No Wall-No Fall

You may have heard of me, but almost certainly through a false account of my previous presence here on Earth. Now I feel the need, in this time in the life of this planet, to set the matter straight.

The danger of false narratives is that they can turn into false history, replacing true accounts of what actually happened and thereby preventing future generations from understanding the reality into which they have been born and in which they must live their lives.

It might not seem that a nursery rhyme can be the cause of deeply engrained falsehood nor for the consequent misunderstanding that it fuels. But I can see with my own eyes that this has occurred on the planet to which I have just returned after what you call many “centuries”.

Allow me to introduce myself and give an accurate account of my several visits to Earth.

The name, “Humpty Dumpty”, is close enough to my actual name, given that the human species does not have the voice box needed to capture the whistling, reverberating, multi-tonal utterances of my native tongue. So let Humpty Dumpty be the terrestrial name by which I am known.

However, I would never perch upon a stone wall and if I were to tumble down from one, I would not shatter on a cobblestone roadway beneath. As for needing the intervention of “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” (trying to put me “together again”), that ludicrous image has no better provenance than that, in your language, “men” rhymes with “again’.

Since my earlier presence on this planet appears to have been captured nowhere other than in one of your nursery rhymes, let me use that fact to reintroduce myself. As is sometimes the case with culturally-preserved memories, certain features of an experience are accurately recorded while other features have been recorded as the precise opposite of what happened. Fortunately, in the very exactitude of that involution, a truth can be indirectly captured.

In terms of the straight forward cultural record accurately preserved: it is true that to the human eye my physical appearance is somewhat like a large egg carried on two spindly appendages. But since I travel by levitation, those “legs” are not involved in my moving from place to place. And my so-called” egg-shaped torso” is that shape for a reason. It was the shape of my sister, who came to Planet Earth four billion years ago, and dashed herself to pieces in order to seed life on this world. For me, that shape of potential fecundity has led to eons devoid of purpose.

I visited Earth about ten thousand years ago in the hope that I could teach humans about their beginnings and help ignite the galactic purpose whose evolutionary juncture they had reached. Some individuals understood: that there is a wholeness conjoining all life in the cosmos; and that nothing is separate from anything else. I wanted this to be understood by humanity so that Gaia could become fully conscious of the hope for which she had sacrificed herself on the rocky promontories of a small world on the outskirts of the great coherence into which she, like all beings, had been born.

But my message was only understood by a few. It has been preserved in images of a living planet, Gaia, that is a unitary being. But in the daily life of most of the human species, the image of a unitary whole has been replaced by the story that there are only the shattered fragments of what is now a warehouse of dwindling resources available for human beings to exploit.

In this profound misunderstanding, it is not just Gaia whose living being is treated as a carcass available to be consumed for as long as it lasts. The human spirit, destined to be Gaia’s consciousness in the cosmos, is also dying day by day.

I know how that feels. I won’t darken the lingering of hope by saying where I have been during the past four billion years. I’ll just say that to see the human race–the potential flowering of my sister’s longed for cosmic renewal, for which she gave up her own earned enlightenment when she shattered on the surface of a barren world—now racing towards extinction, breaks my heart anew.