The Same Sun And Moon
Often I think I chose the wrong career.
When I see anything about archeology and anthropology, I’m hooked.
I’d do anything to be Dr. Indiana Jones.
Attention Albert Lin from National Geographic Network: if you’re hiring apprentices, please call me!
What I’m saying here, is that I see the world in layers. Strata. And we, fellow humans, are sitting atop what I call, The Plastic Crust.
It’s basically the structures of our modern world, including the technology permanently at our fingertips. The Plastic Crust is also the sociological constructs of our day: the toxic gossip mill of social media, the 24-hour news cycle, and the never-ending onslaught of marketing.
Below this plastic crust is the world or our not-so-distant ancestors, our parents and grandparents. They lived in a world without the gadgets and devices, without connectivity to the electronic hive mind.
It was simpler times for them.
And below that layer is the one in which our great and great-great grandparents grew up on. Their way of life was closer to the earth, agrarian, slow.
And below that, well, you get the idea.
Living on The Plastic Crust, it’s all too easy to forget the layers below us. Why would we want to acknowledge them anyway? We have everything we need right here, right now.
We don’t even need to leave our house if we don’t want to.
Two things are missing on the Plastic Crust: the way of life of our ancestors, and, our ancestors.
Sure, we cannot have our ancestors back, yet we can honor them by incorporating their lifestyles into ours. We can acknowledge their contributions every moment of the day in how we interact with each other, how we acquire our foods, how we prepare them, how we use natural resources, and most importantly, how we use time.
Our ancestors lifetimes were short, but they lived long rich, full lives, although maybe not by our standards. Now, we have more time, but we have more distractions, and so we are engaged in a constant battle on how to use that time, i.e. where to direct the attention.
But if we pressed ourselves to the earth, felt the grass and soil and lakes and rivers and oceans, if we looked up at the sun and moon and sky, and watched the animals and plants grow, we would quickly learn that we are in sync with the ancestors, and thus going deep below the Plastic Crust.
Afterall, it’s the same sun and moon they looked upon. It was the same earth upon which they grounded themselves. Might we pull back the plastic and touch that same earth?
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Unsplash
