What Earth was Like | Catherine Viel

By Catherine Viel, March 6, 2023

(Golden Age of Gaia)

March 5, 2023

The intriguing comfort of an imagined past
is entered through objects
the same way we continue the present
but without nostalgia
~Allan Peterson, The Appeal of Antiques



It’s Sunday morning, and a sudden craving landed on me, fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. I want to go to a diner and have country-fried steak, eggs over easy, crisp hashbrowns so greasy they leave a puddle on the plate. Lightly toasted white bread slathered with butter. Coffee strong enough to stand a spoon in.

Bemused, I shake off that image and tune back into sacred choral music on KUSC. My cat is healing himself in the sun, purring so hard his whole body shakes. I’ve seen him relax incrementally over the last 45 minutes, face turned to the light, eyes tightly closed.

As I watch, he slants to the side and nestles into a crescent of contentment. His head sinks onto on his paws and his purring calms down, no longer the slightly frantic healing purr.

Where do country-fried steak and eggs and bitter-strong coffee fit into this peaceful Sunday scenario?

*****



I’m swamped with nostalgia during these quiet mornings. Nostalgia for what was, a memory of my grandfather eating at the diner in Stanton, Nebraska, two meals a day for years after grandma died and he moved to town from the farm.

There doesn’t seem to be any place in our vaunted 5D future for greasy spoon diners and old men hooking fedoras on the hat rack, settling at the counter, greeting the waitress with a nod and not bothering to order because she already knows what he wants.

That particular world is already long gone. What is it about that image, not even from my own life, that exerts such a strong pull? How is that imprinted in my cells? More importantly, is there anything I’m supposed to do about it?

It’s not charged with any strong negative emotion. It doesn’t need to be “released.” Why am I suddenly uneasy about entertaining nostalgia? Is it wrong to memorialize the past as if it matters, as if it means something important?

*****



I wonder if, assuming it’s true that other beings are intensely interested in our planet, they will ever study what earth was like.

The memories of humans are impossible to trust. We can’t help coloring events with our emotions and inescapable self-centered viewpoint. There’s no such thing as a truly impartial human witness.

Perhaps the history of our Earth resides communally in the memories of us all. The hardscrabble existence of less developed areas and primitive times juxtaposed with extreme modernity, skyscrapers and unimaginable luxury.

Are we supposed to wipe out our past because it’s said that most of what we’ve been taught is a lie? History is fabricated by the winners, and up until now, those winners have been the elite controllers of the globe.

I have an unshakable internal sense that these words matter, that all the stories ever told matter, that our known history, even if wholly or partially false, still matters.

It’s the history of each of us, the history that we traverse and can record moment by moment as we travel through our lives, that expresses truth. Woven together, your truths, my truths, all our truths, create a fabric of what life on Earth is and has been throughout human existence.

*****



I like to think that somewhere, there’s a repository where words like these are automatically slotted into place, timestamped and identified as coming from me, alongside countless other stories from billions of humans and the moments of our times.

Some might say, well, that’s the Akashic record. And no doubt that is so. But I hope that there’s an imponderably enormous library where all of our stories and truths are collected, guarded against tampering so the experience of each moment will always ring true.

And whenever I might want to revisit that diner in mid-twentieth-century Stanton, Nebraska, I have only to put my finger upon that particular Dewey decimal point of time, and recollection can be mine.