This is not a Simulation

We walk along manicured paths that wind their way through an overgrown forest. Thick and dense. The sun trying to break through the canopy. See creeper vines wind their way up the trunks, hugging, suffocating, the dying trees covered in moss, pulling them back into the underworld. Nutrients for future landscapes that only invasives recognize we are heading for. They are the catalyst, the gateway into coming times.

The land, rivers, streams, plants, fungus, all operate on a time scale outside of our own. Taking up residence in a larger and more diverse movement of ecologies both future and past. They speak in ways that we have grown deaf to. They communicate through whispers that pulse in rhythms we can't comprehend.

Sophie Strand is inspiring in the ways she is able to recognize these movements and encourage us to recognize we are woven into them. Encouraging us to place ourselves back into that web of being that our western, dominating society desperate wants to separate us from so that we feel "unharmed" when the land around us is stolen and ravaged. So that we don't feel or recognize that a part of us is being stolen and ravaged. We don't remember that we are woven, that we are a part of the tapestry. The movement is about coming back to, it is about everyday remembering what it means to come back to self. It is a recognition of self being beyond these individual, flesh covered, human shaped shells.

This existence is not a simulation. And to believe or say it is so is demeaning and degrading to all our non-human kin who reside beside us. I'm sure those who control a large portion of this world would love for us all to accept that simulation as reality dialogue, because in some sci-fi dystopian future that's where they desire to bring us so that we are able to be controlled entirely. With greed in their hearts, bound in metal and plastic destruction. Minds fueled by oil extracted from the underworld. A land ruled by forgotten gods.

People have grown so distant from the natural world that surely it seems right to surrender for an apparently "easier" existence. But, tell me, what is easier about having to fight for clean water? What's easier about becoming a refugee to the climate crisis? What is easier about a collapsing ecosystem? Nothing is easier. Nothing is easier about trying to survive in a world that was manufactured to die.

Let's start looking at the future from the perspective of invasive plants, or trees, or mychorrizal systems. Let's start looking at our decisions on a scale that is larger than ourselves. To separate ourselves from our current egos and place ourselves truly into the web that is encapsulating us every second of every day, that is every breath we take. Let us stop limiting ourselves, stop caging ourselves within our finite ego bodies and release ourselves back to the wind like seeds or pollen. Start singing love songs back to the land that created us. Let us love it as we would our life partner because, in all actuality, it is. It is the one who holds us during our moment in time, the one who guides us back when our pulse ceases to beat. The goal is to be given back to earth, to be examples of reciprocity, to give ourselves as tokens of the love that the dance of life thrives off of. We are dancers coursing through this existence, we are singers harmonizing with the entirety of existence. We are here together, let us not forget our place. We are not above. We are not below. We are just another being floating through this incredibly magical star filled space. Let us be grateful for this life.

Musing inspired by the work of Sophie Strand.