terra shrugs, the sliver narrows.

We live on a planet which is so drastically older than we are. to try to fathom that gulf of time beggars metaphors that are meaningless from the sheer scale of comparison, a single struck match held against the night sky. we operate through this meaninglessness with our stories, with our bold and tragic conceptions, so much so that when that veil is parted, and the story reality is laid down, tiny and glitter next to the truth of the earth, which is broad and deep, moist soil and blasted heath ringed by horizon, it takes some time and effort to slip back into the stream of our daily narrative.

surrealism, psychedelia, cognitive dissonance, any of these blessed experiences can bring you into communion with reality, with truth.

disasters of a scale like the japanese nuclear meltdown have the same effect on me. and for a few frightening days i must commune with reality.

We operate on such a frighteningly narrow sliver, so fucking tenuous is our grip on life that we are blinded by narratives. whether simply to not see the truth behind it, or because the narrative is so persuasive that we spend too little time outside it to see the shape of our lives. how we orchestrate every single occurrence until at some point we say "oh, what a strange destiny i see around me, how did we ever get here?"

this crisis of mass death proportion is a result of escalation and of narratives. by the simple fact of being a nuclear powerplant escalates any possible scenario that is in any way connected to it, to an extinction level event. we allowed ourselves to develop and use forces so staggeringly beyond our remit, and for the narratives to be about benefits and control, and these twin shapers of reality have played out catastrophe scenario once more. you can run the numbers, do the studies, put in place best practises, standards and checks, but you cannot rein in an earthquake. so we shape the story around the reality to perpetuate our daily narrative. all the while being gloriously unaware of the grace of a planet billions of years old, that is right beneath our feet. mistake it not, the planet will endure, life will endure, only we can see to it that we will too.

or not.