Who Am I?

I am Mother Earth, Gaia, Earth, Madre Tierra, Chuhuit, Chup, Tsuqqit, and many other names you have given me. None of these resemble what I call myself, but as I am you, so too am I any name you choose for me, even when it’s a curse. Whatever my name, listen now to this simplest fragment of Who I Am. Whales blowing. Dolphins in transient flight. Waves thundering, and the cliffs, rocks and sand which they strike and caress. Kelp. Squid and sting rays, both great and small. Tuna and salmon. Magnificent, sea-filled canyons, and mountains, the tips of which you call islands. Swift, gliding predators, and shell and scale-filling wisdom which seems mindless to some of you. Coral, both living and bones. In places, thick-layered with ice. Oceans – This is Who I Am.

Breezes that stir the leaves of alders growing on the banks of wild streams. Mists, wet and steamy, still and translucent above warm wetlands. Transparent, vast blue skies over prairies, and darker blues above transiently clear high mountain passes. Exuberant tornadoes which stir the land and life below. High, swift currents, hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, and sudden passionate squalls over previously tranquil seas. Birds in flight. The breath of all life, constant, endlessly beginning and ending. Air - This is Who I Am. Rolling land, enormous variegated homes of many grasses, the creatures that they feed, and those that the feeders in turn nurture. Earth which is almost but not quite water, giving rise to creatures of stunning stealth, and flight, and abundance. Sand dunes, arid mountains and hot plains which turn cool and silver under my sister Moon. Other mountains, solitary, linked, massed, dramatic and yet embracing to the energies which they sustain - plant, animal and stone - the places where water from the air is first gathered and empowered. Continents – This is Who I Am.

Places where land life is richest, most fecund and potent. Trees in wonderful variety: sequoia, aspen, pine, maple, sycamore, mahogany, cocoa, fig, cecropia, ebony and so many more. Jaguars and leopards, colobuses, vervets and howlers, liana vines, iguanas and green mambos, gorillas, chimpanzees and humans, antelope and deer, wolves and bears, tarantula and beetles, cockroaches and army ants, mushrooms and wild garlic. Deep shade and shafts of sunlight, the drip of rainwater after a storm, trees singing in the wind. Forests – This is Who I Am. The blood of continents. Flowing, flooding, boulder moving and tree uprooting, quietly streaming, gently dappled moving pools nurturing thirsty antelope and lion. Crocodiles and hippo, trout and catfish, minnows and darters, salmon and shad, sturgeon and pike, boto, piranha, anaconda, and terrapins. Whitewater and thundering waterfalls, whirlpools, silent, driving energy, sparkling clear, muddy, irresistible, changing, constant, rain fed and ocean feeding. From the smallest stream to the greatest river – This is Who I Am. Flint, granite, gypsum, marble, pumice, quartz, slate, chalk, coal, basalt, aplite, breccia, diatomite, shale, sandstone, obsidian, dolomite, gneiss, halite. Emerald, diamond, ruby, sapphire, garnet, jade, lapis lazuli, opal, topaz, tourmaline, turquoise, tanzanite. Uluru, Burringurrah. Everest, K2, Lhotse, McKinley, Aconcagua, Bonete, Mercedario, Whitney, Blanc, Dufourspitze, Matterhorn, Elbert, Robson, San Jacinto, San Gorgonio, San Antonio, above the alpine tree line. Hard, smoothed by air and water, enduring, movable, watchful, quintessentially rooted. Rock – This is Who I Am. Kilimanjaro, soaring above ancient, vibrant plains. Mauna Kea, like Kilimanjaro, Ranier, Shasta, and Fuji, resting, waiting, warm. Etna, and young Kilauea, energetic, hurling fire and brimstone, streaming lava, persistent, earth-creating. St. Helens, explosive, trickster, modest and swift. Ol Doinyo Lengai, coolest yet hot, quickest, laughing, unnerving, fantastic. Earth-stretching Chimborazo, Ojos del Salado, Socompa, Popocatepetl. Burning rumours of my internal riches, intimations of terrible, domestic power. Volcanoes – This is Who I Am. Magma. Crust, mantle, core. Silicates, iron, nickel, gabbro, carbonatite. Magnetic fields, hollow visons, caverns dreamed, theoretical slow currents, iron crystal, liquids, solids. Unseen, extrapolated, intimate and yet further from your knowing than visible stars. Subject of invention and arrogance, untouchable, amusingly incompatible with your misunderstanding of life. Streaming with unimagined substances, and a greater variety, complexity, detail, sensitivity, activity, and consequence, than the whole of my skin from which you and everything in your direct experience is shaped. More than a trillion cubic kilometers of mysterious, engaged interior – This is Who I Am. Breaking out of my shell. Moving from and to other living forms, hungry, growing, eating the delicious gift of expired life. Sharing together with my siblings, turning in myself old into new, death into birth, the bridge between past joys and future exuberance. Eating, breathing, food and air ingested as one and yet separate. Shedding my skin, and shedding again, until at last I am grown and my hunger ceases. Moving away, seeking a quiet, safe sanctuary where I can work the miracle of transformation, not through death but from life to life. Leaping into flight and the stunning freedom of three-dimensional speed. Maggots – This is Who I Am. Eating trees. Shifting rocks. Loving family, and especially our children. Remembering, sharing long and intricate stories with one another, sometimes with others far away, enjoying community. Spraying great streams of water, and then dust, pasting our skin with mud. Making breezes with our ears, staying cool. Choosing mates, making love, and giving joyous birth to new generations. Fearing little, except our own passions, our own unmet needs, the failure of our visions – and the young two-legged, flesh-destroying, imprisoning creatures which have come to plague us. Elephants – This is Who I Am. Sunlight. Today. The knowledge of many todays lived and yet to come. Thrumming with the wind, together with my others. Sheltering little ones of great variety, free to come and depart and come again. Feeling the earth in which I rest, and which suckles me, giving me food and drink. Understanding the life within and beneath me, harmless, amusing, pleasant company, changing. Snow, and liquid streams. Fire, roaring, consuming, brilliant, rushing past my roots and toward the sky, for me warming, refreshing, transforming if not myself then my surroundings. The terrible cutting brought by small, deaf, quick, lethal groundlings, when they choose our death. They have not always made this choice. Giant Sequoias – This is Who I Am. Cocooned. Formed from the bonding of another’s sperm and our mother’s eggs, as our mother has also fathered our inverse siblings in their mother, our father Ringing our mother, slipping from her slim, muscular body to rest separate in a moist, quiet, dark, grainy, delicious presence. As we grow elaborate, refining our destined journeys, straining towards emergence, we begin our parting. The cocoon cracks and we rush out, newly born and yet almost adult, starting out in every direction to live and love and enrich the earth, making possible the life of multitudes. Young earthworms – This is Who I Am. Some of us, myself among them, are slowing. We eat less, and surprisingly, sometimes even prefer standing to moving. Driven by our devotion to community, and our fear, we struggle to keep up with the others. We know that our end approaches, when we will join the many behind us who have already left, becoming food and then becoming new, reshaped into different life. We resist, and yet we wish it, understanding how uncomfortable and complete we are now. Ahead is a small river we must cross. Those younger move quickly, aware of risk. I am caught in the water, my hindquarters crushed in the jaws of the great lizard whom I have seen before. I struggle, collapse, drain away. It occurs to me, last, that I am free! Wildebeest – This is Who I Am. Floating, swaying, accumulating beauty, brushing against one another, visibly unique but surrounded by an abundance of similar kin, sliding down to the joining below. Many-colored and yet a perfect white, absorbing sound and gifting hush, relishing my unmatched brilliance. To arrive is to end, fusing into a cold and yet protective, warming insulation against the harshness, spreading a new kind of wonder on the life-giving, frozen surface below. Snowflake – This is Who I Am. Big and bipedaled like an ostrich but only half as fast, and yet flourishing, even overpowering. An exceptional ability to manipulate and to fashion tools which serve and protect their communities. Storytellers, dancers and singers, able to move with extraordinary grace and to shape complex sounds with special tools and with their bodies, in which they delight. Inquisitive, keen to discover creation, capable of weaving together more than just themselves. But become sadly voracious, using their tools to fling themselves and too many others into extinction. Human beings – This is Who I Am. Intimate with the wind, moved by the wind, delivered to tidbits, snacks and delicious feasts by the wind, returned to my loving, my loved one, and my infants by the wind, sometimes, understandably, abandoned by the wind. Yet I begin on land, surrounded by the sea which is my bounty and my constant companion. I too dance and sing, joyously, though at first uncertain and awkward, learning in my youth my own musical path to my partner and our creation. A master of invisible energy great and small, a teacher, tool-maker, and sustainer of my people. Rooted in a single place and still nomadic, my paths circle and soar around the whole gifting planet. Great Albatross – This is Who I Am. Water mother, cliff father, mother-honed and homed. Caressed, rocked, shifted, tumbled and swept by currents from pacific to passionate. Frequent witness and fleeting ground to the passing of others whose homes lie elsewhere, but who sometimes die here. Colorful, reflecting, gentle, stunning multiplicity and singularity. Fragile, strong, enduring, wise, accepting, unnoticed, capable of unintended treachery. Sustainer of cascading streams and welcoming shores. Free of hunger and possessions, patient, spirited, knowing, small to some, giant to others. Giving magic to those who can see it. Pebble – This is Who I Am. Passive by inclination, I am our Mother’s preeminent devourer of the sun. I take many forms, create spacious communal blooms and aquatic forests, and I thrive in many quite different places. While I leap, and sway, and sing with the energy of moving water, it is the energy of a star which moves me best. I become the food, soon or late, and my breath is a vital elixir, for those which cannot consume sun’s fire. I give the most and take the least, and I am beautiful. I know joy, and pain; I, like others, spring into infancy and youth, and if I am not eaten first, I too diminish and die. Algae – This is Who I Am. Howl of hurricanes. Whisper of hummingbird wings. Subtonic rumble of earthquakes. Cry of eagle. Rhythmic boom of ocean waves, greeting shores. Trumpeting of elephants. Exhilarating wail of storming trees. Oscillating crackle of feeding earthworms. Humming of still air in the heart of wilderness. Inaudible, omnipresent, wordless tales of the ineluctable playful reality. Silent, roaring, renewing, invigorating, affirming, shape-changing river, moving over and through the few who face, and the many whose backs are turned to, the current. Subtle vibration of bodies hearing their Mother’s song. My voice – This is Who I Am. Spoken and sung with an ear to me, filtered by the gentle ignorance of this singer, the above is but one breath of my story, one resonant note of my song. The whole of it begins almost before I remember it and is sung each moment, each day, in all of my places, by all of my creatures and by me, the one Earth, until and beyond the distant end of my place in time. We hope, by this, that you will be helped to see and know who I am, and who you are. Bill Luttrell, one voice of Mother Earth