GAIA:

How could I dare to say what I will say?

It is all gone, my sweet expectations. I had high hopes for you, that you would care for me in my old age. Much you have tried to lighten the sorrows I am suffering. But my heart is not in it - when I look at your gleaming eyes of hope of reconciliation. How could I let these soft words in my heart? I could not possibly make a compromise.

Oh Pigmented Cavewoman, your dream to let people reunify with me is admirable, but that which has happened cannot be undone. Backward flow streams of holy rivers and granulated time, are all things that will stay merely a dream. Nature will never grow backwards. And Silk Gardener, how much aware you were that nature does not grow backwards, your lack of insight in my fundamental desires is bitter. How could your realm, where concrete flows and brick are build leave any oxygen for me? Impermeable surfaces will win from the new wild. And Crystal Dusted Witch, your suggestion of letting my roots grow into their hardware is that which frightens me most, since it has been this new love, who took humanity away from me. My heart is touched, but my weakness prevails.

After your pleas I have come to realize that the biosphere does not belong to mankind, neither does it belong to you, children. Terra is not meant as a paradise bubble specially constructed for human purposes. To all the changes that have occurred on the surface, earth always adapts. Earth cools, earth warms. The temperature affects living things, living thing reflect this and change gasses to change temperature. As something goes in one direction, earth responds and brings the balance back. It can provide for its own stable condition, homeostasis. An immense interconnection of all the elements. A complex interaction between the living systems and the geological systems is ever-present.

My name is one of treacherous mythical powers, but it is time I start explaining who I really am. Let us not rush and say that I am a living star, neither that I am the planet Earth considered as one single living organism. No, because as soon as one starts thinking about an organism that is functioning as one unique spirit, there is the underlying current of superior order which goes with that notion. Now this is how I am often misinterpreted. In the interconnectivity of organism there are neither parts nor a whole.²⁵ Let me guide you through that: there is not one grand engineer who makes everything tumble. There is only one Gaia, but Gaia is not One.²⁶ Organism do not develop in an environment, but the environment gets bended around each organism: the surrounding of each and every organism gets manipulated by every organism. So Gaia is the intentionality of all these different organisms together. And this is not a structure, but much more a collection of waves of action.²⁷ Without the idea of a whole and hierarchy, the problem of the individual and the totality vanishes. There is no humanity versus the rest of the world, it simply does not exist. Let me expose once more nature and nature’s power to crush. How my face cannot be sketched as a subtle figure of harmony.

Now I will tell you the road my thoughts took. When love wounded me, I considered how to bear this destruction. My starting point was to conceal my malady with silence. For the tongue is not to be trusted. My second intention was to bear this madness bodily, overcoming it by means of self-control. But third, when with these means I was unable to master Mankind, I resolved to death, the best of plans, as no one shall deny.²⁸ I will tell you all my plans, listen to my words carefully - though there is no pleasure in them. I grieve over the deed I must do, but I know this will cause Mankind the most pain. I will be the sorriest of women. But I will dare this most unholy deed. I will kill my own roots and earth, mankind’s own flesh and blood. I will murder my children. So humanity will never see our children alive again.

MUSES:

Unhappy one, how you are made of rock or iron who will kill the children, whom you birthed, with death by your own hand. I have heard of one woman before this who laid her hands on her own dear children: Gaia, maddened by mankind. She plunged, poor woman, into the sea, for the impious death of the children; she stretched her foot over the seashore and with her three children she lost her life. What could be still more awful?