Bedtime Story: Extinction is Loneliness

Jun 22

*“Extinction is loneliness. I can see it in no other way. How else would the beetle, the acacia ant, the bacteria, the salmon, experience the absence of part of themselves?*
*This is heartbreak. This is an outstretched hand waiting millennia for anybody to greet its soft warm flesh.”*
- Alexa Firmenich

SYNOPSIS:

I wrote this piece in a 6am flurry of sunrise inspiration, the words pouncing through me, stirred by a combination of books I’d been reading on plant science and deep evolutionary history (thank you, Stephen Harrod Buhner and Thomas Halliday).

All too often we read headlines about extinction or climate change, and it can be difficult to relate. Difficult for emotions to flow and process. I think we need to bring these notions intimately home, into the utterly personal, into the first-person experience of what it’s like to lose something forever. I wrote this piece from the perspective of life itself, relishing and feeling all the parts of its splendorous body.

It brings me tears and yet such sheer gratitude that we live inside of this kind of world... That we are this. There are still so many possibilities. Please sit back and enjoy this rather different bedtime story.

There are still so many possibilities. Please sit back and enjoy this rather different bedtime story.

Find the written piece here. And pair with this song for something delicious.