Another Choice

Today and more so every new day more of us experience physically, with our bodies, the ire and fury of the earth – reduced by the magnitude and intensity of its forces to the most primal state of creature.

With a start, a jet of fire, an atmospheric turbulence, the forces of terrestrial nature can eradicate all of our accomplishments, pulverize our instruments, and give us back to the worms.

While even outer space has become our rubbish bin and we scatter our beer cans on the planets as we have sullied our noblest and proudest summits, glaciers are melting and oceans swell and choke with our amassed detritus, forests are devastated by our machines and rivers are poisoned and air is becoming toxic, wars, epidemics and plagues and calamities no longer suffice to arrest our noxious proliferation.

And, meanwhile, it is not life that triumphs, but death.

The opposite of meaning, the opposite of the aim.

***

Therefore, which urgency can this be about?

Can we, are we then capable of approaching this question lucidly, sincerely and impartially?

Is it not still and always the terror lurking in the blood of the physical creature faced with the specters of suffering and destruction, is it not this old instinctive terror that dogs and haunts us?

For the Earth shall recover and our own disappearance, the annihilation of this human species would not sign such great setbacks for the infinite riches of matter.

***

But there is this too: the love and adoration for this living Earth, this physical, material universe – for the body of the Supreme.

The infinite and ever new magic of the great and noble and profound Earth, the rolling waves forever, the fields of blooms in the springs of the mounts, the dunes never the same in the

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