Why do we have to fight for basic human and environmental rights?
They aren’t even rights. They are older than that. More sacred than that.
Water.
Air.
Soil.
Bodies.
Rest.
Belonging.
The source of life itself.
We’ve reduced them to “rights” because we allowed them to become negotiable.
A debate.
A transaction.
A political talking point.
A line item inside someone else’s quarterly earnings report.
I HATE that. I hate how disconnected we’ve become from ourselves, from each other, and from this impossibly beautiful planet that keeps trying to feed us despite what we keep doing to her.
I think the deepest wound in modern humanity is severance.
From the body, the earth, stillness, the quiet, dark emotions. We’ve learned how to override ourselves so completely that destruction starts feeling normal.
Ignore your exhaustion.
Push harder.
Monetize the hobby.
Optimize the relationship.
Turn art into content.
Turn rest into productivity.
Turn forests into profit margins.
Turn human beings into labor outputs.
Turn living things into resources.
Extract. Consume. Perform. Repeat.
No wonder the majority feels hollow…
The planet mirrors us. She is suffering because of us. Scorched nervous systems and scorched soil. Bodies depleted the same way rivers are depleted. Everything treated like it exists for production instead of relationship. I feel that grief constantly lately. A tightness in my chest when I read the news. A heaviness in my body when I see billionaires trying to abandon the very planet they helped destroy. A rage that rises in me when corruption disguises itself as innovation.
Fuck their projects.
Fuck the greed.
Fuck the endless appetite pretending to be progress.
I don’t want to become hardened by it though because I don’t think numbness heals numbness. I don’t think disconnection heals disconnection. A part of me wishes it could all just be love and light–bare feet and gardens and songs around fires. Sadly we aren’t there… YET.
I’m trying to remember to stay open while telling the truth. How to let beauty crack me open instead of only letting horror consume me. How to let rage move through me instead of calcifying inside me. How to build a sustainable self so I don’t disappear inside the grief. Because sustainability is not just environmental, emotional, spiritual, relational, and communal. The way we treat the earth mirrors the way we treat ourselves. Most people are exhausted because they’ve been taught to abandon their own humanity in order to survive.
Override hunger.
Override intuition.
Override sadness.
Override joy.
Override the body until you can no longer hear yourself at all.
When you cannot hear yourself, you cannot hear the earth either.
I think that’s why nature feels so healing to so many of us right now. It reminds us what living actually feels like. The silence before rain. Juniper trees twisted by survival. The smell of wet dust. The way the canyon holds sound. The way my nervous system softens the longer I stand still enough to notice something alive outside of me. Nature does not rush. She does not optimize. She does not perform. She belongs to herself completely. Humans once knew how to do that, too.
Despite everything, despite all the destruction and greed and violence and endless consumption, I still believe most people are trying their best to remember what matters.
Even the lost billionaire souls.
What a terrible thing it must be to have everything except the ability to feel connected to your own humanity. I’ll still hold their hand when the illusion cracks. I’ll still cry for their pain. Celebrate the small moments they remember how to feel again. I do not want a world where only some of us are worthy of tenderness. I want a world where we remember we belong to each other. To the earth, to our bodies, and to this brief and fragile experience of being alive at the same time together.
Healing starts there. It doesn’t begin when we’re perfect or pure or pretending we are beyond rage or grief. It starts in honesty, and it’s our job as humans to feel all of it. The revolution is remembering we are nature, not separate from it or masters standing above it or consumers standing outside it. We save the world by learning how to belong to it again. Through walking on the ground, touching our hands to soil, cooking for one another, watching the birds, telling the truth, and resting enough to dream again. These small sacred things don’t fix everything, but they remind us what we’re actually fighting for.
I hope all of us find our way back here eventually.
