Running on Empty, An Image of Our Times

When I was sick, I felt all the time that I was running on 'empty'. Then I was using up my basic structural body. I was loosing bone and muscle and brain. When I think of planet earth, and I think of how we have sucked out so much oil and coal, and minerals, and gases and we have burned them up while spreading toxic substances and creating new ones, I see kind of the same picture. We are not just living on the earth, we are sucking out the very substance of it, burning it up. When we cut down the forests and plow huge swaths of land, we are removing the oxygen from the brain of the earth.

The wisdom and the homeostasis have been wildly disrupted by the human parasites, eating and multiplying at the core as well as the surface and the atmosphere. I couldn't get over how susceptible I was to other infections when my balance was ruined.

I can't but picture the earth as a living breathing being. I used to be laughed at when I'd mention that nature abhors a vacuum and when we suck out the oil and gas, there had to be seismic shifts. People of more education than I have would laugh at that picture. I stick by my mental image. We can't sit on empty spaces under the ground and under the seas without something happening. We can't use up the forests above ground and still create the bones to sustain the earth. The wise mind of the earth can not be so muddled by humans, that her wisdom is inaccessible.

I don't even think this is a big leap to jump from my situation to a world wide one. We are microcosms of the macrocosm.