dear aliens-unseen-and/or-beyondhumans-and-spirits/gods/deities-and-other-benevolent-entities-aware-of-this-planet,

it’s probably selfish to ask for your help. you may only know my planet from its space garbage or psychic toxicity. nonetheless, today would be a good day for some advice or intervention.

this morning i witnessed a white man screaming at a black man in detroit. i was preparing to give a brief talk, so i finished it with Octavia’s words, “kindness eases change”…how did she know this? and how do we practice this with those who are not practicing?

i was born in the US and in my lifetime it has not much improved as an experiment in coexistence. mostly it’s been this same type of black and white interaction, with different clothing on. there’s a constant turning away from each other, competing against each other, harming each other for complex reasons and then not growing beyond the harm.

our planet is gorgeous and fecund, but my species is swallowing everything with greed based consumption practices and crowding the biodiversity out of existence. and then we try and come together, sometimes the pressures of the world push us down until we explode.

i am thinking a lot about what kind of freedom is available for sentient beings, and, in a separate but connected part of me, wondering if sapience always has to move us away from freedom because something about being able to think leads to control behaviors. almost everyone i hear talking about freedom is simultaneously proposing an alternative system of control. perhaps we have strayed too far from freedom in our evolution, and it will take many generations to remember how to be wild.

how long is long enough? how long is too long? are we on time?

i’m sending this message to you through many minds, because my comrades and i do not have access to the space range communication devices on our planet. or confirmation of most things we would need to know to send this message to you, such as your existence. still, i write this, and others will read it and it will become a small part of collective consciousness. and i suspect that any species more evolved than us will have the capacity to know what the collective consciousness knows.

how do we get through this? how do we keep going when it’s really very hard and overwhelming?

there are many ways to look at history, one way is as a scroll of suffering. i wouldn’t want to live at a time before this, even though it’s all going to shit right now. perhaps it is my limited imagination, or my ego, which thinks i am more free than my ancestors were, more connected.

i am tired of the story of suffering, of being defined and sorted and gathered and deepened by shared suffering.

i am many kinds of people, and i want us all to get a cosmic, psychic, material break. i think we need a breath in between all the cancer and breakdowns and trauma and bad leadership and kidnapped children and racism and hatred.

i will speak for me, i need a break.

so how do we generate boundaries that don’t become borders? how do find the balance between the self and the collective – how do we learn how full our cups should be in order to have enough to share without getting empty, without constant spilling?

all i’m really saying is we’re tired, i’m tired and i often feel like that’s not allowed. but it’s for the whole species, i’m tired like a velociraptor.

how do we be tired and stagger ourselves and get humble and make our small offers valiantly and with joy? how do we grieve without losing sight of life?

how do we become a species worth keeping?

all answers welcome…i’m sure you aliens-unseen-and/or-beyondhumans-and-spirits/gods/deities-and-other-benevolent-entities-aware-of-this-planet will channel it back through human mouths and fingers and i am open to it, i need it.

thanks,
amb