Rocky Planet, Fleshy Heart
Reality stares and demands that I alter my fantasies through its presence.
Rocky Planet
We live on a rocky planet.
Our planet is four and a half billion years old.
Once, this planet was a molten rock.
Still, they are a rock suspended in space.
They have been through meteor showers, solar flares, super volcanic eruptions, mass extinctions… They shifted their face more times than we know. There were many supercontinents like Pangaea in Earth’s life story; Rodinia, Pannotia1, Gondwana and many more. Our planet got hit by many meteors. They have seen many species emerging on the planetary stage and taking their bows before they went extinct.
Rocky planet cuts, and it should. Fleshy body bleeds, and it will.
One species2 cannot turn a four and half billion year old planet into their safe, secure and comfortable heaven, and do whatever their primate-selves imagine and please. Apologies, dear species, we got it wrong. Some days the cosmic joke is louder than others and some days its silence is deafening.
Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody can get some things wrong. Our web of life is an ongoing story like our universe. We, as humans, can stop, reflect, and course correct. We can apologise, ask for help, repair, change our behaviours and transform ourselves and our species. We have that capacity. Nevertheless, there are many challenges ahead.
Life can get bloody hard. Life can get unfair. Along the way we get hurt. We lose people we love. We lose health, home, our will to live. We may feel abandoned, alone, rejected, misunderstood, unappreciated. There are many dragons we must face and collaborate with. We get asked to strengthen and liberate our hearts and minds, sharpen our senses, expand our imagination, re-wild our relationships and hone our talents again and again. While doing so we can think, feel, imagine, live more planetary, more in terms of deep time; rather than only self-, family- and species-centric. Throughout life, I feel that I have marked some mountain ranges with my own blood and I will mark more. That’s called living. Yet we all must find more innovative, responsible ways not to lose too much blood, pump and transfuse some fresh living blood into life.
Our planet does not owe us anything but we owe our planet everything.
From our bones to our skin we are theirs. They are ours. Before we were named we belonged to Earth.3 We may choose to be worthy. We may choose to live as their human, through hardship and challenges as well as gifts and marvels. We are of rock, of bones as well as of flesh, of blood. One cannot separate a human from a planet and a planet from a human, they are intricately connected and belong to each other.
Fleshy Heart
We live on a rocky planet with fleshy hearts.
First hearts have been beating for over half a billion years.
Hearts beat in air, they beat in water, they beat in soil.
Hearts create and sustain our field of living. They pump blood. They carry oxygen and nutrients into the cells and they remove carbon dioxide from them. With the evolution of birds, the winged ones and mammalians, the milked ones around 250-300 million years ago, we, sapiens got our four-chambered hearts. This innovation allowed the heart to circulate blood more efficiently and support high metabolic rates.
Our hearts have been tender. They have been working overtime.
These days, these years I feel we are asked to stretch and strengthen our heart muscles more than we have ever done so much so that we may be forced to evolve our hearts in ways we are yet to find out both personally and collectively.
There has been so much bad blood amongst humans.
We are witnessing how bad blood plays out in the world scene in the most brutal ways.
Some days we lose heart. We lose a lot of blood.
It is complicated to have a beating heart where there is so much bad blood, stagnant blood, lost blood, cold blood, and warm blood amongst our species. Our heart tries to clean the metaphorical blood through creativity and fails more often in presence of such mindless violence and irresponsible destruction. Personally, it emboldens and inspires my heart to see some others caring and trying to clean bad blood and pump creative blood.
We live on a rocky planet. Once they were a molten rock. Still they are a rock suspended in space.
If we want to come alive and truly become our planet’s, we are going to get out there with our fleshy bloody hearts and pump some blood back to our planet’s imagination and creativity hence new kinds of relationships can form.
My father got sick around Ramadan. I felt he danced at the edge of living and dying and I danced alongside him once again. None of us are guaranteed more than this breath. None of us are promised one more sunrise on this planet, in this fragile yet beautiful web of life.
Yet I must promise myself and to my planet that I am seeking more courageous and creative ways to offer my fleshy heart to my planet’s realities and dreams. I am trying harder to circulate the stories that come out of that. Some days I am able, some days I can hardly hold it together, many days I am somewhere in between.
Wishing you an enchanted Sagittarius full moon. Sagittarius is the cosmic centaur and archer. Sagittarius is where our galactic center resides chaotically.
May we aim the planet-loving and creativity-provoking arrows to human hearts. Once our hearts begin to change as we fall in love with our planet, we may begin to feel their heartbeat as our own. And then perhaps our hearts pump the most needed compassionate creative blood throughout our fragile world.
Gizem Gizegen, 2024 Istanbul, ☉ Taurus ☽ Sagittarius
The name Rodinia comes from Russian and means “motherland.” Pannotia is derived from Greek words and means all-south indicating this supercontinent was primarily located in the southern hemisphere. Pannotia is also known as Greater Gondwana.
Or a group within that species…
“before I was named I belonged to you” Rainer Maria Rilke, Ninth Duino Elegy