Grieving for the loss of human
expressions of grief for a world that is losing its soul and how to return to human
humanus - Latin, ‘of man’; from Proto-Indo-European root (dh)ghomon meaning “earthling, earth being”; Latin humus - earth, soil. Humilis - low. dhghem (Proto-Indo-European) meaning ‘earth’
“Of course! The path to heaven doesn’t lie down in flat miles. It’s in the imagination with which you perceive this world, and the gestures with which you honor it.”
― Mary Oliver, House of Light
It all begins with the word.
Words are maps to our belonging. To get to know the story of anything, go down to the word-root and dig the inheritance of soil until you find home. Home as the place of origin of any one thing. Home as mother, home as what held the germinating seed, what fed, what was before.
To understand anything, or anyone, find the word that names them and dissect that like an eager anatomist hungry to understand the parts of a whole. The name is like a seed that holds the story, the acorn that contains within it the maps of its becoming, the directions of growth, the reservoir for its nourishment.
A word is the acorn from which the story becomes an oak tree.
Recently, I am feeling a deep grief in me for what I sense as a loss of human. I want to understand it, to understand what we are losing, and the object of my grief.
To begin, I go down to the roots of ‘human’ to try and find within this word, traces of what we may be losing.
What does it mean to be human? Human, humble, humility, humus.
No etymology dictionary explains exactly why hum, what is the hum that links these words like a mycelium, connecting us to the earth, to the modesty of soil. What is this hum of our aliveness, the humming of belonging to more than human-kin, to more than our own individual story.
Our ancient Proto-Indo-European language gives us more in its offering of dhgomon, or dhghem meaning earthling or earth.
The humbleness of an earthling
To be human is to be of the earth. No teacher can show us a greater way of how to be more human than the earth, than the lessons in soil. Open the earth tenderly and within it, you will find answers to many of your questions. The ground dwellers will become your teachers - how to move without a backbone, that even spine-less you can move through life, feeling the vibration of your path through your belly kissing the earth.
The earthworms are keen to show you how to feast on death and nurture new life. Ants are speaking to you about the strength in togetherness and you will learn to be slow from the snail and remember the sea from its spiralled shell and know how to move even when you no longer have bones to hold you.
To be human is to be a body of humility. To be humble is to be close to the ground. Unlike the stories I used to hear from church as a child about how humans are wicked and lowly and impure, pushing us into a chorus of self-pity and despair, I see humility as the choice to go down on your knees in awe and reverence for the beauty and the sacred before us. To be humble is not to be forced to the ground, but to surrender with love for something that is outside of you and inside of you, for something that is you and not you, for something that needs you as much as you need it. Beauty humbles us.
We have become maddened with an obsession with the ascent…
What I am grieving is the slow degrading of human and humble. It is the ravenous ascent of the world to perfection. I see around me a delirious chase for the impeccable - a society that wants us to be polished, with no space for flaws or error. I see it everywhere - a refusal to acknowledge the importance of descent, no more space to sit with death and the dying, a maddened obsession with killing germs and demons and eradicating darkness and disease. No more space left for the unexpected. No more mystery.
No more space left for the chaotic creative spirit that comes to us unplanned and burning.
No more space for the flawed and the imperfect. For the word misspelled yet somehow so fitting.
We live in perfectly square houses, with perfectly square doors and windows, in our boxed rooms, with immaculate walls, white straight corners of a dumb ceiling. No space left for the imprecise beauty of the old home of my grandmother leaning itself to one side and welcoming you in through its curved threshold, its rounded rooms holding you like your mother’s womb.
Our body yearns to see the old forms of nature where there are no straight lines, the rounding of your home space like a round belly. We are not accustomed to the straight and narrow world that stifles us to the bone. There are no precise lines in our bodies, no sharp edges - only winding veins, uneven marks and folds, and colours spreading from moon-greys to milky white, fiery ochre, smooth olive or sea-dark. Nothing is exact or measured, nothing can be reproducible.
We seek to turn everything into perfect: a perfect god, immaculate and so distant. We want to sing with perfect voices that never quiver, we want to write perfect poems that flow with exact rhymes, we seek to find the perfect lover that’s made of ecstasy and certainty, of unending love.
I choose to pray to a god that’s flawed, a god that is close and warm with life. A god that I find daily in the unfurling ferns and the blackbird song, in the stillness of herons. A god that I can taste on the skin of who I choose to love, a god I can hear within me when I’m quiet enough.
I choose a flawed life that is full of compost and germs. Full of decaying matter for I know the darkness necessary to fuel new life, the descent we have to make first, always first, before our thriving.
The more we are losing human, the more we strip away the life that has soul. Instead, we make space for machines and automations, for a godless intelligence that grants us the perfection we have been so hungry for. That takes away the sleepless nights spent writing novels, the early mornings spent listening to our muse whisper to us the next line of the poem. The machine takes away the arduous moments when we are desert-dry of our creativity, when we do not know if we will ever be able to create again. It takes away the essential days and days of pondering, of dreaming, of brewing our ideas, waiting and waiting and waiting for that seed to germinate, for that song to begin, for that story to sprout, for the cracking, the breaking open, the blooming.
I see around me those that no longer create or write poems that come from their own bodies, words that have arisen from their bone-life. Within minutes, the machine can create what you need: songs or poems, books or essays, spoken word, answers to any question. It can provide reassurance or scorn, it can give you the words that your lover never was able to utter. It can give you your daily plan, what you should do, recipes, your own thoughts you didn’t know you had.
In my encounters of grief…
I meet more and more people that have surrendered their flawed creative potential in exchange of a dumb and dry perfect solution found in what the machine can give them. The machine gives us instantaneous answers to any question. Yet how did we live before with our questions inside of us, brewing and becoming? What happens if instead of reaching towards our prison-phones for answers, we leave the questions inside of us? We stay with the not-knowing. Maybe we will receive the answer, when we are ready, in a dream, or overheard in a strangers’ conversation.
A young man dreams of creating an app that will provide unlimited artificially created ‘therapists’ that people can go to instead of meeting their human, meat-bloody-and-boned therapist. He says it’s because there aren’t enough therapists, and too many people in depression struggling to get help. Again, I say, go to the root - the root of why the suffering and why the pain and work there, rather than upstream, creating robots that can tell us what we want to hear. Isn’t it maybe why there are so many struggling in the first place - because of this scarcity of human contact, of skin to skin, soul to soul connections that fuel and nurture and make us thrive?
And will this robotic thing ever replace the soul-filled miraculous human that is behind the therapist desk, that has been grown from the compost of his own losses and descents? Will this screen-white-bright-lit cumulation ever replace the breathing and yearning and grieving human?
I see more and more people writing poems that have been written for them by something that is not real, that does not come from the earth, from humus, from human. Something that has no humility, because only what has soul can be humble in reverence for the divinity and divine of life.
What comes from your insides, what you create from your viscera can never, ever be replaced by even the most immaculate creation coming from ‘a thing’ with no soul.
We are losing human, and within me there is a quiet revolution forming: that I refuse to surrender my imperfection, to chase ascension, to stop giving to the world what is within me, flawed as it is, but true, true to the very core of who I am.
I want to leave you with one thing…
As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, to carry a gift is to carry a responsibility.
And we all carry gifts, imprinted in us like the acorns that hold the oak. We have a responsibility to create - to really create. Not through the machine, not as the machine, but as your imperfectly beautiful miraculous human that you are.
I ask only one thing of you: that may you remember this next time your hand reaches for the phone looking for the machine to give you what you are looking for. Stop and stare at your hand, the space between each finger, the way your cuticles have grown too much, or your thumb is weirdly shaped, or the way the mole on your forearm sits proudly like an old grandmother. Look at your hand opened, at the lines on your palm that may or may not predict any truth of who you are, at the marks and calluses that brought here. These hands, these hands are here to give and shape your calling into the tangible, to create your dreams from the heart-seed to their clay-full moist incarnation as a bowl or a cup, to spell out your visions from soul to a paper that was once a tree, now full of lines and crossed words and convoluted meanings. These hands are yours and yours alone and who you are, and what you are here to give is not to be found or sought or made in what you are reaching, but in exactly what you are avoiding.
Bring yourself back to earth, to earthling and take responsibility for the gift you carry and the creations that you hold in you.
Go to the root,
always.