Dear Amazonia

Dear Amazonia,

I apologise on behalf of humanity. Unlike your mother, nature, who acts in response to natural rhythms, we humans have replaced cycles with unnatural greed that ironically threatens our own long-term survival more than it does your own.

We have replaced give and take, with only take, and we have confused destruction with progress. The needs of the children from our seventh-generation have been ignored by those who think only about short-term gains, and the need for short-sighted growth.

Our indigenous guardians remember what you have shown them, and they are fighting on your behalf. But their numbers are tiny, compared with those who have forgotten.

Show us how to help more people to remember.

Bring us back to ourselves enough that we understand that we are part of you and that you are the best part of us.

Amazonia you are the lungs of our world. And what spectacular lungs you are. You have evolved with grace for the past 55 million years and hold in the treasure trove of your habitat, magical life forms that we are destroying before we have had the time to discover, let alone understand.

And that is what hurts the most, the ignorance and wilful greed that is driving us forward and seems to be unstoppable.

We have simply elected the wrong people, but implicit in this is our lack of humility and understanding. We live and breathe and have our being only because of the thin layer of topsoil beneath our feet, and the hospitality of our great mother.

We do not deserve the mantle of leadership we have given ourselves, and we need to find improved representation. Even better we need to stand up, each and every one of us and speak out on behalf of the mother beneath our feet.

The time for privileged reticence is gone. We need to dig deep. We need to look at our allergy to earnestness because at this time earnest passion and true community is all that can save us.

Despite it all, I believe in humanity. I believe we are being held hostage by the worst of us, by the 1% that are delusional, that have been denied access to their own hearts, that are so damaged they cannot see the harm they are doing to their very own mother.

Please, Amazonia show us the way.

Help us to use our lives properly so that we are able to look our grandchildren in the eyes without guilt.

This is not a dress rehearsal. We are heading towards the sixth extinction where humanity will be a casualty of a planet that can no longer support the very specific needs of human life.

And we have brought it on ourselves.

Will our mother breathe a sigh of relief when she has finally been able to shrug us off?

Perhaps….

But I believe we are better than this.

We have love, we have compassion, we have connections, we have community. We can prove ourselves worthy of our great mother.

We can win back the trust she once had in us.

And to do this we must look to the indigenous guardians on our planet who have not forgotten what so many of us have.

We need their sacred knowledge and the rituals that have evolved since our earliest days to keep us in balance, to keep us honest, to keep us close to the mother that provides so unconditionally for our every need.

Can we empower each other to stand and speak on behalf of our planet, on behalf of our mother, on behalf of the one who continues to give her all so that we might have a life?

Amazonia we are sorry.

We have much work to do.