I'M HUMAN JUST LIKE YOU & WE'RE ALL LOST IN THOUGHT

Mother Earth by Lourents Oybur

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately; thinking about nothing in particular except for everything in particular and my brain feels a tiny bit mushy. You know, thinking is great. I spend eighty percent of my day with my mouth shut and my mind reeling in a hundred different directions and most of the time I want to do nothing more than that. Our ability as humans to reason and not just act on innate instinct is what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Strength? Any lion could tear us apart. Brains? Most of us have got that in the bag. However, as lucky as we are to have this, I believe that our ability to think-- and think a lot at that-- is one of the greatest downfalls of being human... There I go, thinking something again.

There is a quote that one of my favorite essayists, Annie Dillard, writes in Teaching a Stone to Talk that expresses my current feelings perfectly. It goes a little something like this:

"At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence. Nature does utter a peep - just this one. The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don't do it. There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life's length to listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. The silence is not actually suppression: instead, it is all there is."  

- Annie Dillard

These words are ones which have resonated deeply in my mind and soul since I first had the chance to read them and I can't help but feel a bit melancholy upon reading them back again. At first sight, this excerpt sounds a bit like a nature writer expressing some sort of seeded frustration with human encroachment on the beauty that is Mother Earth... and to an extent it is that. But moreso I think it is a calm and necessary expression of a human flaw which continues to separate us from each other and the very thing that raised us.

The modern world is one of everpresent distraction and constant competition. Humans are dedicating more and more of their time to figuring out the next "big thing" in technology, business or whatever it is that they feel inclined to figure out and our lives are quickly consumed by this need to know everything. Meanwhile, the world around us-- not our homes or our cars or the cellphone in our back pocket, none of that-- but the life that existed long before we did, we know nothing about. 

I mean, we think we know about it. We think we know that the oceans are okay and that the animals living in that rainforest we tore down magically found a new home. We think we know that our dogs love us and that the butterfly that landed on our hand the other day was a sign that good things are to come. We think we know.

As humans, we try to put meaning to everything we do because in some way it validates our own existence. We don't speak the language of the trees or the animals or the tides rolling in and out at dawn and dusk. Maybe one day, a long time ago, we did. But today? We're too caught up in human noise that we don't speak the language of where we come from anymore.

And all the time I think about how if humans could not speak, if they could not think in such a complex way, how maybe this silent treatment the world gives us wouldn't be so silent at all. If our lives weren't swarmed by the desire to make everything significant on "human" terms, maybe we would understand that not everything has to have meaning. Perhaps things can simply exist and live for the sake of just being and not to cater to humankind desire for significance.

We are meant to coexist with each other and with the rest of the life on this beautiful, extraordinary planet. Our lives are but a fleeting moment in the grand scheme of things and one day we will be gone. This isn't meant to be some depressing smack of reality. For me, it's a call to be better and more open than the day before-- to strive to find the place in Mother Earth that was made for humans but that we've somehow strayed so far from.

On that note, I give you this:

“We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.” - Annie Dillard

Written by: Ana Luz Jayme