There's Levels to This...

Creator: AleksandarGeorgiev |Copyright: Aleksandar Vrzalski

“When this world peels away, the new one is right underneath.”

-Amaru Rufus an earthseedling child (as told to his mother and repeated to me in a reflection by Earthseed Founding Member Zulayka Santiago)

The overcast sky broke at sunset and the layers of cloud and not-cloud looked like the layers of the earth. Or at least what I think the layers of the earth would look like. But seeing the layers of earth as a visual is an apocalyptic fantasy isn’t it? As they are, the layers of earth are literally inside their own opaque sphere, rightly unavailable to any trick of light, even a sunset from another stage of star.

And it stops my breath to know the the strange clouds billowing over Ohio are dredged up stolen minerals somewhere in their radioactive process, raining back into our water supply to show us how toxic this system is, the one that we’ve stitched across this wounded land.

In all the diagrams that show too neatly demarcated cross-sections of earth, fossils, groundwater, ancient silt, crust, mantle, core, the earth is cut open, overexposed. I feel it like a gash in my gut, which is why I won’t share one of those images here. The rings of a centuries old tree may tell a complicated beautiful story, but I want the tree to live. I’m okay with the mystery.

Or maybe, as usual, this is about me. I want no further wounding. Spare me your curious incisions, too close in reasoning to the drills searching for oil in the oceanic and continental crusts of the earth right now. Stop. So we can live. Do I really have to prove my layers on this planet bleeding out? Stop all the drilling. We wouldn’t need to see the layers if we could learn to feel.

I have to learn to feel these compositional chemically complex layers within me, my thinnest oceanic crust, (still miles thick). The biggest part of me, my multi-various mantle a diverse inheritance of substance under pressure. My lisopheric plates of armor over the muck underneath. What can the asthenospheric parts of me, that slog of me, not solid not liquid not neat teach me now. And what about the hot liquid metal protecting my heavy core?

It’s complicated in here. When I get heated, under pressure I change chemically, physically. Who you thought I was melts and solidifies again. And if you would learn to recognize what’s going on here you have to look beyond looking. You would have to know who I am. Under this much pressure liquid, under this much pressure solid, at this temperature rock, at this temperature sludge and remember too, I am in orbit inside myself. How can you love the parts of me that you can’t see or even touch?

There are other ways though. The reason deep earth geologists feel confident about the substantial differences in the concentric layers of earth is that their best way of measuring what is happening under the surface is by calculating the seismic waves that move through from core out to the universe. They have to listen closer and closer to the vibration of earth. Which is what I am trying to do by learning to listen to myself. Which is what I’m trying to do by loving you. I’m listening closely for how we move through this. Because at the end of the day the sky will break, the consequences fall like acid rain. And I need the solid of you, the sludge of you, the malleable the thick. I need the flow of you the metal. I need exactly this, your melting armor and all your heaviest holding close. Because love moves through us like this. Listen. And so much should remain underground. Remain. A sacred mystery. Universe bless me with a heart better than all the Geiger counters. Universe bless me with a listening worth your iron, your nickel your change. Attune me grace, to all the layers of who you are I’ll never see.

P.S. If you are trying to listen to yourself more closely join me in daily practice. I’m here in Stardust and Salt and/or The God of Everyday.