Here’s how to not operate our Spaceship Earth

A letter to Elon musk, Brett Kavanaugh, trump, Descartes and my ancestors,

I don’t think therefore I am.  Life created before my thought. Life excited before my prefrontal cortex tried to make sense of it all. I don’t agree with you Descartes. I think your thinking got us in trouble thinking we created existence, thinking we think we’re god, thinking we can dominate Nature.  Though your contribution, Descartes, was worthy, I think we took it too far. 

I don’t agree with you Elon Musk. I don’t think it’s time to send stuff to space when our only blue planet is crying for us to stop.  I also don’t know you.  I don’t know how you look when you make love.  How you play with children. How you like your eggs. Do you prefer coffee or tea? Mountains or ocean? 

I don’t want to hate you.  Though I’ve tried. I’ve ranted and raved with your name in vain.  Those both dead and alive. I’ve blamed men like you for how I’ve been hurt by men you’ll never know. 

Brett Kavanaugh I’ve blamed men like you for sexually assaulting women like me. I cried in a church sanctuary sharing my story among others while you were in trial.  I don’t know how you felt on the inside in that courthouse. I don’t know how your mother raised you, how money betrayed you.  I know I don’t want to hate men because of you. I know I am better than the worst of your crime. That I will not give into the mindset we call an ideology that became an economic system that gave you permission to hurt. 

Trump you were and are a catastrophic cocktail of individual narcissistic psychopathology combined with a political pathology of hyper-capitalism both fed by the same absent umbilical cord of abandonment.  Not nurtured with love, but spoon fed meaningless money dipped in fossil fuels. A fools gold. That abandonment of love is a lineage none of us want to claim. Is the blood of a system choosing injustice.  

If I were to try and connect the dots of Descartes philosophy to Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” to Kavanough’s touching and trumps grabbing and Musk’s blast off,  I would say there is a feeling of denial.  I would say my ancestors messed up.  Not because they built a home or raised kids or created roads, but because they forgot they’re not the only ones.  They’re not geniuses or aristocratic idols or founding fathers.  I don’t want to belittle any damage done. I want to try and humanize the parts of them I don’t agree with. I want to appreciate their gift to me, to be able to reflect what they maybe couldn’t see. 

I will try, mess up and retry again to honor the natural law that says there is no such place as away.  That energy is neither created nor destroyed but only transformed. That what you put in will return, even if we’re dead. That energy circulates.  That my hatred is growing tired and it isn’t my job to stay divided. That life, not merely mine or yours, but the fundamental elements that form them, requires some evolving recipe of how to be in ethical and authentic relationship. That existence itself can not exist without it.

If you asked how we do operate our spaceship Earth I’d say ask Earth.  Not just the fungi that supports the trees but the fathers who cross seas and the strangers on the park bench. 

Genius comes from the Latin word of the same name, meaning "guardian deity or spirit which watches over each person from birth.”  Genius is Creator.  Is mother mothering. Is father fathering. Is decent. Watching over each being from birth.  I don’t believe genius is in shiny technology or a doministic ideology. Genius is quiet and ordinary. Genius is planting seeds and cultivating soil. Is Gaia. Is wHoly.