My dog, Blue, and I step out into the day numerous times a day everyday. On this day, April 22nd, as many of us know has been commemorated for 50 years now as “Earth Day”, we came here and I found my whole being joining with the awe and vitality of All That Is expressed through the skies and the vast open land.
Of course these are extraordinary times overall, not just as we reflect on Earth Day having been openly celebrated now for 50 years. The Earth is known and recognized, at this time, to be close to 5 billion years old. There are many things that we do our best to figure out and deciphering the ‘age’ of the Earth is one of those things. A margin of error of 50 million years is factored in to this scientifically based estimate (using carbon dating) of how long Earth has existed.
How many extraordinary ‘times’, as we are in now, have pulsed through the seemingly fathomless length and depth of earth time? How many other catalytic events or disruptive cycles have shaped the Earth and also shaped us as earth beings, human and non-human beings alike to who and what we are today globally and collectively?
Here in Taos, we still have a month or so before the clouds will gather enough precipitation for rains to begin falling as part of the monsoon season in northern New Mexico. The cloud beings that gather in these parts are favorites of mine. I literally feel the uplift of their presence and feel, oddly, as if they are my very own playmates! (What do they hold within themselves?)
Every year with every season, I notice differences and fluctuations, subtle shifts within my own timing that most often are stimulated by that unique elemental dance before and around me. Grasping that I am part of all life, life being life, what a potent way to wake up to what is moving for me within the internal landscape as my own earth and skies! There I can also experience what is budding or coming to fruition literally and creatively.
We are earth, we are carbon and fire, we are sky, we are water and air. We are also time and timeless. We are hungry and thirsty, we are nourishment itself, as we are death, we are life. We are that which continues.
Could this recent pandemic (considering that the root of this word is the Greek pandemos, ~ pan meaning ‘all’ and demos meaning ‘people’ or all people) be something truly new universally, as in the novel (corona) virus? Viruses have existed almost as long as the Earth has been in existence. Viruses are, essentially, as timeless as the Earth.
In the Virus-first hypothesis, a scientific theory of viral evolution, viruses played a part in cellular life emerging. We as cellular life have been in mutual tolerance with viruses throughout known existence. As paradoxical as this might seem, life as we know it is what it is integrally woven through and through with viruses. Viruses by nature are constantly in mutation and act as a catalyst to life via their RNA and DNA mutative information.
There is something called a phylogenetic tree that shows that all life or all organisms now on Earth have what is termed a LUCA or last universal common ancestor. It is as if we have all emerged from the same forest floor or more accurately from the capacity to find and take nourishment from existence itself. And we share our information.
We are a mutational species by nature. Perhaps we have our closely tied journey to the mutational journey of viruses to thank for more than we know. Many people right now are saying “we are all in this together’. In an oddly comforting way, I think of that We as including ALL OF LIFE and in that also including whatever mutational energies, including viruses, including all the anomalies or deviations that can so provoke or temporarily destabilize us such that certain kinds of change are possible. AH.
Breathing in, I find myself soaring again within the vast space of molecules of oxygen and water mixed with millions upon millions of micro-particulate and bacterial beauty, finding the immeasurable in life being life. AH OM HUM.
All photographs by Janice Sandeen – April 2020
Life Being Life 