Apr
21
2011
Earth Day: Mother Earth's Defeat Becomes Stunning Victory
As it happens, this year’s Earth Day falls on Good Friday. I wonder if any connection will be made between the two while folks are planting trees or strumming guitars in consciousness-raising events. Probably not. In its short memory (this will be the 41st), Earth Day stays focused on the color green. But the Earth herself—if we can figuratively speak of “her”—remembers mostly in red.
We are not equipped to remember our own beginnings, much as we’d like to: the passage from warm darkness to chilly light; how we fixed on a face; the first words we heard and spoke. We don’t remember how we learned to stand and to fall, the exploration of hands and feet belatedly recognized as our own, the first glimmerings of personhood creeping up on us out of a fog.
But Earth—brooded over, spoken forth, watered, and greened—was full of memories better forgotten. For instance: a sudden darkness, a tremor in Eden, and the gravity of an angel with a flaming sword. The blood of a murdered brother, her first deep wound, made her cry out to heaven. But in the years to follow, with death polluting her fields and blood continually soaking her soil, who could keep track? The tally-sticks piled up and rotted away, as Earth grew old before her time, sunk into grief and despair and finally indifference. An occasional rumbling—fire on the mountain, a monumental voice, a whirling chariot—made her stir, but only briefly. She sighed, and trembled, and soon forgot.
As for her children, carelessly borne and carelessly begetting—they groped through their short lives calling on the sun, kissing hands to the moon, careening among the spirits, and flailing away at each other with clubs and swords. They were too many, too rough, too brief, too lost, and she would just as soon cast them into oblivion.
Until that one birth.