2022 — The Year I Found My Voice Again
And I’m screaming ya’ll
This is my third incarnation of this post. I’ve tried writing a fancy essay on how my trip out west reawakened my voice and make it sound so noble, but I failed twice. So here it is, in a nutshell: my dormant voice reawakened to a roar. I found my voice and started screaming.
I screamed to be heard, and some of you did. I screamed to warn, and many of you forearmed yourself. Will I keep screaming in 2023? I’m not sure, but I will keep writing my essays and monologues. I will keep writing about our dying world and how we should step up and fight for it. How we should change our foolish and childish ways before it's too late.
Is it too late? I often wonder about that and it makes me angry. I feel like a raging sea at times. Angry at how we’re destroying the most beautiful and precious living entity in the universe, as far as we know exists, and for what? Money? Power?
This quote by Carl Sagan sums up exactly how I feel about this.
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. — Via The Pale Blue Dot, by Carl Sagan.
This is where I make my stand. This is where we make our stand. We must fight as authors, artists, lovers, friends, and humans of the world for a better and new world. Why? Because life is so damn amazing.
Memories of my life flood me on a daily basis. I dream of it, I see the dance and feel the web of life.
I remember the day my daughter was born. I cut her umbilical cord and whispered the words “I love you” in her ear.
I remember clinging to a cliff wall for dear life in Tent Rocks. I remember watching thousands of bats emerge from a lava tube. I remember seeing the wild horses of Assateague and dolphins play off its shores.
I can’t help but feel the wonder that the atoms in my left and right hands came from different exploding stars eons again. I can’t help but feel this incredible web of life permeate through everything.
It’s here, the entirety of existence and consciousness. It’s all here for us. If we can keep it.
It is paradise on earth, our Garden of Eden, one that needs to be fought for. One that needs to be protected so that all of us can live. Every single crawling, creeping, flying, swimming, and running living creature. Everything that is alive has a right to live and it starts with us humans.
The fight starts with our pens, our songs, and our voices. It starts with what we teach our children. It starts with acts of disobedience. It starts with us saying “no more!” But above all, it starts in our hearts and our minds.
Thank you all for being here with me.
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