Sarah Pizer-Bush
“Retreat”
Inspiration piece
Beyond Shapes Like Globes
By Darice Jones
Response
We sent our elder’s souls into the bodies of small furry animals as a way to observe the practices Planet 4488-10, with all it’s wisps of blue and white. It was one of the small round ones. The beings there seemed to have no awareness that not all planets were round, like theirs. In fact, they knew so little about the multiverse these days. They had taken a strange but sharp turn in a relatively short amount of time.
When they were all still on one land mass (the largest land mass on the planet, which they now call Africa), they worked together well. There was a commitment to the best idea rising, as there is still in the rest of the multiverse. During that long era, life was less about competing and more about learning, testing that learning, and creating new ways of being. It was about the growth of the whole, and no one dare put personal gain over that of the whole of humanity.
Then, when some of humanity moved to the colder parts of the planet and experienced scarcity, they created competition and survivalism. What was once acute, became chronic for those people – and they lost their connection to abundance – then to each other. They felt so unsafe in their cold environments, that fear became their driving emotion, even after there was nothing to be afraid of. They taught each other and their children that the world was a threat rather than a sustaining force. The best thing, they claimed, was to conquer and control all they could. They practiced conquering and controlling with a religious fervor. And had they continued in that fashion where they were, they would have died out within 3 generations. But, to the chagrin of all life on the planet, they came down from their northern home and brought their toxic practices to the planet in the most egregious of ways.
I’m Della. I am from a cube-shaped world that itself illuminates 10 galaxies. I am tall, brown, round, and both handsome and beautiful, depending on the light and how tall or short you, the viewer, happen to be.
Today, I am coming to pick up elder Nzemi who claims that all the elders should shed these animal bodies and return home now, because they have seen enough. He is waiting for me under a rather lush tree, so his spirit should be calm by the time I reach him. How shocked the humans would be if a quarter of their animal population vanished one day. Even more shocking would be the realization that those animals were not native to their planet at all, but they had been created on mine for the purpose of this long study.
Nzemi claimed that the humans were so addicted to the concept of inner conflict, that they refused to allow each other to grow past the stage of being when souls are stuck in existential angst. Some of them were so caught up that they spent their lives in active destruction, and an even weirder hoarding of simple resources. Even their most enlightened spent far too much energy on this idea of inner turmoil. They seemed completely unaware that angst was just one way of being, relatively early in an incarnation, and that it wasn’t supposed to last their whole lives. This addiction to drama, combined with a kind of collective agreement toward spiritual immaturity, Nzemi claimed, was reason enough to bring our elder beings back home to the cube and leave these babies to fend for themselves.
I had only been on the planet during these trips to retrieve one elder or another, but in my short time, I had sense a beauty and a potential that had the power to enhance the galaxies far and wide. Because of this, I disagreed with Nzemi. So, I did what we do on our planet when we see things differently, I wrapped my body around his in a deep embrace. This allowed him to see the colors that I saw every time I came to this planet. It allowed him to hear the music of it. It allowed him to sense the beauty as I had. Even in the body of the small Black furry animal he now inhabited, I could see his eyes shift to a softer state, feel his breath loosen as he let out a hot exhale.
He felt it, and he knew. It was not yet time to go.
Written by Darice M. Jones
In the year of Wangari Maathai ©2022
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