Sunday, 19/04/20; An Australian Chest Physician’s Reflections on the Covid-19 Pandemic. “Conversations with Gaia. An Epilogue
Letters from Australia. No.7 Part IV by Prof. Roger KA ALLEN (www.sarcoidosis.com.au)
Introduction
Since my interview with Lady Gaia, I have just received a letter from her wishing to address a few issues she left unsaid last time. She also penned a poem about the current state of our species which I would like to share. She called it “Gaia’s Elegy” although I think she could have called it “Song for Gaia” notwithstanding potential copyright issues with Elton John’s publishers.
Gaia’s Letter:
Saturday, 18/04/20
Dear Interviewer, “Roger” isn’t it? I wish to thank you for asking me to speak candidly with you last week. However, there were a few things I left unsaid including this poem I penned after our discussion as I have had a lot of spare time since you humans have been quieter with the planet and I see no one is buying petrol now.
I would like to commence with a poem I wrote and which expresses my dismay with your species.
Gaia’s Elegy or The Rebel of the Biosphere.
Oh how I loved my Earth,
This orb I so created
With its great, gravid girth
Vast seas and skies of blue
So skilfully by Nature separated.
For eons it turned in harmony
With Sun to warm it day by day
While the timeless epochs, a miscellany
And species came and went their way.
And all went well until along came man
Who thought he was the planet’s king
When little did he know this Earth can
Devour him, this fragile, mortal thing.
So it’s ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
Thus is his unerring Fate,
No ifs or buts
But now he’s left it all too late.
But if he sees with a mind aclear
Of how once he lived in unison
With Nature’s laws a way back then
He may yet re-join this Biosphere.
For a long time your so-called “primitive” peoples lived in harmony with Nature i.e. with me, respecting my ways, my animals, plants, sea-creatures and geography, seasons as well as cycles both astronomical and spiritual. You know whom I mean and you also know when it all went wrong so I will not labour the point. Even the Vikings who are often regarded as hostile barbarians had a close relationship with Nature with their earthly, mystical and cosmological ash tree, Yggdrasil which permeated every aspect of their being and connected the Nine Worlds. It was the great tree of life with roots reaching down to the Underworld and Hand up to the heavens with a unifying concept about all life.
Your Genesis story told of a great tree, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil with the Serpent at the bottom and from whose fruit you ate, thus dispelling your innocence, but the Bible mentions little if anything about the biosphere and how to respect her but fixates on your internal biosphere; your moral and spiritual life which seems blind to the natural world and her needs. Indeed those teachings presided over the colonisation of the whole world with gunpowder and preaching with disastrous consequences.
This concept of the great tree of life was well typified in your film, Avatar and the colonisation of the lush and fertile habitable moon, Pandora in another solar system, with its indigenous humanoid tribe, the Na’vi who are accosted, as has happened throughout your history, by short-sighted humans bent on exploitation, colonisation and ecological destruction. This is the history of your species.
At present your species is behaving like toddlers having a tantrum and unruly teenagers. Your only hope is that you develop in time, Wisdom, what the Greeks called Sophia, even Agia Sophia or Holy Wisdom and become ecologically mature, realising your interdependence on the biosphere in which you live. Only when you recognise your true position as just an interdependent species and a small part of the whole system, will you be able to ensure your continued survival on this fragile planet. Only then will you become my children again, to join your place in loving harmony with the other species and the complex ecological system.
I see some glimmer of Hope which was the last thing to remain when Pandora opened that box that fateful day so long ago. As an aside, Pandora’s Box was not a box but a ceramic jar as I saw her open it but I realise humans are malleable with historical facts just as they are with numbers they have created and which do not exist independently in Nature.
Your thinking is so off the mark. For example, you have a body called the World Health Organisation which is not really about “world health” or the “health of the world” but about the health of your species. Thus it fails to understand the basic idea that the health of the world i.e. biosphere equates to the health of your species and that Corona virus is but a symptom of world ill-health rather than the viral scourge from one of your nations. Your doctors and nurses are only firemen putting out the medical fires your species created just as your firemen put out the fires your neglect of habitat creates.
If man does not change his ways, his thinking and his expectations, more such plagues will continue to occur as the planet is further ravaged by his short-sightedness. He may well need to explore other planets like Mars and other solar systems for suitable “Pandoras” as life on this one may cease eventually to be habitable. However, I think he will take his old ways with him to even these new places just as he now contemplates mining the Moon and even Mars
I have said my piece. It is now up to you but I know you will not listen as your ears, hearts and minds are deaf. To quote your Martin Luther, “Here I stand, I can do none other”.
Yours sincerely,
Your Wordliness,
Gaia