I saw the movie Mother! last night, around the same time news was breaking about the death toll from and damage caused by the earthquake in Mexico.
Mother! is the kind of movie that you either love or hate; there is no middle ground. Kinda like one’s beliefs about our planet: You either believe in climate change, or you don’t. You either believe that the planet is a living breathing entity, or you don’t.
The actress and director claim the movie is an allegory for our environment. Some critics believe it’s a stronger metaphor for religion. I believe it’s a cautionary tale of who we are quickly becoming and what we are currently doing to the planet and ourselves.
When I got out of the theater, the sky was putting on a show of its own, with shards of lightening lighting up the night sky — another of Mother Earth’s powerful and unpredictable occurrences. It always blows my mind when I stop and think about the fact that humans, no matter how strong, smart, or advance we are, will never have the capacity to recreate, challenge, or change nature.
We don’t have that kind of power even though we like to think we do.
What does all this have to do with trending tea? Well, everything.
Because much like in the final scenes of Darren Aronofsky’s film, we are — whether consciously or not — destroying the world around us. We are digging holes to lay Dakota Access pipelines under sacred ground. We are fracking our earth and creating earthquakes in places where historically there have been none. We are straining our climate with factories, pollutants, garbage, over population.
We are killing our planet with our greed and desire to live with more, more and more.
And coming out of a Dallas Pride weekend full of rainbows, gayness and Pride, the reality of the state of our planet, of us, is tough bottle of pills to swallow:
Pill No. 1: A member of our trans family getting gunned down by Georgia Tech campus police instead of subdued with non-fatal force.
Pill No. 2: Hurricane Maria leaving the entire island of Puerto Rico without power.
Pill No. 3: 225 dead in the Mexico earthquake (the number continues to rise).
Pill No. 4: Donald Trump tweeting about the Emmys while former President Obama offered up his condolences and thoughts in Spanish to the people in Mexico.
The pills go on, ad infinitum, but the water we drink them down with does not. Water is a nonrenewable resource — as is our planet.
I guess the tea I’m trying to spill this week is my own. I believe the earth is a living, breathing entity. I believe in climate change. I believe that if we don’t start treating our earth better, she will continue to lash out in anger. I believe that if we don’t start treating each other better, we are going to be the death of ourselves.
And I really do believe we can make the world a better place by simply choosing to do so. The choosing is the easy part; it is the action that’s hard.
And that’s the one thing about movies, you only see the end result: the actor’s final performances, the director’s final vision, the editor’s final cut.
You don’t see all the work, the people, the sweat, the rewrites, the cries, the crew that exists beyond the silver screen. We forget that art, that progress, that evolution takes work. The kind of work that should be easy: love they fellow neighbor, don’t litter, pick up after yourself, be kind to mother Earth.
But in an age of overstimulation even the simple becomes that much harder.
But we don’t need to rip out our own hearts or bleed them out to change the world. All it takes is a little bit of compassion, a dash of empathy, a strong desire to make a difference and the courage to tell a different story from the one currently playing onscreen.
Or at the very least, “Take nothing but memories and leave nothing but footprints.”
Brandi Amara Skyy is an award-winning writer and drag artist. You can find out more about her and all her projects as BrandiAmaraSkyy.com or @brandiamaraskyy on Twitter and Instagram.