This is how we change the world. We change the world.

Mullein Changing the World on Some Crushed Gravel Leftover from Road-Building

This is going on across the slope of a gravel pit cut into a post-glacial riverbed that ran high along a wall of ice high above the valley 12,000 years ago, for six months or so. How do we know it was only six months? Well, look at the rocks below. They are splinters, eroded by water but barely so. That’s perhaps about six months of tumbling: a quick fast river, not travelling far, and dropping its weight along the ice, probably at winter freeze-up.

Look how jumbled these rocks are! That’s the Interior of the North of the Northwest for you: all kinds of crazy volcanic islands jumbled up together in splinters across a couple thousand kilometres north-south distance in a series of huge collisions, and then cut-and-diced by ice and moved by water. As you can see, over the fifteen years of exposure in this gravel pit, water and gravity have started moving rock again.

This is commonly called erosion. It isn’t. That is a concept based on a notion of a pure and perfect Earth that suffers, later, from decay. That might be the story of the Garden of Eden, but it’s not the story here. Have a closer look at this so-called “erosion”.

There is a volcanic stone there that is crumbling away. Erosion, though? Well, that concept presumes that the Earth is a long-ago place, created and then set on a course towards death. And look how it’s coming true!

The Infamous Tar Sands

But it wasn’t a perfect Earth and it’s not “dying” now — not on its own, at least. Whatever it will be is being created now. The Earth is not in a state of erosion but of opening — a continuous opening. Even the deathly scene above is an opening. Into what is unclear. What is clear is that it is the result of a misconception.

But let’s get back to the Earth. Here,  the stone above, and the one below…

… are opening. Like these stones tumbled out by gravity and water (from a tumble of gravity and water) …

… are mixing with air. Over time, the sky rusts or eats the stone…

In other words, minerals are jumbled together and mixed with air, the minerals from one place are oxidized, and in this new form, one that plants can use, minerals flow into the soil, blend with it, and allow for life. Check out the tiny plant opening within this opening energy field below.

And this in December, which the “Dead Earth Theory” claims as a time without life. It is hardly so.

In the stone above, notice as well how frost, working together with water, achieves much the same effect as air does on more flammable stones, lifting it apart into layers, and opening it to the cold of the sky. In this one too:

The Sky Made This

And this one:

It’s quite the jumble. In some of the stones, like the red one on the lower left below, the processes work together.

There is rock here without this process, but only this process of opening makes it live, and life is this process of “opening.” The process continues beyond stone. Here, balsam root takes it up:

What is a plant, after all, but a mixture of stone, water and sky? Each adds its nature to the mix. Here in the Siya? too:

Look how the wind has frozen this bush into shape. It flows like a river, like these stones in water:

like these leaves in wind:

Water will plant them now.

That is not erosion. This change of perspective changes the world. It makes it turn from a place of entropy, against which humans must fight to build an artificial, sustaining world that mines the Earth for resources…

Los Angeles Freeway, by Ed Freeman

… into a space that is alive, and which humans either erode or participate in, and when you are not participating in life, well, you are an agent of death, an agent of this:

It’s not the devil that tempts you. It is disobedience to life.

It is a concentration on human social bonds over the seed within the apple that must be given to the soil instead of to the mouth. Yes, it is a paradox, but there is a way. Here is Smoker Marchand’s Salmon Chief in sqwexwnitkw.

Note the rust of industrialization returned to thanks giving, not for humans but for the fish. It stands in contrast to the industrialized water sprayed out from the posts behind in summer for the joy of children, so they don’t have to go into the lake. That is our choice: to go into the lake or to rust away. The irony is that if we don’t go into the lake, we will rust away.

And the Earth will take us in as we are and make her soil out of that. Without care, we will replace ourselves. We are well along the way on this path, but we can still step off. Note the fence below. It’s not for this cow.

It’s for us.