The Planet Is Our Greatest Connection. {fiction}
{source}
And it was in those years the belief that two-thirds of the planet’s species had gone extinct due to the wrong ways of man. Humans had used up every resource out of fear and a strange disease of the mind many realized later was greed and an insatiable need for power.
“Why did they want so much power?” the young ones later asked, the young ones who were fortunate to be born after those terrible days.
“Such a powerful desire to gobble up everything in sight came from a sense of rootlessness,” the older ones replied. “See, they were cut off from the knowing they belonged to the earth. They felt the only thing connecting them to the planet was gravity.”
Tonight the young ones listened, their arms wrapped around their knees before the good fire. It was a traditional winter tale, and was a way to pass the long nights.
“It was a kind of hubris,” the storyteller continued. “So they set to shift the poles by drastically accelerating temperature change. The earth in its need to stay balanced and keep up would have to shift its poles, which could send the planet into spin. Then no amount of gravity could keep us here. Keep us alive.”
“But why would they do that? If they knew this would happen?” The young ones rocked forward in their anticipation of the answer. A spark popped out from the fire and they jumped a little, then laughed, turning their eyes back to the storyteller who settled her shawl around her shoulders. She searched the flames before she answered.
“A lot of them didn’t know. It was a kind of unconscious death wish. A kind of self-loathing. To accelerate such consumption, a bloody-mindedness, a one-pointed thinking that never let up. It was driven by a terrible and ignorant fear, a race, if you will, to have it all, be it all, control it all, and they could do that if the planet eventually threw them off for its own survival. In the end, they would be the kings of the world as they saw it, and better to be of that stature for a very short time than to be true human beings and leave the world better than when they came into it, at their death.” The storyteller looked away again into the flames, contemplating their dance as shadows patterned the walls.
“True human beings? What is a true human being?” Sometimes the young ones, if they had not heard the story before, really did not know as they were just learning of their true natures.
“One who remembers who they are. One who knows that we are all connected to each other and to every living thing on this planet, and that the planet is our greatest connection, that will provide for us everything we need, if we would only love it.”
The young ones looked down at their hands and some their eyes wandered as they wondered if they loved the earth enough, if they were honoring this connection in the way required. Do I know who I am? some of them thought. All of them understood their world was beautiful. They learned this in new ways every day. These thoughts were lightning-fast, and soon enough they quickly refocused on the storyteller. “So what stopped them from gobbling everything up?”
“Well, some couldn’t be stopped. But in the Accelerated Times just before The Change, those who couldn’t be stopped began to sicken in the heart and in their bodies. Some became ill and their lives were shortened. Some met untimely deaths because they were no longer in sync with their intuition.
Some snapped out of it and were desperate to change but found they could not, so they became addicted to sorrow and sought to mask it in all manner of ways. They slowly died of broken hearts. Others who woke up began to act to reverse what they had done. They became the true masters, because their shadows had been so dark, the light they shed was in equal measure.
Some became great teachers. Others were born at that time who were already in the light. In fact, they had come here to help. And so in Those Times, there was much conflict but also a rising of Hope.”
The young ones became quiet as they often did at this place in the story. The fire crackled and popped, rain and sometimes snow drummed or beat softly on the windows. Other nights, if it was clear, the moon climbing the sky would shine upon the panes.
The smallest young one, or sometimes another, would eventually blurt, but most often it was the smallest youngest, as she did now, who said, “And now the animals are coming back. Is that Hope too?”
“Yes, well, the fruition of hope.” And the elder, the storyteller, would finally smile at her rapt audience, for they loved to hear about these dangerous times when people had acted so strangely and had forced such peril upon their ancestors and on the beauty which none now took for granted as their home.
“Hope began in some people’s hearts during those terrible times.” She took the smallest into her lap. “And that has made all the difference.”
***
Lisa Marguerite Mora has won prizes for poetry and fiction. Her work has been published in Rattle, Literary Mama, Public Poetry Series, California Quarterly, Cultural Weekly, Rebelle Society, Serving House Journal, among others. She has won a Blue Mountain Arts Poetry Prize, and in 2017, was the First Place winner in Micro Fiction for Dandelion Press’ the artwork of Lori Preusch, and the 14th Moon Prize for Writing in a Woman’s Voice. Shopping around a first novel, she has caught the attention of top agents. You could contact her via her website.
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