Earth, I love you so utterly. I love the way your mountains rise in their stubborn silence, the way your deserts stretch open and unrelenting, the shock of cold in your waters. I love the lava that burst out of you, the trees that speak beneath you, the gleeful pops of color that remind me joy still exists. I love the humans who walk across you - different in culture, age, skin, gender, sexual desire, and ability. I am grateful for the chance to learn from them, each one carrying a piece of you inside. You are alive and you are sacred.
America, I’ve been fortunate to explore your country from West and East, North and South, still offering corners I have yet to meet. You provided me with a beautiful education. You even had moments of moving closer to equity and supporting art. You were never perfect - and neither am I. And I loved that I could learn from the flaws as much as the gifts. But now, I am devastated that I don’t recognize you anymore.
Earth, I’m sorry our country is failing you. I’m sorry that our country is erasing the history of slavery and Native Americans. I’m sorry that it is censoring and punishing those who speak truth. I'm sorry that our country is gutting the arts. I’m sorry that kids are terrified for their literal lives to go to school. I’m sorry our country doesn’t believe in science. I’m sorry that our country is awarding the ones of white skin, of heterosexual orientation, of cisgender, of able body, and of extreme wealth. And I’m sorry that many of these people, in this awarded position, stand idly by, or even advocate for your destruction.
I promise you, Earth. I will go on loving you. I will go on standing with the communities our country tries to erase. I will not glorify a man who dreamed of destruction and spoke hate about everyone who didn’t look like him. I will keep making art in your honor - art that reveals your brilliance and unmasks the rot of capitalism.
Earth, what I’m saying feels like the most basic truth of being human, doesn’t it? And yet here I am, in a country where so many stand against it. Where words like these could one day be enough to take away my passport.
You held me before I was named, you hold me in this very moment, and you will hold me when my body returns to you. I’m grateful I grew up in a family that did not share my views, that I sat in a 2008 Political Science class as the only one to cast a vote for Obama, that my intelligence has been questioned because I am an artist and a woman, and that I was taught to measure success only in dollars. All that noise taught me how to stand for what is just, even when it felt like I was standing alone. And still, through all that noise, I don’t give in to a dictator.
Earth, I grieve your collapse as it unfolds, and still I root myself in your soil - loving you, fighting for you, refusing to let go.
“The darker the circumstance, the more brilliant the invitation” - Joanna Macy