“How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when it is so clearly Ocean.” – Arthur C. Clarke
I read this quote the other day and it struck me as obvious, true and profound – not necessarily in that order.
The people who named our world were land-dwellers, with a completely one-sided perspective. They lived on the land – the earth – so the planet must certainly be called that.
I will give them a pass. They didn’t have access to Google Maps or satellite imagery. Heck, some of them thought the world was flat. How could they possibly know it was 70 percent water?
But that got me to thinking…
What else am I – are we – missing?
Elephants are known to mourn their own dead. How can we keep them in the category of wild animals, when they clearly have memories and emotions that we don’t quite yet understand?
Crows have demonstrated the ability to recognize human faces, and their offspring and grand-offspring will react positively to a human who was well-know to a predecessor. What sort of communicative abilities are required for passing down experiences with humans to future generations? It certainly sounds like something we thought was above and beyond the pay scale of a crow.
Trees communicate with each other through underground networks. Through these connections they share precious resources such as carbon, water, nitrogen and minerals. Older trees share extra sugars and nutrients with newer saplings or stressed trees to help them survive and flourish.
Maybe the most astounding of all, when trees are threatened, they can send signals through their roots to alert nearby trees of the oncoming danger. These neighbors then react by releasing protective defenses such as bitter tannins.
Meanwhile, I’ve always looked at them as trees. Sedentary. Inactive. Non-reactive. Steadfast, but living at the mercy of their environment. Completely incapable of feeling emotions. But is any of that true?
Humans misjudge things in our environment all the time – elephants, crows, trees, the very planet we live on. But perhaps our most egregious judgement comes against one another. We look at other human beings and believe we understand them.
Most of the time, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
We pass someone in the grocery store or on a street corner and immediately see them as an obstacle to our own forward movement. “Get out of my way.” We see them as flesh and bone, posing an impediment to our progress. We label them a hindrance or an annoyance or probably both.
In that, we are missing the Ocean for the Earth.
We see a physical body – but in reality we are much like Mother Earth – 70 percent water and 30 percent clay. Isn’t that amazing and profound?
We look at other people and see the clay – the physicality that might get in our way when in pursuit of a jar of peanut butter in aisle 11.
But we don’t necessarily take into consideration the water. The substance that dominates each of our physical beings. It is where our hopes, our dreams and our pursuit of love and peace churn beneath the surface. The undercurrent. It is the truest sense of each of us. The beauty that lies within, if only we’d remember and see: We are all so much more Ocean than Earth.
— Jill Pertler’s column Slices of Life appears occasionally in the Times. She can be reached at slicescolumn@gmail.com.
