The Parliament of Ferns, Part 1
Speaking into the Future with Pua'aehuehu
Photo by Nikita Tikhomirov on Unsplash
Aloha Dear Readers,
This week I’m sharing a speculative piece I wrote on considering what I would put on an ark to survive the next cataclysms to wipe out on Earth. Of course, that future is still to be decided. Although it appears that we are not only on the way to destroying human civilization once again through our own actions, but also our home planet, we don’t know. “Don’t pray for the Earth,” I recall medicine man Miguel Rivera saying once in a sweat lodge. “The Earth will take care of herself.”
Our prayers must be for ourselves and our human kin. Those prayers could be to heal ancestral trauma, to heal our blood and bones so that we can integrate our ancestors’ losses and let them be at peace and move on to the next world. We live on a planet haunted by the unacknowledged and mostly unmourned genocides. Many of us know of more recent genocides due to European colonization of the American content, but are unaware of the trauma remembered in the bones of all humanity going back to previous cataclysms. That fear and the subsequent survival at all costs programming lives in all modern humans, even white people who are responsible for most of the more recent genocides. At this point on Earth, war is the universal culture. If the organic human is to survive into the future these primal losses at the source of civilization must be felt and mourned.
This little essay is my contribution to awakening, an invitation to speculate about what is worth saving from the human culture I’ve been a part of. I’m dividing it into three parts to give you time to digest each segment and hopefully create a sense of excitement about next week’s installment. A reader recently told me how excited she is to open my letter each week. Comments like that mean so much to me. After years of trying to make it in the publishing world, I’ve finally acknowledged that the world I wanted to be part of has been swallowed by corporate monsters. I could still try to get in, but I if I did I would end up being swallowed, too. Better to create my own world with you as participants, not just as audience. So I thank you for reading and appreciate comments and feedback. Let’s build this world together!
The Parliament of Ferns, Part 1
Aloha Future Beings,
If these words have reached you that means they survived the cataclysms that destroyed my civilization, maybe even our planet itself. Earth.
If Earth no longer exists I don’t know how you are reading my words, but I have faith in them the way I have faith in water who came to Earth from an unknown source, and release them into the mysterious flow.
If you can read, whoever you are-whatever-know my words are spores, capable of creating organic life without sexual fusion, for the organic was glorious in all its manifestations. You could be life’s next avatar. Let us not be lost to amnesia.
Maybe you don’t need sex to reproduce. Maybe you don’t need solid ground. If so, I’m sorry. They were two great pleasures of human existence that sometimes brought us closer to the being we called God, though by the time I lived many thought sex and Earth were dirty, minds tainted by the culture of control that feared their wildness.
We took water for granted until it dried up, until it flooded the cities where we sacrificed ourselves to the machines that destroyed us.
The last time civilization was destroyed by a flood, a man named Noah built an ark and brought aboard two of every creature. This time Noah’s ark won’t be enough. As humans merge with machines, organic sex, the two by two kind, is dropping off, along with fertility rates. People are more interested in the virtual than actual bodies. That is why spores are needed and not seeds, and why, when I was asked to place something worth saving on this new ark in the hopes something good from our civilization would survive so future beings could recreate culture, I chose pua’aehuehu, Mū Hawaiian fern medicine.
I am not Hawaiian, though my mentor Ke’oni says since Mū was the original Earth civilization, at one point we were all Mū. I don’t claim this as an authority to appropriate a culture, rather to say I claim my place as a child of Earth. I don’t have any special powers besides to pay attention and to grieve. That’s one of the ways we failed-not feeling our losses as the waters rose and the world burned. The birds and insects died by the billions and most of us didn’t notice. There was so much loss we numbed ourselves to go on. We had these things called rent and bills that controlled us. Earth, bought and sold. Fire trapped in engines and bombs. In my time water was commodified and people forgot they used to drink it free from streams and wells. I’m sure we’ll be paying for air soon.
I’m at my desk writing this on Hawai’i. The Big Island many called it. The gods are still alive here. They hear our prayers and offerings, and everyone has a story about how Pele upended their life to teach them a lesson. Just four years ago she destroyed 800 homes a mile away from me. Ferns are already unfurling on the black lava.
In front of my desk an avocado tree is fruiting. I am keeping an eye on the vanilla vine snaking around its branches because if it flowers we plan to hand-pollinate. There are still bees here in Puna, but they aren’t the right kind. Vanilla is also a colonizer. I don’t say this to absolve myself by admission, but to acknowledge that I chose to be here in this time and I will do my best to flower where I’ve planted. It’s too late in the game for blame.
Debussy wafts through my earbuds into my cochlea, spiraling like shells inside my head.
I wonder if music exists in the future? Maybe there is only music, sound waves spiraling out from the invisible to build shells around themselves like chambered nautili. Mynah birds squawk and bang on my tin roof as I tap black keys that translate thoughts into silent shapes on a screen. You’d never know they were born from the warm interior of a human body, air in concert with bones, organs and body fluids carving out canyons.
I hope you have water on your planet. I hope you can sing in the rain and pull a bucket up from a deep well; cup your hands where a spring pours out, I hope you know thirst so you can quench it; meander like a river, flood an arroyo, soak in a thermal pool heated by a goddess. And rainbows-how water paints the sky with the sun’s hidden colors.
I can’t believe how many rainbows I’ve passed without bowing. I still think they’re beautiful, but the awe is mostly gone. That is why I’m writing-to keep feeling alive for as long as I can. My message may not be understood in my lifetime. I may not even understand it. But I did my part. Not like a good soldier, like a lover on her back in a clearing looking up as light entered, receiving spores on her upturned palms.
I will let the ferns speak now.
Thanks for reading Part 1 and tune in next week for Part 2. If you have not yet become a subscriber please sign up to make sure you get Part 2 directly in your inbox instead of having to rely on social media. As always, if you appreciate this work please consider a paid subscription and please feel free to share this article.
Kō aloha la ea,
Concentrate on love by way of the light,
Jen