Nature and Humans

This weekend Mary ran her first workshop that is part of her Stories and the earth project. In the week leading up to the workshop she and I experimented with tools to use and some of the process. I created a video in experimenting, and the full text of what I say in the video below.

I don’t really have many places that feel as if they matter anymore and not that feel worthy of turning into a story. There also just aren’t any that feel “unique” enough for inclusion in this context with my voice.

Part of the issue is that I simply don’t feel it is much worth continuing to exist. Even as I do partway-decent work for clients of the web development partnership my dad and I run, is it worth the resources it takes for my body to persist? I really think not. Maybe that is where a place that matters, in the context of sustainability and our climate (however you define both) fit in. I truly have come to believe that I should not bother to exist, and that ceasing to is very likely the best thing that I could do to better this world for the humans that remain and everything else post-humanity.

I see some of those of my generation having children, and also some thinking about not doing so, making for both extremes of the spectrum. I feel a step even further in that not direction. I am really kind of pissed off at my own parents for even bothering to try to have children, much less actually doing so. Perhaps the hospital in Beverly, MA could have lied about what happened around my birth, and should have, to then kill and dispose of my body rather than send me (or anyone else) to the NICU. While China at the time had a policy on the number of children, the whole planet should have outlawed anyone in my parents’ generation from procreating. This is why I truly don’t want to ever help populate this planet, when what we populate it with ultimately harms the planet. I simply wish I had never been born, and the only thing I ever ask for as gifts or compensation is to no longer exist.

Our planet is hurting, many people can see and feel that, in their own location’s unique ways. COVID really is the antibiotic our planet is taking. It just didn’t fully eradicate us humans. When we were entering into lockdown I was sitting across from family at our slightly expanded table and thought to myself that I honestly wished I’d die from the pandemic. Later it just sort of felt wrong to get vaccinated, even though I did. This is because I really did already feel less of an importance to exist, doing harm by simply breathing.

Circling back to this notion of a place that matters, you see there cannot be much of one when my very place in this world feels undeserved, at best, and downright criminal to the rest of the planet, at worst. In earlier drafts of a story for this project I found myself bouncing back and forth between various locations and forms of storytelling surrounding walking in the wilderness, with that wilderness were not far from home. But they never felt authentic to me, or worthy of my time. It seems that my truer thoughts are that my very existence is harmful to those places which at a higher level may matter to me. So rather than naming such places, what seemed more sensical was to name what I feel is necessary to preserve them, even though that directly removes me from the equation.