A Human is Not Just a Human

On April 10th, I blogged the following: "If humanity has difficulty comprehending itself as a part of Gaia, it is as though we were nomads on a desert, though a curious tribe who lost track of where we came from. Perennially wandering back and forth across sand dunes, searching for an identity in a form that may no longer exist. When you look for something and you can’t see it, it might not be because it doesn’t exist. Even more, it might not be because you don’t know what you are looking for.

It might be because we don’t yet know how to look."


This thought has haunted me ever since. I was recently reminded that humans have cultivated a humancentric perception over a hundred-thousand years. Yes, indeed we have, and over the past several thousand years cultivated this humancentric perception even more deeply as we have been able to exclude ourselves – at least in our perception – from nature. This, despite that it is in perception only, for without nature we would die immediately. Yet, this perception is that from which our identity in this moment is deeply informed.

Lost like nomads on a desert, we have forgotten the tribe from which we came. In distancing ourselves from nature, we have walked away from our ancestral heritage. It was even a conscious abandonment, done with pride. We preened our identity as above nature, above the plants and animals, and even a special species in the light of the divine, which we created as well. The more we distanced, the more pure we felt we were. Interesting, yet unsurprising how this reach for purity has laid waste and fouled an Earth that hitherto our efforts, been healthy and clean.

How we identify ourselves, such as Lakota, or German, or banker or soccer player, are all meager attributes, or curiosities of a particular existence, and hardly an identity. Who one is, the fullness of identity has been lost in noting the particulars of the moment, something for which humanity is almost too-well-suited.

So who are we? What is this identity that I challenge as more than the particulars of occupation, culture, nationality or even race? Who is this being that wanders within the body of Gaia, stuffed with self-importance, estranging itself from its homeland, leaving devastation in its wake? The difficulty in answering this is because we don’t yet know how to look. We have practiced the self-other posture for too long not for it to have become part of unquestioned reality, a reality that provides the basis upon which an identity is constructed. An identity of human nature.

It is time humanity began to challenge this self-other dichotomy. Humans are simply Gaia, reflecting back upon herself. Nothing special, for so are tadpoles and meadowlarks. Yet we humans, we like to think, have the ability to ponder more deeply (we believe), a creative brilliance that has been used to inflict as much ill as it has ever been used to bestow good. This brilliance, this edge in cognitive ability beyond the same abilities in other species, has been our weakness as much as our strength. It is the human virtue taken to excess, utilized for unwise ends, that has been snaring us into what may become our ultimate tragedy.

If we can take this recognition that we are more than simply human, and begin to own - as part of our self - this entire earth amidst which we are but a part, we may begin to finally see… a tree is not just a tree, a frog is not just a frog, and a human is not just a human. Our body does not end at our skin, but possibly seven miles into the sky where the uppermost reaches of our atmosphere cease to be. Our identity does not end at our nationality, our name, our culture, or even at our species.

We are nature herself, a part of Gaia functioning awkwardly under the illusion that we are a separate entity, split into a tragic distance from the rest of our full self. If we have trouble comprehending who we are, it is because we are not seeing who we are, and thus have nothing substantial to comprehend. It is not that our identity doesn’t exist, but that we don’t yet know how to see it.

We have no idea.