dominate the thinking of the human species. There are still those who can spurn money and return to their semi-deserted lands, and eke out a meagre living from the life they find there.
Sadly these are seen as anathema by the banking system which is doing its damnedest to enthral every living – and many it does not consider to be living at all – entity, into the trammels of mortgage, profit, career, ambition and pride. The attempt was made in the 19th Century to destroy the living economies of the Native American people. The railway was used as a means of breaking up the migration paths of the buffalo, and then seen as a means of dragging tourists on to the plains to slaughter willy-nilly, for the pure pleasure of indulging their blood lust. We have seen the many pictures of herds stripped of their skins and left to rot. Was this the beginning of consumerism, or was it already well-established?
What is not considered by those whose closely check the profit margin – for now they are doing the same thing with the Masai lands in Africa, tourism heralded as the saviour of a flagging economy – is that Life is only visiting this planet.
What does this mean? I hear the scoffing voices clamour.
Life did not begin on Earth. It arrived here. Among the ancient and unbroken cultures – recognising the western capitalist model that has infected the world at large as a broken culture – it is known that Life is a gift. Different cultures no doubt share different ideas as to what and where the Mother is. For a seashore dweller perhaps it is seen as the sea; for a riverine culture it may well be the river that is praised and prayed to as the Mother of Life.
One thing is evident. It is not Banks, nor the ‘Global Economy’ that is seen as the all-provider. When bankers suffer heart-attacks and managers collapse through breathlessness. It is not to the Bank they turn for help in their hour of need, but rather recall some primitive source they were taught as children and cry out ‘O God! save me now’. Until they begin to acclimatise themselves to the idea that they too are mortal and will pass away. So they make clubs to join which assure them they have been here before and truly are immortal.
But few stop to think that Life may as easily choose to leave this planet, as once She chose to visit it.
