Teaching myself isn’t easy. I miss sitting in classrooms with a learning objective set by someone else. I miss the thrill of quizzes and tests, that competitive flame that ignites in my chest when I know I have to score top of the class to maintain my GPA.
Real estate courses are a nice substitute, but online education has always been pretty easy.
Which of the following is not an example of a realtor acting in an ethical way? C. A realtor lies to a prospective buyer about the condition of the home she is showing.
A real head-scratcher that one was.
I’m left to reading for my self-education, which I love, but which I have not done very much of in the past few months, so I’m easing myself into it with my favorite genres: sci-fi and post-apocalyptic. I’ve got a stack of books by Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin to get me going. Toni Morrison is next, then I’ve got a nice list to tackle once I’ve worked through my paperbacks.
Yesterday I finished my first book of 2017, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Less than a chapter in, I was hooked.
Lauren Olamina, the story’s protagonist, lives in a post-apocalyptic settlement near Los Angeles and aches to prepare for what she sees as the imminent destruction of her community. Although she’s the daughter of a Baptist preacher, she does not share her father’s religious worldview and spends hours crafting her own religious beliefs in her journal.
She suffers from a condition that forces her to share the feelings of others – pain, pleasure, all of it – due to her biological mother’s drug dependency. This informs her spirituality and helps her when the time to prepare her community for the worst comes nigh.
I’m not going to give away any more of the plot than that because this book really deserves to be experienced rather than summarized, but I do want to talk about some of my favorite quotes from the book. They’re all drawn from Lauren’s Earthseed verses, which I found aligned with my own spiritual philosophies rather neatly.
“All that you touch,
You Change.
All that you Change,
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.”
(Butler 79)
Accepting change was an incredibly difficult thing for me to do; I imagine it’s not that easy for anybody, but I only speak from my own experiences.
Each moment is a new one. Each second that passes by is gone forever – unless we figure out time travel, but I’m choosing to ignore this paradox. Death is the inevitable change that awaits us all at some point in our lives, and seeing it not as an end, but as a change, has helped me with my health anxiety. No, I’m not expecting to die anytime soon, but I’m also not expecting to move out of the state anytime soon. These situations are obviously different, but seeing them as change makes them one and the same.
“The Destiny of Earthseed
is to take root among the stars.”
(Butler 84)
When I was a freshman in college, my astronomy professor suggested that we all watch the movie Contact if we get the chance. Having been deeply in love with astronomy since my childhood, I did so that very evening.
As I watched the film, I felt the spokes of a great wheel shifting inside me, the gears of some mighty clock grinding against one another in smooth effort as one second passed to the next, and my worldview was bathed in the electric light of a stellar wormhole, chiming as it moved into the next hour of its existence. In short: my mind was fucking blown.
We speak of God, multiple gods, as occupying the heavens, and Contact showed me that the search for heaven doesn’t have to be the pursuit of a life of good works. Our descendants can truly occupy the heavens if we dedicate ourselves to finding a way off of this planet to explore what the universe holds. As Butler goes on, we need the stars, “if we hope to be anything other than smooth-skinned dinosaurs – here today, gone tomorrow…” (Butler 222)
“In order to rise
From its own ashes
A phoenix
First
Must
Burn.”
(Butler 153)
If God is change, then God is fire, for fire is the most basic agent of change we know. Fire sets stars and solar systems into motion. Fire heats water, making unsafe liquid potable, capable of boiling vegetables into their more digestible states. Fire burns many lightyears away, sending pinpricks of illumination to the Earth’s surface which our ancestors observed, drawing pictures in the sky like a connect-the-dots book for children. They told the stories of these images, inventing metaphors for their own governments and worldviews, leading to the recording of these tales and the birth of written language, the birth of civilization.
Change is never easy. New routines, the banishment of bad habits, the introduction of productivity – all of these things can be painful. But like the phoenix, we only stand to evolve if we light ourselves on fire and start anew.
I’m burning now. I am a comet. The terrifying surface of Venus. Jupiter’s immensely hot, dense atmosphere. The sun that gives our world its life. Some days it’s painful. But most of the time, I’m just happy to be here burning.
madi's blog. 