Mother Mutilated

Mother Mutilated

Once upon a time there was a beautiful woman. She was the most beautiful woman of them all. She was the most beautiful life form of them all. For she was nature itself. And, being nature itself, she was the mother of all.

Like a mother, she cared for all her children and all of life was her children. And we were her children as well. All of us. All of us everywhere. The whole world of people who lived in the world.

Every part of her body, her soul, her heart were ineffably beautiful. It was a beauty that came from the spirit. A beauty that came from the life force. It was a beauty that came from the truth beyond vastness, beyond depth, beyond anything.

She was everything and she was nothing. She was nothing and she was everything. And within her was sealed everything that we were, everything that we needed, everything that we longed for.

And there was peace. Amidst all this radiant beauty of the soul, this beauty untameable, this beauty unseeable, there was peace. And from within that peace there was life. And from within that life there was love.

We were two parts of the same whole. The mother and the child. The lover and the beloved. The seekers and the found.

We rose up though. We rose up horrible and apathetic. We rose up grabbing and pushing. We rose up as one great, grey mass of hardness and power. And we rejected her claim of motherhood onto us. We rejected her.

We broke her heart when we broke away from her. But that was only the first thing that we broke, the first of the many sacred entities.

We looked at our mother and we saw no longer our mother. We saw an object to be torn into, to be exploited, to be mutilated, to be destroyed. We saw something deep and dangerous. Something alien and unfathomable. We saw something ungodly rather than something sacred.

But still, she called out to us. She called out to us. And she called out to us until some of us could hear her. And even though some of us could hear her, her echo was faint and her words were incomprehensible to us. And so even those of us who could hear her, we did not fight. We did not fight for her.

And so we continued with our greed and with our hunger and with our malice. We had a never ending hunger that nothing could sate, that no-one could fill. And we always wanted more, wanted more, wanted more. We wanted to fill up our lives with so many things and so many pretty pictures and tastes and smells and sounds. We wanted so many shocking and interesting stories, with no regard to the messages they sent. We wanted entertainment, wanted fun, wanted pleasures and thrills to fill up our lives.

We wanted all these worthless, hollow things so much that we didn't care about what we had to destroy or who we had to kill in order to get them. We only cared about having more. And we started to take more. We started to take more and more and more and more from our mother.

And so we started to destroy her.

We cut into her to pull out vast swathes of her flesh, on which we built farms and factories and processing plants and packaging plants and warehouses and refineries and chemical plants and so much more. So that we may make more things, make more things, make more material objects to buy and sell for a price and a profit.

All these farms and factories and processing plants and packaging plants and warehouses and refineries and chemical plants and so much more spewed out poison. They spewed out heavy, insidious, toxic poison out into the air, the waters, the lands. The flesh of our mother was poisoned. The blood of our mother was polluted. The breath of our mother was befouled. And she was dying, dying, dying.

Dying as the edges of her body that we cut into and built upon withered away.

We slashed across the very heart of her, building roads and pipelines and power lines through her wild lands, cutting lines through her sacred ecosystems. These lines created edges where her sacred lands were weak and unhealthy. And that weakness spread deeper and deeper and deeper down to the very heart of her. She was slashed through with many, many, many cuts. And all the blood within her started leaking, started dripping out.

And our pipelines leaked into the ground, into the water, spilling toxic chemical oil that the companies were too stingy to stop, were to apathetic to prevent. The thick, black, poison oil poisoned her animals and her plants and all the life that she created herself into.

We sent millions upon millions of cars on millions upon millions of roads. We sent out millions upon millions of ships to chart their ways through the waters. And millions upon millions of airplanes out into the skies. It was poisoning her air, her breath, slowly but surely, tenaciously and agonizingly. And the cars hit birds, hit deer, hit all sorts of small animals that had made their way to the road. And the the ships disturbed the sound patterns of the creatures of the ocean, creatures that they hit often.

It was a horrifically ordered chaos. The march of civilization. The marks of civilization leaving our Morher bruised in a million shades of anguish.

We built houses. More, bigger, taller. Houses that took up more and more of what precious little space our Mother had left to herself. We built houses and restaurants and bars and museums and art galleries and playgrounds and movie theatres and concert halls and stores of all shapes and sizes. Our cities grew and grew. And from our cities spewed forth more poison and pollution into the air. Our many lights reached and stretched up into the sky, and they blocked out our Mother's stars, so that them we could not see.

We stole and we stole and we stole more and more of our Mother's body. We cut down her many forests to make wood and paper and many other materials. We dug deep into her, punching in our tools and our machinery, to make mines from which we extracted metals and minerals and gems and all manner of precious things to build our precious material objects with. We stole and we stole and we stole. And from all the scars that we made on her land, seeped forth our poison.

Our mother's body was bruised and bloody, bloody and bruised. Her body was beaten and battered, bartered and beaten. She was poisoned from the inside as well as from the outside. And she was beauty, battered. She was still the most beautiful woman around, still the most beautiful woman imaginable. But her beauty was now covered by scars and blood and bruises innumerable.

Our Mother's soul was much the same way. Bruised, battered, scarred, poisoned. But still, despite all these bruises and despite all the ways in which our Mother's soul was suffering because of us, she still loved us. She still loved us unimaginably, with all her heart and all her being. For no matter how much we turned away from her, no matter how much we hurt her, she was still our Mother and we were still her children.

But we kept boring and boring and boring into her. We kept destroying more and more of her.

And she couldn't protect us. She couldn't protect us like she used to. She couldn't protect us like she wanted to. She tried her best, gave us all the safety that she could, but her ability to care for us was being stripped away. Stripped away by us ourselves.

And what will happen when there is nothing left of her? What will happen when the most beautiful woman in the world finally dies? We will die too. Our souls, our spirits, they will all die. And when we can no longer rip things out of her, we will focus all our energy into ripping things from each other. And we will eat each other alive.

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