The other day I watched the film Avatar once again. It tells the story of a paraplegic ex-marine that goes to another planet, Pandora. With advanced technology, he is able to embody this other sentient being, this “Avatar”. Through his avatar he is able to experience the way of the People of Pandora, how they cherish nature and feel connected to their planet. Unfortunately, Humans are in Pandora to exploit and extract the valued mineral Unobtainium back to Earth. In this process we (humans) destroy the cherished and beloved forest and treehouse that the People of Pandora inhabited.

After watching this film, I couldn’t help but notice the similar conflicts we face Today on Earth. How climate change is affecting planet Earth. How easily we’ve destroyed homes, killed people and dismissed indigenous population and wisdom in favor of greed, power and money. How, perhaps, unlike the dinosaurs, we won’t need asteroids to extinguish us, our own arrogance will be the very thing that undo us all. In the film there is one sentence that describes fittingly how I perceive our modern society:

“We have tried to teach other sky people (humans). It is hard to fill a cup which is already full” 

Our cup feels full and so there is no more space for anything but the modern way of knowledge and wisdom. We hold a certain pride in technological advances, which somehow gives us license to feel superior to others. That worth is measured by money, power and the things (we believe) we own. Yet we failed to see we’ve been owned this whole time, by this “big machine”, that tells us how to behave, we’ve been enslaved to and for the system.

And so, with all of that, I wanted to say that I have been thinking about climate change, indigenous wisdom, and pondering about the question on how to love people in spite of their beliefs, even when their beliefs might land me in jail or even mean my own perishment.