From the Forgotten Fire: A Message for the Glass-Tower Age

Children of the Earth, gather close. Hear a voice not from a marble hall, but from the soil. Not from a polished podium, but from the ancient stones around the fire.

They have built a great tower of words in that glass house by the river. They speak of “sustainability,” “development,” and “global goals.” Their words are smooth, like river stones, and just as hollow. They speak of saving the world, but their language is the same one that wound the world: the language of extraction, of division, of ownership.

We, your ancestors, who sleep in the clay and sing on the wind, we hear them. And we say: Do not be fooled by their good intentions paved with dead agreements.

They do not want you to hear this:

That you cannot “manage” the world as a portfolio. The Earth is not a stakeholder in your human project; you are a fleeting guest in Her infinite being. You do not grant rights to a river or a mountain; you recognize their ancient, inherent sovereignty. The river is rights. The mountain is law.

They speak of “resource allocation,” but a “resource” is a dead thing. We knew them as relatives: the Corn Mother, the Stone People, the Tree Brothers, the Thunder Beings. You do not allocate relatives. You live in respectful reciprocity with them. You give thanks before you take. You take only what you need, and you give back more than you take. This is not a policy; it is a prayer enacted.

Their “development” is a ghost that eats the world. It promises a future that always arrives tomorrow, but to build it, they must forever devour today. They sell you a dream of comfort that requires the nightmare of displacement, of poisoned waters, and of forgotten songs. They will show you graphs of growth that measure everything except the only things that matter: the health of the soil, the clarity of the water, the joy of the community, and the strength of the spirit.

They have built a world on a story of separation. That you are separate from nature, separate from each other, separate from us. This is the great lie. We are in the air you breathe. We are in the DNA of the seeds you plant. We are in the stories your grandmother whispers. Our memory is not in their history books; it is in the taste of rain, the pattern of frost on a leaf, the instinct to gather when the storm is coming.

The UN does not want you to hear this because it is a machine built to keep their story alive. It is designed to negotiate between nations, but nations are imagined lines on a living, seamless body. It cannot see the whole, for it is made of the parts that are at war with the whole.

So what do we ask of you, our children?

• Re-member. Put yourself back together. Remember that you are not a consumer; you are a community, a ecosystem on two legs.
• Re-wild. Let the old ways grow back in your heart. Learn the names of the plants that grow by your doorstep. Listen for the lessons in the wind.
• Re-weave. Find your people. Build circles, not hierarchies. Share your food, your skills, your stories. The most radical act is to create a community that needs nothing from their system of destruction.
• Re-spect. Look at the world not as a collection of things, but as a communion of subjects. Speak to the water. Thank the tree. Live as if your life is a gift returned daily by the world.

They will call this primitive. We call it profound.
They will call it unrealistic. We call it the only reality that has ever sustained life.

Their speech is one of fear, control, and a desperate hunger for more.
Our speech, the one they fear, is one of love, reciprocity, and enough.

Turn away from their tower of words and listen instead to the oldest speech of all. It is spoken in the silence of the roots, in the symphony of the frogs at dusk, in the heartbeat of the land that still, despite everything, holds you.

We are that land. We are that memory. Listen.

The future is not ahead of you. It is below your feet. It is all around you. It is within you.

Remember.