I want to express my gratitude. For this birth, this world… this life. For the people who were kind and intelligent, and for the people who taught me by being ignorant, cruel, and greedy. I needed to see examples of generosity to understand my own heart, and I needed to experience examples of stupidity to understand its origins and my own vulnerabilities.

I needed to be frightened, alone, vulnerable, forgotten. And I wanted to be adored, celebrated, appreciated and loved. So I want to express my gratitude. For everything. For the incredible privilege I have enjoyed in this lifetime, and for all that threatened, opposed, ignored or abused me. I am unhappy about the relationship of our species and collectives to the living world, because it is not only misguided… it is lethal.

But perhaps I needed to experience that, as well. To know that I oppose it, and how to speak meaningfully to others about why, and what we might be able to do instead. I want to say thank you to all who were kind to me, but also to those who were not… because both of them were my teachers. Perhaps most of all I am grateful to the plants, animals and living places… because they were always true, and never pretended to be other than they actually were.

Modern human culture is exceptionally bizarre, and though I understand many of its origins to some extent, its activities are not merely unsustainable — they are insane. It’s hard for me to be grateful about that, except that, again, witnessing it allowed me the opportunity to understand aspects of my own being, concern and thought that I feel fairly sure would have evaded my awareness in any culture whose behavior was relatively intelligent, sustainable, and evinced integrity in its relationships with language, knowledge and nature.