The Pliedians have a mythology about this planet we live on being a sort of sacred library of information. And while you may not believe that there are life forms in other galaxies who appreciate (or even know of) our planet, it turns out that they are correct.
The life forms we all are (humans, fishes, fungus...) amount to vast storehouses of information encoded and encrypted in our DNA and in the structure of the building blocks that make up 3 dimensional matter.
We have the distinct grace of being able to inhabit these vast accumulations of information as conscious creatures somewhat able to comprehend how lucky we are to be surrounded by such beauty: a frog, a dragon fly, a fiddleneck fern. That we can even vaguely comprehend our existence is kind of like this insane magic trick within a magic trick within a miracle.
Until you can't keep count of the odds anymore.
A video I saw about 3 months ago on Youtube documented the insertion of a video camera into the 2nd reactor at Fukishima. Once the camera entered the reaction chamber, thick and flat gamma rays of light became apparent as they encircled a central glowing orb in a (silent to us) room otherwise full of pipes and steam. Gamma rays are like the poster-child for 'radioactivity', and can most often be seen encircling a Nucleus on just about every logo there is for the Nuclear industry.
These rays are by-products of certain kinds of nuclear decay: energy expressed as light when larger subatomic particles get loosed from their stations and go hurling off into space. These particles are called 'free radicals'. I like to think that these dreary scientists tried to think of the scariest ideas their minds could conceive, and named these particles after them.
And for a good reason: 'free radicals' are indeed scary. They amount to invisible knives that go through space at warp speeds and slice through most material they come across. Because they are subatomic particles (and invisible), the kinds of damage they do is at the molecular scale of atomic structure and DNA: essentially both the 'intelligence' of a cell (the adapted set of 'successfully integrated' information accumulated over millenia) as well as the cells reproductive apparatus and chromosomal genetic code.
In a random and unbiased way, free radicals ream through genetic material and essentially destroy the integrity of the information contained therein - causing havoc both for us in this life (diseases like cancer), and for the remainder of the lives created from the vestiges of what is left of our genetic material. Chernobyl babies are real.
I say this now namely because very few Americans are aware that, even as I write these words, the Unit 4 storage pool at Fukishima is teetering on the brink of meltdown with a possible outcome of global nuclear holocaust. Even fewer Americans are aware that the first time the lions share of that fallout will make landfall is in the United States.
TEPCO, the owners/operators of the plant, have declined taking immediate action because they do not want to pass the large cost of something like this on to their investors. As if there is an amount of money worth more than the accumulated capital of information that the life forms currently inhabiting this planet represent.
Many of you will not believe the truth of what I have said because you will find it inflammatory or think I am being melodramatic. I understand. This sounds crazy.
I would just ask that you gather your own information and read for yourself about the trip US Senator Wyden took to Fukishima and the statements he has sent to his colleagues after visiting, or about the letter that has been sent to the UN with signatures of over 140 nuclear scientists from Japan and around the world, or about Helen Caldicott, the internationally renown physician and scientist, who plans to 'evacuate to the southern hemisphere' (from Boston) should the storage pool of Unit 4 loose it's water, or about the studies at the WHOI labs in Massachusetts regarding the mutation of DNA of oceanic micro-organisms found there that have been traced to Fukishima.
More pressing than the hope that folks reading this will inform yourselves about the current situation, my (and our) biggest hope is that you look at the life-form nearest to you now (this can include yourself), and just appreciate the fuck out of it.
Understand it for the beautiful miracle that it is. Appreciate all of it's regularities and irregularities.
Feel it against your cheek. Taste it.
Look at the people you share the earth with right now and understand how precious this time is that you are sharing. When your dog or child or spouse comes up to you wanting some attention, give her a couple extra minutes, and notice the contour of her skull or the ridges that curl her earlobe with the understanding that the very shapes of these creations you are beholding contain more embedded intelligence and information than what can be stored in the computer you are using to read this.
And finally, remember that we are, in fact, stardust. Remember the meticulous sand paintings that have been created in the past just to be blown away: Jerusalem, the Black Rhino, the World Trade Centres, Jose Arguelles, the Woolly Mammoth, Atlantis. My sincere hope and prayer today is that somehow the experience of love and reverence that so many people and things inspire retains it's meaning - even in the face of their disappearance.