Like many of you who follow this blog, I wasn’t meant for this world.

 

Perhaps I’m a Star Child, a remnant of some far-flung ancestor who arrived here from another world where beings were uniformly intelligent, curious, kind, compassionate, and in tune with the rest of creation.

 

I only know that I feel most alive, safe and free when I’m sitting in a field or forest with animals, tame and wild. Or when I’m walking on a beach by myself or alongside a safe, trusted friend.

 

I have been watching Neil Degrasse Tyson’s COSMOS series (better late than never, right?) and the stories utterly fascinate and delight me. I don’t understand all the intricate details (the science), but the overarching message I understand completely and always have: we are kin to all that lives, here and throughout the universe(s), and we are all made of star stuff.  We are all extraterrestrials temporarily housed on this planet within this decidedly delicate ecosystem.  (There have been five mass extinctions on planet earth. Thanks to one of our ancestors, a burrowing animal, we managed to survive and further “evolve” into our present shapes and intelligence following the last mass extinction.)

 

It took me  a long time to forget and disavow my connection to the Cosmos and EVERYTHING when I was a child.  (In fact, I never did completely forget or disavow this feeling.) I had always known it — was born knowing it, it seemed — but little by little, other people began to differentiate things and beings for me.   I began to feel separated, alien,  because I no longer felt at home.

 

“People here are very different than the place I came from.” 

 

I resonate to many indigenous cultures that revere the Great Mystery and the living earth and waters that sustain everything and everyone.

 

Although I don’t believe in a heaven, per se, or in  a god, per se, I do believe in heavenly places and people. I have met some of them and learned about more of them dring my short time here. They appear to be few and far between, but their voices are of one accord.

 

They include(d) the Dalai Lama, Bernie Sanders, DeForest Kelley, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Robert F. Kennedy Sr., Pastors Dennis Gunnarson and John Pavlovitz, Maya Angelou and others.  Their focus is/was on equity, compassion, concern for others, and just plain being  decent human beings to everyone they met and to people and beings they didn’t even know.  They “got” that how we treat others — including those who are least like us — matters. Everything is a part of the same enormous, magnificent tapestry and fabric of life.  Break a single thread and everyone suffers.

 

ALIENS ROLL UP THE WINDOWS AND LOCK THE DOORS WHEN THEY GET NEAR US

 

If we wonder why extraterrestrials haven’t been confirmed as visitors, I think it’s probably because any culture advanced enough to get here across light years is probably so far more advanced than we are that they regard us as savages. And in far too many cases, they would be right.  Most of the powers-that-be here don’t treat our home planet or our brethren (including the other animals that live here) with respect or even much regard. They’re insanely self-centered, greed oriented and frightened of “the other.” (There is no other. We are all one, strapped onto a world that will thrive or perish based on how we regard and treat each other!)

 

We have a lot of growing up to do to catch up to our technology.  And unless we do that, and damned fast, we are going to pull the life support plug here on Mother earth and condemn everyone on it to a horrendous ending.

 

So much for the smartest species (supposedly) that ever lived. The dinosaurs roamed the earth for 150 millions years. We’ll be lucky to make it a fraction of that. (Although our ancestors have existed for about six million years, our modern form evolved about 200,000 years ago. Civilization as we know it is only about 6,000 years old.)

 

So brains aren’t everything until we use them creatively and constructively to find ways to sustain our ecosystem so  everything can keep on keepin’ on. I don’t see this happening in the halls of Congress or much of anywhere else.

 

We focus on short-term greedy goals instead of long term sustainable goals.