Thor’s Day: End time acoming

Alex Grey's "Gaia" (1989, oil on linen, 96"x144")
[See statement from Mr. Grey at bottom.]

The Destruction of Ilê Aiyê—the World Tree

By Bob Boldt

Since its sprout days,
its twig days,
it has rooted itself here,
on the edge of the abyss,
above the wide river,
shining like a tiny silver vein
in the deep chasm far below.
Miles across, its gnarled trunk is sinewed
and strong as the neck of a crone.

When the first charges were detonated,
they sent a cascade of dirt and rock
showering down to the canyon below.
The huge trunk barely shuddered.
Helicopters, tiny as hummingbirds,
were there circling the base,
cameras running.

Then a necklace of charges fired a sequence of flashes,
followed seconds later with a pop-pop-pop-pop.
A beard of dislodged soil rained down the face of the cliff.
This time the ancient one did shudder from step to steep.
In the high cloud-strewn branches far above,
birds fluttered up deserting
the fledgling young in doomed nests.
Its base gone, its roots severed from the parent,
the great tree began its tortured descent.

Slowly at first, almost deliberately,
like a failed rocket gathering for an assent,
the leviathan reluctantly yielded to the pull
of earth and the yawning maw of the chasm below.
The rocks and structures that had grown up at its base,
older than time,
crumbled and fell away as the severed trunk began
the gigantic groan of its long way down.

A cheer went up, followed by a gasp, then silence
as the slide gained force and momentum,
tearing at the rock face.
Mountain goats, panthers, and snakes,
panicked denizens of stable earth, fell away and plunged,
making way for the great fall of the World Tree,
falling to centuries of dark,
heralding eons of dead time to come.
_______________
From Alex Grey, on his painting:

The day after our daughter, Zena, was born I had a vision of Gaia, the World Soul. Gaia was the tree of life or web of life with her roots in the subatomic, atomic, molecular, and cellular levels of matter (mater/mother) reaching upward through the oceans, stones, soil, grass, forests, mountains, lakes, rivers, air, and atmosphere to nurture all plants and creatures. A natural cycle of birth, sustenance, and death was woven into the tapestry of Nature, Gaia continuously gave birth to life through the love energy in her heart. The future generations of humanity were symbolized by a human mother nursing in Gaia’s cave.
    Gaia’s body was being ravaged and destroyed by man, reflecting the present crisis in the environment. A diseased and demonic phallus had erected structures all over the earth to suck dry Gaia’s milk and turn it into power and money. The wasteland of a disposable culture was piled high and was seeping into the microgenetic pool causing diseases and defects in the Great Chain of Life.
    Emerging also from that microgenetic level – but on the side of Nature – was an evolutionary alarm represented by a large “seeing” hand which catalyzed the collective will of the people, enabling them to see, with eyes of unobstructed vision, the actions necessary to stop the destruction of the world soul.

Copyright © 2015 by Bob Boldt