Can you hear the cries of the planet?
I used to be able to, or at least that’s how I might have described it as an emotional teenager. I think I’ve mentioned on this blog my youthful tendency to end up in a fetal position for hours because I felt so aware that so many people around the world were suffering, and I could do nothing to stop it. Over time, I learned to shut my emotions down, had to in order to function, both in a dysfunctional family and an equally broken world. In recent years, the wall I built around my heart began to crumble. It was a very high wall, a very secret garden, but it’s mingled now with everything that was once kept outside, and once again I find my heart painfully connected to the planet that part of me hates.
It’s very strange. I’ve spoken here recently about wishing Project Earth would just end, instantly and without any suffering, and now I feel like I’m being challenged. How serious were you, Athlynne? Is this what you meant? Are you sorry now for what you felt? I honestly don’t know. Without knowing during earthly life what the point of our incarnating is, I can’t have an opinion about whether our hardships here are worth whatever we gain from them. The fuzzy and constant background noise of hurt and sorrow I couldn’t block out as a kid has continued, I know it was there all along when I had it blocked out…if anything, it may be even louder. But maybe it was never just people.
Understand, all right, I don’t know if it’s true of all autistics, but it is of this one – stories I love are powerful to me. They take on the power of religion to the devout, characters become pantheons of a sort, and I lost my heart a long time ago to Final Fantasy VII. Its remake is out, I’m delighting in YouTube playthroughs of it, and it’s constantly on my mind. And what is it about? A group of friends trying to save a planet that a wicked corporation was draining the life from to use as a fuel source. Later on in the compilation, the wounded planet lashes out with a terrible sickness. Add to this my nightmares of a zombie-type apocalypse, my seeing the world dead, and I wonder – is our planet doing the same?
I joked to my well-informed sister that Japan started this whole COVID-19 thing as an ill-advised marketing campaign for Remake, one that simply got out of control. And I was joking. I’m not so crazy as to think that anything as small as one of my fandoms could have a connection to something that is so grievously affecting our whole planet. But I’m no stranger to synchronicity. I keep thinking about the planet those heroes occupy, Gaia, which is also the name for its singular Goddess, who when the planet was wounded sent out horrible monsters to fight those who supposedly were harming it, a reflex that meant no harm to the innocent, any more than an abused child means harm when he expresses violence and blood in his drawings. Planets and people both, we just need to be heard sometimes.
It’s part of that world’s mythology that Gaia’s counterpart Omega will one day, when the planet is too damaged to continue on, gather up all life on it, to preserve it, but in doing so will kill all these beings, or at least cause a change in their state of being that they would call death, mistaking transformation for an end. It’s all rather vague and I don’t quite understand it…but my point is just this, just the question I timidly posed to my little sister – do you think the planet is angry at us, angry now to a point that it’s lashing back?
There’s a scene in a movie within the FFVII Compilation where descendants of one of the characters race up to a clifftop overlooking what was once a thriving, industrial city, and is now silent and still, the horror of twisted metal covered over lovingly by the green and growing. Life coming out of death, cheating it because life is more powerful, because unlike death it has no opposite, no opposing force.
As a child, I sought out nature, loved it enough that I could make peace with confusing, disappointing humans. I wish I could have that ability back. I wonder if I’ll be forced to find my way back to loving Earth as my Celt ancestors would want me to, before my soul, seeking holy, returns to the stream of life from where it came.
My Longing Shall Gather 