A journey to remembering forward

Over the Moon by Rob Gonsalves

Take yourself on a journey.

Lie

Walk

Or Wonder.

Imagine (eyes closed or open)

yourself floating in space

looking down on this extraordinary planet

this ball of rock, of water, weather and bones

all this messy, complicated, delicate life,

all lives living and passed

alive in skin, fur, scale, bark and feather

every breath

breathing together.

Imagine all the moments you cherish most

imagine forward, all of those to come

remember the found, the unexpected,

what was ached for and

everything deeply given.

Remember the quiet moments.

All that you will long for

sculpted by years, tears and torn knees

all wishes tended and watered

all the unheard

all the unseen

all the unmade

all the beheld

all the touched

all the shared. 

Imagine all the wonders

you can manage to cram into your imagination

and now imagine more. 

Imagine this planet from the shared view of the stars, looking down.

“The way the planet seems to breathe, an animal unto itself… it's the perfection of this sphere that transcends all language. Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold, no, a need to protect this huge yet tiny earth, this thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness, an unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. 

Can humans not find peace with one another, with the earth? 

It’s not a fond wish but a fretful demand. Can we not stop tyrannising, destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing, one upon which all our lives depend? 

Yet they hear the news, and they’ve lived their lives, and their hope does not make them naive. They’re humans with a godly view, and that’s the blessing and also the curse….

When they look at the planet, it’s hard to see a place for the small and babbling pantomime of politics; it’s as though that pantomime is an insult to the stage on which it all happens, an assault on its gentleness or else too insignificant to be bothered with. 

The stories are kind of talking in tongues when compared to the single, clear, ringing note that seems to emanate from the hanging planet they now see each morning when they open their eyes. 

But then one day, something shifts, they look at the earth and they see the truth. 

Every swirling neon of red algal bloom in the polluted, warming, overfished Atlantic is crafted in large part by the hand of politics and human choices. Every retreating or disintegrating glacier, every mountain laid newly bare by snow that has never before melted, every scorched and blazing forest or bush, every burning oil spill, every vanishing mangrove forest, or the hundreds of acres of greenhouses which make the entire southern tip of Spain reflective in the sun. 

They don’t know how they could have missed it at first. The hand of politics has sculpted and shaped and left evidence of itself everywhere. The politics of growing and getting, a billion extrapolations of the urge for more, that’s what they begin to see when they look down…

The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything: the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies.

A planet contoured and landscaped by want.”

passage from 'Orbital' by Samantha Harvey

Remember again.

The wonder.

Imagine again.

The wonder.

What do you cherish most?

What are you most grateful for?

What will you miss and ache for? 

What forests, seas, butterflies, frog species, coral landscapes, communities and traditions do you grieve your great sadness for? 

Exert from Orbital by Samantha Harvey, BBC Radio 4