Earth guardians
“Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?” ― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
It always helps to wonder over a word.
guardian (n.)
"one who guards," early 14c., garden; early 15c., gardein, from Anglo-French gardein (late 13c.), Old French gardien "keeper, custodian," earlier guarden, from Frankish *warding-, from the Germanic source of guard (v.). Specific legal sense is from 1510s. Guardian angel is from 1630s.
But we’ve lost touch with that deep, abiding connection with the earth, haven’t we?
If it were otherwise, we wouldn’t be careening off the edge of the world at breakneck speed.
Of course, the majority of us, qua humans, don’t believe that but, certainly, apropos of our ‘lifestyle’ choices, we don’t behave as guardians of anything save our habits of must-havery, comfort and living up to our potential.
I realise that this naked and aggressive characterisation is writ large with a slew of generalisations but look at the wake of our lives and imagine the pile of stuff we’ve bought, consumed and discarded. And I mean all of it, including the CO2 that we’ve been complicit in allowing to be spewed forth, be that in the manufacture of the goods we’ve bought, the overseas holidays that have lifted our emotional states (“I need a break…!”) and the waste we’ve accumulated.
I can’t see it though.
I can’t see a world where we did a volte-face our industrial modus operandi but it doesn’t stop me wondering how it got like this.
It’s too easy to say we’ve lost touch with our animistic roots by dint of the industrialisation of everything but it’s difficult to find the right words to encapsulate how far we’ve fallen from our small-scale, hunter-gatherer and low-impact roots to the point where we’re so disconnected we don’t understand that everything we do or don’t do in adopting a guardianship role has consequences.
As I’ve said before, everything costs friends.
What do you think is the principal reason for our disconnection with the earth?
Why have we so easily fallen under the spell of the Ad Men to the point where nature, if we’re not careful, will become extinct or certainly it will be corrupted to the point where it might never come back?
Take care.
Much love,
Julian
Photo by Tomáš Malík on Unsplash