OPINION|
The Ozarks Oracle speaks.
She murmurs softly from the mouth of her ancient Ozarks Dolomite Cave formed by dying sea animals and living bacteria during warm periods of high atmospheric CO2.
Her dolomite mineral home loves hot temperatures and rising oceans in a greenhouse earth and now, after a 66 million year nap, she wakes to the same warming world that made her 325 million years ago. “Feels so familiar,” she declared the other day.
I tell her she doesn’t look a day over 320.
She formed between two of the earth’s great extinction events: the Devonian and the Permian, where most of the living species on earth perished. She is mostly made of former living creatures, cruelly massacred, but now her watery channels are filled with new life. She feels the water flow through capillary passages and she is tickled by the pulsing networks of mycelium tendrils, tree roots and ant colonies.
Her consciousness is the distributed kind: her mind doesn’t arise from a single rock or neuron, but a network.
Humans think intelligence comes from a big brain, but honey bees, termites, octopuses and the brilliant organisms known as trees conjure their decisions collectively. At one point, the universe was all plasma, then hydrogen, and so the instructions that made everything that followed had to be embedded in the smallest possible unit of existence.
Life wants to be and it wants to see itself in a mirror. This is called consciousness and The Oracle speaks for those who have some measure of it.
Over eons, she sees the repeating patterns and now she speaks the language of future events using terms that are bawdy, tangled and disrespectful of our race. Her humble scribe cleans up her blue words for the children.
And so, welcome to the Ozarks Oracle. She makes bold predictions and her undeserving scribe relays them to you. Your objections are noted in advance, but she doesn’t care what you think. She says humans are mayflies: we flit about for an instant and then vanish while she endures for hundreds of millions of years.
The Hauxeda has agreed to publish her musings as they arrive. Please note the Oracle is never wrong. Any flaw in her predictions is the fault of her miserable scribe whom nobody pays any attention to anyway.
You can write to the Oracle in care of this news website at letters@hauxeda.com — send along your burning questions, but don’t take it personally if she ignores you. She has a lot to say before we disappear.
The Ozarks Oracle!
