Friday, December 21, 2012

Will We End Up Like the Mayans?


Today, December 21, 2012, I bought a Moleskin daily pocket planner. I was feeling optimistic about the rest of the day and tomorrow even knowing we were at the end of the 13th Baktun, the last inscription in the Mayan calendar.

But I am not so sure our civilization will endure. Why? Because we are incapable of being in awe of anything, even our own existence on this planet.



Mayan temple at Tikal, Guatemala

For example in 2009, NASA scientists bombed the moon so they could find water or so they said. They could have destabilized this perfect sphere, failing to note that even a fraction of disturbance in the moon's trajectory would have wiped humanity off the planet.

The moon is our only close companion in our solar system. We are chemically connected to its gravitational pull. Our ancestors, including the Mayans, worshiped the moon.  Alchemists named the moon Luna after a goddess, and Monday is named in honor of the Moon. 

So to bomb our moon was a desecration of sorts. 

Just six years earlier, on Sept. 27, 2003 the asteroid designated SQ222 passed within 54,700 miles of earth. The asteroid was not even detected until after it hurtled by earth. Only then was it discovered that it was the closest known fly by of an asteroid -- ever.  

Some astronomers believe the moon’s gravitational pull may have deflected SQ222, thus saving the earth from a life-ending collision. Just as the moon has deflected countless other asteroids for millions of years. 


5,000 years of records ends 12- 21-2012

If we cannot be in awe of our existence, our planet and moon, how can we expect to endure as a civilization?

Here is my answer to the above question: 

Caught between trines & transits
I felt a planetary pull like
a pin ball bouncing between
karma and gravity.
I learned that life-ending debris
had sped by earth and we never saw
it coming – like a splitter cut fastball
thrown by Rivera to close out
the inning.
No wiser from our brush with
fate we continue on, gone badly wrong.
Our bakers don’t stay for long
after they visit the cookie dough
they left behind.
Why don’t they
take us back with them to the factory to
modify the recipe?
We’ve been trying to leave
this planet ever since we
could stand, and now we act
like we belonged here.
But this planet will survive us puny
interlopers, even when it becomes
barren rock, albeit less pristine 
than when we found it.
We failed as the planet’s steward
because we grew tired of it.
Such is the life of  organic
 space garbage.
Our prison is this planet if not
our skin. Inmates all of us
who suffer themselves then recycle
into compost, just so
much clay trying to trying to differentiate
ourselves other corrosive bits of cosmic
sludge. We only
fuck, eat or kill.
And like the Mayans,
who never came back from lunch break,
all we will leave behind
is a calendar.

1 comment:

  1. You can afford to stay optimistic. But this is just a choice among many opportunities. "until death do us part" as they say...

    ReplyDelete