Love/Judgement

You protect what you love. What you judge too easily, often, you can’t really, deeply, truly love, or it does get too clouded and smothered by the judging.

Our knowledge, our education and the conceit we derived from it has led us to judge the planet too much. We decree places more and less beautiful, or charming, or express our likes and dislikes for weather, flora, fauna in rather final, judgemental words and tones. We are unable to see ourselves as mere parts of a beautiful, interconnected, interdependent planet - each part of which fits in perfectly, is full of life and complexity and beautiful in so many different ways.

As I’ve travelled, I’ve glimpsed more and more of this beauty everywhere. The heat of the northern plains is a fact, but my discomfort with it is mine alone to deal with. Many a creature, including my younger self, thrives in it and will continue to do so, being part of and extending the web of life. The dust I started to see as an irritant flies and settles, changing lands and continents and histories. The stories we know were written by many such duststorms, and floods, and winter chills and heatwaves.

As I’ve been more with and on the land, I’ve started seeing all of it as beautiful — a little more each day, and perhaps sometimes it is my perception and view that’s flawed. I still continue to view man-made ugliness as that, but the various forms of the natural world, whatever conditions they create and get created by, are beautiful in their flow and their enormous continuity across time and geography.

I suspect our conceit and judgement might have caused the disconnect with the planet we see at scale today. We did not accept it as it is, and tried reshaping almost everything about it almost everywhere. We did not accept its creatures, its variations, its ‘tantrums’ as inevitable events. We desired to control and tame it, and fit in inside the straight lines inside our heads, to simplify its complexity, to reduce its diversity within our ever smaller imaginations. We fell out of love with it, and obviously stopped even thinking of ourselves as a part of it.

What you judge, you can’t really love. And we’ve done that with our planet. It’s a relationship we must re-examine if we are to live well on it in the coming times.