Peter Adair, with his wife Caitlin, is the co-creator of the Sanctuary Garden in Westminster West.
WESTMINSTER WEST-We may truthfully say that imagination is the human superpower. This is a wonder conferred by a mysterious universe.
All our inventions and achievements in science, technology, agriculture, medicine, religion, literature, mathematics, design, art, music, dance, architecture — among myriad others — percolate first as bubbles of imagination. In our essence as human beings, we are founts of imagination.
And it is not at all a coincidence that this superpower is born from a home planet in a continual state of transforming.
Unlike Mercury, Venus, and Mars — planets, once active, that have settled into a stony paralysis — or the gassy giants Jupiter and Saturn, or the icy twins Uranus and Neptune, Earth is a cosmic seed that sprouted, and it is a marvel of planetary metamorphosis.
No other planet has altered its outward appearance so thoroughly and so often as Earth. With swirling clouds, polar caps, drifting continents, mutable land- and skyscapes, surging oceans, and swarming microbial, fungal, plant, and animal life, Earth is itself a rich display of imagination.
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This imaginative capacity is one among several of Earth’s native superpowers — superpowers that traditionally have been intuited and referred to by our ancestors as the “primary elements.” As understood now, these primary elements are earth, water, life, air, and fire. As Earth formed, each superpower arose from a preceding one, much as a seed germinates in stages.
We can chart the course of this emergence. It begins 4.4 billion years ago, when a small planet-like body that would become our moon struck Earth. The impact vaporized a portion of Earth’s rocks, releasing the water held within them, falling as rain to become the oceans.
The oceans then became the fecund womb for life’s appearance 3.8 billion years ago.
And from Earth’s early life of photosynthesizing bacteria in the sea, our oxygen atmosphere formed. This oxygen-rich atmosphere, in combination with plant life on land as fuel, allowed for the sudden and uncanny appearance, 400 million years ago, of fire.
This is the astonishing trajectory of Earth’s unfolding.
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The advent and evolution of these remarkable superpowers is an expression of Earth’s indigenous creative imagination. We belong to a flowering miracle.
Once established, the elements became essential and permanent features of a maturing Earth, composing the lustrous jewel we now inhabit. And like a developing organism — like a human life — Earth has experienced travails and traumas during its growth.
One of those challenging circumstances occurs early in Earth’s formation. During the time period between 4.1 and 3.8 billion years ago known as the Late Heavy Bombardment — scars of which can still be seen on the faces of Mercury, Mars, and the moon — our planet underwent a massive pummeling from comets and asteroids.
The assault might have left Earth as scarred and bereft and unfortunate as our planetary neighbors. However, because Earth is warm-blooded, with its core heat ceaselessly stirring its magma, the violent impacts were absorbed and transmuted into Earth’s body.
That ceaseless inner stirring is the activity of a dreaming Earth.
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What does Earth dream amidst this cosmic upheaval?
In imagination and reality, an evolving Earth births its first life forms — a marvel of creation arising from mayhem. Earth endured the transgressions, healed its wounds, and continued to shape itself. As humans, we, too, possess the resilience to recover from trauma and remain open to new growth.
In a unique planetary reimagining more than 4 billion years ago, Earth became a water planet, with its surface covered by ocean. Water’s quality of absorption, accompanied by the rhythm of tides and waves, enabled the dissemination of minerals and chemicals throughout the planet, providing a necessary condition for life’s development.
Water is a blessing. Nonetheless, there are instances in Earth’s history when water became a danger.
On three occasions — 720, 650, and 580 million years ago — our planet’s life-giving oceans froze over to become the phenomenon known as Snowball Earth. Due to a sharp decrease in carbon dioxide, expanses of ice formed and encroached from the north and south poles, encasing the planet until only a narrow strip of open water remained at the equator. Viewed from space, Earth would have appeared as an ice sphere.
Earth recovered from this extreme circumstance when our planet’s inner heat — that ceaseless creative stirring — welled up in volcanic eruptions that restored essential heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere.
Earth did more than simply react to the drastic condition of a frozen world. Earth’s inspired response was the triggering 630 million years ago of the first appearance of complex life on the planet.
This is a significant threshold event in Earth’s unveiling.
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We don’t have to imagine this. Earth did.
Complex life — that is, the life of plants, fungi, and animals — would, in turn, face dire challenges in the form of extinction events.
Evidence from rocks testifies there have been five major extinction episodes in Earth’s history: the first, 445 million years ago; the last, 65 million years ago. Between these dates occurred the most severe event on record: the Permian extinction 250 million years ago, when up to 80% of water-based species and 70% of land-based species perished.
And then an entirely amazing and unexpected kicker: Following upon each of these profound setbacks, life would eventually rebound with life forms more widespread, more diverse, and more complex.
Our life-world today is as it is because our planet transmutes adverse events into imaginative creations. Earth demonstrates this miraculous ability time and again. In effect, Earth consents to shining by not minding the rubbing. There is a holiness at work here, dwelling and dreaming at the very center of the Earth.
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The last significant extinction upheaval, as is widely known, occurred 65 million years ago, when a meteor the size of Mt. Everest collided with Earth near what is now the Yucatán peninsula, resulting in the fiery demise of the dinosaurs. As a result, mammals emerged as the principal large animal species on the planet.
The proliferation of mammalian forms begins in a fiery birth, and two million years ago human culture begins with the domestication of fire.
Every human culture that has ever existed, beginning with Homo erectus and continuing through Homo sapiens, has used fire. Fire was a godsend for humankind, providing warmth against the cold, safety from predators, and light beyond daylight hours.
Early use of fire sparked the development of cooking, ceramics, and metallurgy. Fire empowered humans. The degree to which we would later harness fire’s energy for our purpose borders on the magical. Take away fire, and we are quickly reduced to helplessness.
Most significantly, the open fire was a magnet for communal gathering and sharing.
It is here that music making, dancing, storytelling, and ceremony were inspired and cultivated. Fire — the last of Earth’s physical superpowers to emerge — stoked human imagination: It is the hearth from which all culture and civilization sprang.
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Our human imagination, our superpower, stems directly from our planet’s unique creative power.
It is a superpower that, in addition to enabling the realization of marvelous dreams, also threatens Earth’s physical and biological systems to such a degree that in our time we may be incurring a sixth major extinction. Whatever that outcome, in light of Earth’s continuing transformations, we are participants in an act of ongoing creative development. And of this we can be sure: Earth’s imagination is bigger than our own.
We can recognize that we possess an innate imaginative capacity mirroring Earth’s own vibrant activity. We embody the same indwelling creative energy.
Whatever may be the source, Earth is the flowering of a beneficent cosmic intention, and we are a part of this blossoming. Amid its creative movements, Earth has minted humanity like a coin out of the precious metal of divine mystery.
Through Earth’s unveiling, vast movements, and milestone events occur on the most beautiful planet in the solar system — perhaps in the cosmos. Our Earth is a wonder and a gift, and we partake of a shared unfolding, in divine communion with a cosmic intelligence continually creating, discovering, and realizing itself.
This is the miracle we belong to, a miracle living within us, a miracle and mystery appearing all around us, deserving of our service, our care, our reverence, and our celebration.
This Voices Essay was submitted to The Commons.
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