Earth Connection

The idea of our vegetable seeds and therefore our vegetables being replaced by genetically modified breeds does not leave me with a good feeling. Third world farmers in India who have already experienced growing genetically modified cotton (patented by Monsanto corp) ended up cripplingly in debt to Monsanto (paying for the pesticides they manufactured to save the weakening crop from its natural predator that rapidly adapted to the genetically modified variety) and unable to make ends meet saw many committing suicide. Why did these farmers have to surrender the natural right of storing your own seeds, growing your own plants from your seed, and generally being in control of how they grew and maintained the health of their plants to some corporation those only interest was really in milking money out of these vulnerable third-world farmers, as well as a far more sinister motive of spreading corporate ownership of land, crops and seed over the world. This scenario not leave me with a good feeling, in fact that leaves me feeling rather sick.
The thought of these anonymous-faced corporate titans lurking in the shadows of every nations economic-political house, desiring all the same goal of consuming mankinds last freedom of growing his own food, and owning his own land to grow it on without having to enter into bondage to centralised powers that want to squeeze every ounce of his living into their sweaty hands. Then there is the reality the corporations manufacturing genetically modified 'technofixes', pesticides, fertilizers, etc. are pushing for, that is one of a world subjugated to base materialism: a techno dystopia where our food, clothing, medicine, is all generated out of a vast sterile laboratory of scientists in league with death. Consider as well that if we lose the natural gift to grow our own food then we are losing our deeper connection with the Earth, and if we lose that folks then ultimately what have we got any more?
Can you say man knows of freedom if he cannot feel the soil between his fingers and toes? Can you man say knows of a higher reality beyond himself where ideals of love exist if he cannot plant a seed in the ground and see it grow? Can you say man even can know himself if he cannot have his actions and deeds shown to him by what he does to the earth he cultivates?
The resistance to the corporations and their imposed techno-solutions of genetically modified food/synthesised pesticides and fertilizers encompasses manifold issues:
one of the ordinary man losing the freedom he is born with to grow his own food and to choose how he grows it.
two of the ordinary man losing the freedom he is born with to live on the land to corporate possession, bureaucratic centralisation and commercialisation.
three of the ordinary man losing his connection to the living earth.

Today there are 'pop-up gardens' happening over the country to raise awareness and protest against the 'New Alliance on Food Security and Nutrition' which is an initiative between corporations and governments to reduce world hunger, focussing in particular on Africa. How they want to reduce world hunger is of course not through some unconditional boon, but just a calculated manoeuvre to inject Africa with GM seeds and crops, and get the farmers hooked to the big corporate patents until they either commit suicide or decide poverty was better after all than corporate servitude. The rich land as well in Africa is under the cycloptic eye of eager land grabbers and the corporations will help further the advance of land loss to ordinary people, putting it into the grasp of greedy men.
All of this paints a grim picture, but it allows us who are aware to what is going on behind the veil of false promises and awake to the Earth to really clarify what kind of world we want to create for the generations to come.
We don't agree with the motives of the corporations, who seem to be perpetuating a deeply divisive model of society from the past; one of a strata of people who gain unfairly from the pain of all those working beneath them in conditions of material subjugation (and now nutritional subjugation if we are forced to eat GM food from GM seeds). Now there is science and technology involved in this division making between rich and poor, and the division is driving in deeper like a knife to try to sever us from our Earth connection. Yet the Earth needs our connection now more than ever, as we equally need to be connected with our own body's and their health more than ever in history.
The Earth i'm sure she feels in this age of scientific-faith-in-the-machine, the children being educated to perceive and think about the world in a thought-mode which abstracts them from the living Earth to a conceptual Earth. This is where the severance of our connection with the Earth begins in how we taught to perceive her. This mindset is ingrained in us that permeates the world today. it is not a wrong mindset, but rather what is wrong we are only educated to see the world this way. We are seeing the world not as an embodied experience of the senses, but as something in our heads that we are taught ideas about from a book. Genetically modified crops and the rest of the laboratory engineered arsenal represents the manifestation of this disembodied, conceptualised, and compartmentalised mindset at a level that treads disturbingly into what I would call institutionalised hubris (or arrogance, though hubris as the Ancient Greeks talked of was man overstepping his own natural boundaries or the limits of his own power on Earth, therefore inviting harsh retribution from the gods) this hubris is now meddling with the Earth on a level we don't properly understand, a microscopic level with a mindset that fundamentally treats life as dead objects. I am starting to imagine now what is going on now in the world with genetic engineering, involving scientists who are more susceptible to corporate corruption, is the beginning of a world disaster the likes we never have seen before on Earth. The nuclear warheads made in World War two, were heralds of a new age. Mankind is experiencing new forces of a highly intellectualised mind transforming rapidly the material world he see's before his own eyes. But this intellectualism must learn its limits if humanity is not to become extinct. It's other side of the intuitive-feeling mind is another gift we have to deeply reengage with, to balance the materialising force of the intellect-conceptual mind. The intuitive-feeling mind can show us how to receive, and be receptive now to the Earth, instead of imposing and controlling Earth under concepts and thought-forms we have been shaping the world with.
Now is the time just to feel the Earth, and to let go of this idea of controlling her and trapping her energy in the webs of concepts that serve to disconnect not to connect.
Let us let go of everything we have tried to pressure life into, and let the Earth be free.
The Earth calls us to being, as we call her being to learn again what it is to be human.

This poem I wrote I feel is meant for humans as well as the Earth:

         Being who I am

 Today,

   I’m not going to follow you,

   I’m not going to fit in your box,

this is the beginning

of being who I am;

I’m going to be a flower, a thunderstorm, a tree

I’m going to unfold my being like a cake

being made.

 

This is the beginning

of being;

who I am is not accepting chains as part of

my identity,

who I am is letting myself,

to roam off the path,

rambling over the wall,

to reach further everyday beyond my limits,

beyond self-judgement,

far beyond opinion and lies fabricated to keep me tied

down to something I don’t want.

 

Being who I am,

is a journey,

not focussed on destination,

just being here,

expanding with song, stories; dreams and dances with myself.

 

Being is not performing

to the status quo,

but discovering what

you have you can show;

I’m not here on Earth,

to be somebody else’s project,

or a pawn in the system:

here I am to be who I am.

 

Roaring Poet 2013