Can the Earth as Mountain Store the Knowing When the Beings Have Passed? - A Revery on Biocultural Diversity Loss and Language Extinction

[Excerpted from "Petal Fall 42010 of Pacific Cascadia:
Manuscripts, sound files and visual imagery unearthed in the Pacific Cascadia dig of 43343-United Federation of Planets Official Terra-Ethnography
The Life of Terrans, Volume 317: Turtle Island Rites"]


[Manuscript A-1375] [Visual Plates V-9873L-N]

Can the Earth as mountain store the knowing when the beings have passed? Human, plant, ecosystemic. The intricate coevolving weaving, the heart felt presencing, the ways that Scutellaria, Artemisia, Magnolia and humans have intertwined? Is myth the seed carrier, into the mountains? Are our stories shared a living Svalbard of seed stock stored, the mythseeds of intertwining? How will Earth hold all this to the next great flowering? The lost languages, the ways of walking, barefoot, the songs? And how will Earth thrive in the meantime, these songs that helped the sun rise, these prayers that companioned Moon? If we are part of life, part of what is required, then in this time of dissolving, flattening, this time of erasure and the great mindsicknesses that roll across humankind, in this time, if we are not doing as we have done, then the planthunger and storythirst, the songdrought and poemunravelling, how we miss Earth and Earth misses us. All this wavekeening without solace. Perhaps the flowering magnolia can carry us, perhaps old volcanoes ripe with rhododendron.

Perhaps it is this drinking of the ancestor blood, the thick black cemetery ooze of a time before has spiritinfected us. We drink deeply draughts of extincted kin from a time before, perhaps this elixir of ancient cemeteries is a kind of voudoun, and so extinction calls us to it closely. The dark moon time, scythe to extinction. So we need to seed-in, pull the essential information close against the unkind conditions. A time of assessment and discernment. What will Earth harvest from us for some future time? What if we can only bring one thing, or one pattern of life, what will we carry forward as gifts to Earthlife eons from now, some time as different as dinosaurs?

I have no peace in this. Perhaps mountainEarth, fibrileEarth, nitrogenEarth, hydrogenEarth, waterEarth, cloudEarth, riverEarth, magmaEarth, perhaps Earth can carry us deep within. Can Earth know peace? Carrying the mythseeds of us, the distillation, may it not be futurepoison, or if poison, then may it be homeopathic, provoking a healing response. Wholeness, that is this prayer when the spring petalopen flowers contradict the larger scythetimecycle we seem to embody. May Earth know peace. And may we, as a form of living miracle, embody allseason peace though the signs are grim and the grimreap of culture, of beings, unassailably surrounds us. We are beacons of another possibility. May we be these seeds, the mutations, skyrattlingly beautiful, aberrant, potent, vining out also unassailable, awakening and catalytic, clear water in a time of drought, clear water in a time of oilseep, in a time of dinosaurblood. Clear water tingling some older knowing: Life!

Breathe In, Breathe Out as and with the Earth

But also, connection to nature is an internal thing. Do we internalize it and then carry it with us, then emit it in what we also do?

Perhaps there is an internal terrain of sanctuary, balance, biodiversity, the forest, that I can cultivate even when in a skyscraper. I can become, in effect, a wilding, widening gyre even in steel girders or flying elevators. The mountain I walked on Saturday morning can walk with me on Wednesday in the midst of dozens of grey cubicles. Perhaps it's more like inbreath (time outdoors); outbreath (sharing the spirit of outdoors while in built environments); inbreath (walking with a beloved outdoors); outbreath (copresencing the living spirit of Gaia on floor 24 of a large building); inbreath (time in the garden in the light rain, planting early spring greens); outbreath (emanating gladness and wild delight while sitting on the #9 bus). Also perhaps a countertempo of breaths: outbreath (walk up Mount Tabor and sharing love with the ferns); inbreath (taking in and letting Earth's vital catalyzing force instantly transmute the fear and desperation of the large company meeting); outbreath (sharing gladness with the unfurling turbulent sky about to break open); inbreath (taking in and translating someone's harsh or quick words as the sentence "I want to connect. I am feeling deeply disconnected but know that we all share kinship with Earth."); outbreath (praising the crocuses that have their faces wide open to the sudden bursts of sun even walking on the sidewalk in my neighborhood)...

Who or what carries the lost wisdom?

About the Bari people, described in Ethnobotany and Conservation of Biocultural Diversity (Carlson and Maffi, 2004)

For now, and for the time to come when the wisdom is even more scattered to the winds, what do you think happens to that knowing? Do the trees carry it? Is it only alive while the Bari elders are alive, in the interactions/relations of the trees and the people? Or is it held by the Earth somehow? By the ancestors of the Bari who have passed? Or perhaps in the bodies or epigenetically or in the field of the Bari progeny?

Sometimes I think the air, every molecule that was ever a tree or Bari or the light that passed through a chloroplast, is quivering with this multigenerational knowing. Is this what sustainability education is, to re-member how to access this knowing?

This seems to me to be the greatest loss, the languages that have passed into air and branch, the biocultural, co-evolutionary complexity. The peoples whose millenial ways have passed through tortuous means from the vital living cultures of Earth. Is there some way we can summon the knowing in this time when wisdom, particular, specific, clarion, could help guide us?