This week whilst walking through the garden I saw what I found out later to be a Red Velvet Mite. She was walking over a dug over potato patch with gusto and purpose. Having never seen anything quite like it I couched down to observe her wanderings.
Mites are a species of Arachnid that have evolved over nearly 400 million years.
As I watched this intrepid little creature struggle over the upturned soil I thought of the history her ancestors had witnessed. The never ending evolving earth changes and all the creatures that have lived and gone around them. I thought about the place of this precious and strikingly beautiful animal in the amazing dance of evolution thus far and wondered after all this time whether they will survive the human generated sixth mass extinction event unfolding around us now. I began to muse about the human culture of self-centered worship and how this selfish ego driven worship is at the centre of most of the misery that’s occurring in the world to this day and how this culture is clinging to worn out and obviously erroneous belief structures even when it’s painfully clear for all to see they don’t work, and indeed are the reason for the cascading failures of their society.
Having embraced totalitarian agriculture thousands of years ago the stories of human centredness evolved, eventually excluding all non-human life and indeed other human cultures that still lived in alliance with a Universe centered worldview. The gods of the harvest made way for a monotheistic transcendent god fashioned in human likeness and divorced from the biological reality of existence. Eventually scientific secularism turned the last vestiges of a living world into a cold inanimate machine further divorcing humanity from Nature.
It’s here we stand today, with our inherited biological blasphemy looking around at the continuing destruction of our very pillar of existence, the natural world pursued with a fervor held in place by destructive stories of anthropocentrism. This culture of disconnection barely notices the mass extinction going on about them as they argue over self absorbed politics and religion, all manifestations of a failed and inflated ego. They fail to notice or even care about the non-human life vanishing about them with barely a sound coming from the hysterical ranting’s of a deluded human culture.
The few human souls who fight for Nature are lost in an ocean of indifference and distain by those focused on their favourite political fantasies or the trivialities of religious irrelevance.
All of this narcissistic energy turned inward is wasted and leads only to meaningless outcomes that have no bearing on the realities of dying eco-systems. Indeed even seemingly well meaning diversions into so called green energy result in the same outcomes as they too are born from the stories of alienation from Nature. They are all human focused.
Our biological inheritance is being smothered in courtrooms, voting booths and battlefields, poking accusing fingers at each other over who said what to who. Meaningless drivel for those trapped in lives of meaningless self absorption.
The priorities of this egotistical culture are killing them along with all other life on earth yet their myths of disconnection to Nature keep them tethered to the death cult of civilization.
I see no way this descent into oblivion can be steered safely to the shores of sanity. It has way too much momentum in the hands of the deluded and ill informed. We are only metres from the iceberg.
The other side of this collision with reality can only succeed if the stories are changed. They need to be stories of acceptance of all life, living with respect, reverence and co-operation with all life on the planet.
We need to have a spiritual connection to the community of life and a sanctuary of spirit within the incredible beauty, power and awe inspiring sublimity of Nature.
This was the lesson of the Red Velvet Mite.
By Brendon Crook
Panthevita
Panthevita Nature Mysticism 