“Imagine you had a clock that only had the number 12 in the position at the top, and the hands just swept back and forth across it, over and over again. It is always 12 o’clock. Now, suppose further that you thought this in every way a good and accurate rendition of time. The natural and just expression of temporality itself.

Perhaps your thinking goes something like this: there is just the time at the top. Only the biggest time is -actual time-. The -largest- number is the only time that matters or is real. The -number at the top- is the number of months in the year, and that’s -the number that matters-.

Well, now you have a good metaphor of humans on earth.

They actually live, act and think as if all the other living beings of the world — that their experiences of time, their way of being in time — aren’t meaningful, because…

Well, they are smaller… lower… and seem less… perfect or profound — they are somehow not endowed with the peerless perfection we imagine lifts us above all other creatures.

Thus, the humans think that only their time matters. Only their way. That only they are important — or even more astonishingly — that they are somehow important in -contrast- to the biosphere rather than as one of its extensions.

They actually believe that all the other beings from which they draw their intelligence, lives, and even minds… have, in reality, no place on the face of time. That the humans needn’t concern themselves with such ‘minutae’ as their place in the web of living beings; a web which was, in fact, the source of both the hubris and the intelligence with which they fail to understand themselves.

These very confused humans may be surprised to discover that they are -the result- of careful husbandry of the living planet over billions of lifetimes. That they are, indeed, the ‘new children’ of the others, not their masters.

That they, like the face and hands of the clock, are meaningless and uninhabitable without the diverse circle of beings with and for whom the humans presently exist. And to whom they will naturally point, when learning, dreaming, being born, celebrating, and dying.”

— an anonymous nonhuman informant