[Gaia]

EWP 290 Video Project “Earth may be alive: not as the ancients saw her—a sentient Goddess with a purpose and foresight—but alive like a tree. A tree that quietly exists, never moving except to sway in the wind, yet endlessly conversing with the sunlight and the soil. Using sunlight and water and nutrient minerals to grow and change. But all done so imperceptibly, that to me the old oak tree on the green is the same as it was when I was a child.” From the beginning, our mother Gaia, our all powerful, all giving deity bestowed soul into our lifeless husks. In fertile union with the searing hot sun, our mother supported the first cells of creation within her grand and swirling womb known as the primordial soup. And still before our time, an ancient time, ancestral time, came the birth of the creature, a collective of cells, writhing in its newfound existence, hot oxygen burning the fish-like lungs just capable enough to breath the toxic air. Fighting to withstand the burning UV rays, a gorey, horrific, beautiful display of birth. Alongside these wriggling creatures came the ever persistent sprouts that would soon dominate the landscape. Green, pure beings, as alive as any of us, breathing, reaching towards our father the sun in a 470 million year prayer to their lifegiver. From sprouts, emerged the tree, beginning at the roots, building itself up over the years, to standing tall, standing proud, to the final bow of respect, death, like a mother’s child growing up in front of her very own eyes. Although we as humans pridefully consider our host our domain to conquer and control, this world existed before our arrival, and we, as every other creature once was, were born from the mother mud, in one way or another. The trees, growing, standing, and dying, are just another being, giving and taking from the world around us, in their own way. Even if it may not look human, we meet the same criteria for life, and should show a similar reverence and respect for our mother, Gaia. Passing into the human world, the grass meadows turn into barren wastelands of asphalt and concrete. Rusting and withering away, but never growing back like the mighty tree. Left to rot in its own oxidation. Humans, having forsake all their arborous brethren, sought to create their own towering structures, their own canopies to hide beneath, but these structures are lifeless, emotionless sculptures obscuring the natural landscape. As if not to praise the sun, but to blot it out, they cover their skies in power lines and wire fences.A twisting, contorting, strangling mess of wires and cables. Elements meant to rest externally underground ripped up from the earth and strewn about Gaia serves as the all giving host to the life of this earth, and with every host, comes the parasite that abuses its kind nature for its own selfish existence. The hard edges almost mocking their soft and delicate living counterparts The forests themselves face the petroleum based wrath of the righteous man, finding itself littered in plastics and non compostables. A graveyard of long dead fossils, turned into oil, turned into plastic. Yet through the torment, Gaia manages to support as much life as she could, for as long as she could. Passing love upon all of her creations, even her parasites.