My husband mocks me, but I love the 90s sci-fi series Babylon 5. To me, it had this amazing thread of a story through all the episodes and adventures.<\/p>\n
There were these two warring alien races. They had a phrase\u2026a verbal motif. One said:<\/p>\n
Who are you?<\/p>\n
The other said:<\/p>\n
What do you want?<\/p>\n
Oooohhh\u2026.evocative.<\/p>\n
The show was winding up just as my first marriage was crashing and burning.\u00a0 I was reeling to find myself in an existence that I had never imagined. I was 26 years old, staring in the mirror to say:<\/p>\n
\u201cWho are you? What do you want?\u201d<\/p>\n
I hear a lot of talk about how we need to protect the earth. Look at this horrifying list of endangered species! And those are just the ones we know<\/i> about. There are probably dozens or hundreds of creatures that are undiscovered that we are already killing!<\/p>\n
That\u2019s terrible.<\/p>\n
I remember learning in grade school about a climax ecosystem. That the earth had the possibility of making plants and supporting animal life to a certain level. All these nutrient resources\u2014water, sunlight, soil, etc.\u2014would combine to create the area\u2019s ecosystem. And the most intense or climactic ecosystem would be a forest, but an area with few resources would be a desert.<\/p>\n
We got the idea that the desert could be restored to being a rich jungle ecosystem if we could get the right resources to it. We lived near forest; deserts were not part of my Alaskan landscape.<\/p>\n
But it was a concept that there is one end, the super-awesomest, or the existence that there is a best, an ultimate to strive for and achieve.<\/p>\n
THAT!<\/p>\n
Like the center stone of the labyrinth.<\/p>\n
I feel like the tone of ecology has that same goal. The \u2018THAT\u2019 we need to achieve. Save the condors! Save the bugs and weeds and donate and<\/p>\n
PRESERVE<\/p>\n
Keep it the way it was, and spend lots of lots of effort and money and time to keep it or restore it.<\/p>\n
Because we know it and love it and respect it. THAT IS WHO THE EARTH IS.<\/p>\n
But what does the ecosystem want?<\/p>\n
Like the chaos theorist in Jurassic Park, \u201cLife finds a way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Life is so destructive, and so diverse.\u00a0 The life that I know best\u2014my own\u2014I know so little of. I am a mess, and I am different every day, even different from morning to night.<\/p>\n
Just like everybody else.<\/p>\n
As I discovered when I was 26, I better have a lighter grasp of what I am trying to preserve. As much as I wanted to stay in the same story of me being married to the same man my whole life, I realized to preserve that marriage was to destroy me.<\/p>\n
My computer has this cool back-up system called Time Machine. It\u2019s great, because if my computer crashes, I can go back to yesterday and grab EVERYTHING that I had saved on my computer that day.<\/p>\n
I can pluck a moment of all the work I do on my computer, and call that forward. Maybe my book will have a chapter that I edit and hack at in a horrible way, and when I realize how wrong I was, I can GO BACK IN TIME to the moment before I made my horrible mistake.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a nice safety net.<\/p>\n
But my art is not written in stone. You know what? The best is yet to come.<\/p>\n
I still don\u2019t know who I am, but there is a lot of stuff I like about me. There is also a lot of stuff I wish I could stop doing. I am becoming and I want to keep on becoming long after I die. If my art and my relationship with the people I love stays on the hearts and minds, I will change and grow forever.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what I want.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My husband mocks me, but I love the 90s sci-fi series Babylon 5. To me, it had this amazing thread of a story through all the episodes and adventures. There were these two warring alien races. They had a phrase\u2026a … Continue reading