Gaia: Arguments with Our Lady Earth (extract #3)

This is getting a bit complicated but here goes.

Me: OK, so tell me what happened 500 years ago.

Gaia: This story changes as you river-apes dream. Five hundred years ago we cut you off from easy access to spirit because you needed to lose your childish dependence on rescue-gods and bribable-gods and even Santa-gods. Alas, it didn’t quite work as we hoped it would.

You needed to learn to study the world with no easy answers: if the answer to the question “Why does an apple fall” is “Because God wants it to” (or it’s in its nature to fall), then the answer goes nowhere and is too boring to bother with. But if the answer makes the first crack in the way space/time works, if the answer understands mass as interchangeable and finds the power law of gravity… That’s a much more interesting answer. Sir Isaac Newton was a deeply spiritual man, although of course he didn’t believe in me. He was a Protestant patriarch. Many of those look on me as the enemy, unfortunately.

For billions of years I have been bacterial. It took some comets and meteorites to stir it all up enough to allow multicelled life to evolve after what you call Snowball Earth — I did nearly die physically then by the way. My immortal part, my world-soul is part of God as yours is and can never die. But Life needs to be kicked…