Great Gaia alive!

FAITH

By FRANK SENGE KOLMA
THERE have been a number of works dedicated to the proposition that the earth is alive.
That only a sentient entity could create the conditions necessary for sustaining life, that animate and inanimate organisms have purpose and operate in symbiotic relationships necessary to achieve that end such as happens on earth, have given enough food for thought across centuries.
Given the name of the ancient goddess of earth, Gaia, this theory is gathering force and support in these days of environmental consciousness. Of late another work, under the same appellation, tries to explain all the mysteries and conspiracy theories of the world.
I shall concern myself here with the proposition that our earth might be sentient, meaning it has and is driven by intelligence and is perhaps itself alive.
That is to say the earth or Gaia exhibits certain functions that we associate with living creatures. Gaia has bodily functions operating in sublime symphony and in circulatory fashion like those operating in any living organism.
It has air and water operating in renewing circulatory systems. It has fleshy earth and liquid water necessary for the smooth operation of its constituent parts and skeletal tectonic structures that give it form.
It turns on its axis so that every part of it experiences night and day in equal parts so everything on it is given a time of waking activity and a time of rest. It has the seasons that arrive unfailing in all parts renewing and sustaining life as we know it.
It has locomotion and a steering device operating with no known sonar or radar but with an accuracy that maintains its safety and sustains all things on it. Its age is ancient, sufficient for its bones to crumble to dust and re-form themselves.
It might not have lungs such as we have but it produces the air we breathe, floats in it actually.
Like us it is 75 per cent water and 25 per cent flesh.
It has a beating, pulsating iron heart at its core surrounded by molten lava, perhaps its version of our blood.
It has a long memory, stored in stone and fizzles all about us in the air.
It has locomotion, travelling space at mind boggling speeds with no engine we know of and no decipherable means. It does so with no radar we can detect but does so without crashing into other planets or star systems by immutable laws such as gravity. It protects self and all on it.
When you look at it from that perspective you can easily get used to the idea of a living Gaia or earth.
Who is to say that it is not living? More especially why define living within the confines of our own understanding and perception?
On earth there are those systems that are eerily like our own (homo sapian) – circular, renewable, and life sustaining.
Without the seasons, regular like our digestive tract, where would animal have fodder and fodder have its fallow.
A reason there must be and a season of reasons we must harvest. That is as it should be.
Earth seems alive with unique systems flowing in harmonious symphony such as the ocean with its currents and its salt which gives life to billions of teeming fishes, the winds, the seasons, and symbiotic dependence of plant and animal species. Gaia has locomotion, as mentioned earlier, hurtling through space at mind boggling speeds by no known mode or engine known to men. There is no navigation chart, no braking system, and most extraordinarily no driver.
In its time living beings cease to exist, become compost, regrow in other forms. A sea urchin on the ocean floor near Rabaul in one eon might form the constituent parts of an oak in England in the next. An elephant will become a rock next. So animate becomes inanimate, living becomes non-living and vice versa and so on and so forth into the far future.
Gaia, set third in the Solar’s (sun) convoy of planets and accompanying moons and space debris that constitute our solar system has travelled far and will travel billions more miles yet.
We know not whence it came from or where it is heading. It is not telling us much. Gaia has survived much adversity from within and without, that is for sure, and will meet much more yet.
Who are we, late arrivals on the scene to form or pass judgement and give a description here and a name there when we know absolutely nothing of even how we got here ourselves, never mind others.
Who is he, the human being, to create so much discomfort for Gaia in his selfish drive to better himself. Man is a parasite living off Earth’s flesh and blood.
Humans, as with head lice, have become so numerous and bothersome so as to become a health issue for Gaia. He is posing a dire threat to Gaia. With a mere shrug Gaia can end all life living on it.
Say, if it were to all of a sudden stop its ceaseless revolution on its axis. The shock of it would rip all things apart.
Mountains would be flung into the air, Oceans would be emptied from their basins and drown the land and everything might just unravel into their constituent particles, dust.
If it survived the shock Gaia would become barren again and microbes would have to set to work over the next billion years building up earth’s vast array of life all over again.
One wonders if something like this scenario might not have occurred in the past, that life is formed anew after earth emptied the dirty dish water every so often, so to speak.
When we view everything from such a perspective, on a planetary, Stellar and cosmic viewpoint in one perspective and on a microbial, molecular, atomic scale in the other direction it is easy to see that unseen hand we can call god more readily.
True, it might be said, that we suffer the same dilemma that presented itself when our savage ancestor created his god: lack of knowledge but the differences between our ancestor and ourselves is that he feared his god into existence, we can reason our god into existence.
In the case of Gaia’s ceaseless motion, we can ask: Who spun the first spin? Where is it going?
If there was a Big Bang that created our universe, who or what initiated the spark? What existed before the Big Bang or are we to surmise that across countless eons there has been a continuous series of bangs which create a cosmos until that one reached its maximum expansion, contracted violently and died in a terrifying explosion that becomes the next eon’s Big Bang.
Matter coalesced out of spiraling cosmic dust and eventually forming into stars and planets and other bodies. Where did matter emerge from is another god seeker’s question.
The louse does not know the identity of the human hunting it, only a whiff of danger when it sees the hair strand parting where it has been living on. We are in the position of the louse.
We do not know the God we seek, only that it is there. We fear it in every eclipse, every parting of the cloud and every peal of thunder.
If we are formed of the same material that comprises all Gaia and the universe, then hidden deep in us is knowledge of the very origin of the universe.
In our dreams images appear of that past in jumbled form. Is it a recollection from our gene archives a collage of real events in the past?
If Gaia is sentient, does it have god creatures of its own? Is the sun sentient since it is it which provides the life sustaining force of all earth? Does the sun then answer to another greater power than it?
If it did, then the possibilities are endless of those mightier powers in their realm answering to mightier powers still and so on and so forth down an endless path of ever-increasing power ad-infinitum.
And there we very quickly move beyond the limits our knowledge and even our ability to know.