Waking Up to Gaia
A steaming mug of tea warms my hands as I sit in my front window in the morning. The closest star’s light is barely beginning to show in the eastern sky. I am up so early.
My view out the window is of the houses and cars of my street, and the trees, oh, the trees!
A question floats up in my mind, from an experiment I encountered* yesterday: What is the archetypal nature of the world?
Out the window, I survey this piece of world.
In this piece of world, the trees stand like sentinels, watching over boxy houses, the slapped-together houses where “grown up” children of Gaia are playing house. We live so separately in our boxy houses, so many oblivious to the phenomenon of the archetypal.
The cars and trucks on the street occur to me as toys, toys for the grown up children in the houses, made of stuff taken from the earth, from Gaia. To get that stuff, people and machines had to go far and to great lengths to fetch it. More had to happen to mine and melt and refine and form and fabriacte it into cars. My van, outside, is 18 years old and obviously one of the oldest vehicles on the street. Given what it takes to make one of these things, you’d think we’d make sure they lasted for generations.
I remember when someone, another grown up child, perhaps piqued to not have such a toy, once took spiteful action with some keys, and scratched the car of someone I knew. The proud and offended owner of the targetted car took the day off work to say, effectively, to as many professional persecutor types he could find, “Someone scraaaaaaatched my caaaaar!”
What is the archetypal nature of the world?
We are so childlike amidst the sentinel trees, hoarding our toys in and outside of our boxy houses, so seldom aware of what there might be to grow into.
I am a lonely exile from the gameworld of Modern Culture, with my tea, in the window, heavy with sadness from noticing the messes and excess in dramas played out as childlike games.
The only sound besides my slurps are the ticks from the clock. We have clocks because the movement of the sun and stars and the moon aren’t adequate time-measuring gifts. The grown up children of Modern Culture, so often indoors, pay clocks their attention rather than celestial entities. I reflect how much we might gain if we were less desperate to synchronize in schedules to squeeze the most dollars out of every business hour. So much we miss learning from.
I am in a child state, too, and painfully aware. In my schedule this morning is time on the team, picked as I have been to play with the cool kids who are jacking into something bigger. I have heard the call of this something in night after night of dreams, while sleeping and awake, and in my somewhat numbly alone mourning, I ache for it as I survey the evidence of archetypal nature in a world overrun by grown up children.
Yet within this piece of world, evidence of the archetypal can be found, and I look longer, feeling joy from the warmth of my tea mug in my hands and my team in my schedule.
*on the new Possibility Management website: https://themuse.mystrikingly.com
