When we think of an alien, we jump to something that is so completely other that it must have come from another planet. In most of our use of the idea, an alien is a monster. Something frightening, something unnerving, something that scares us.
What’s amazing is how many things that are absolutely from the earth, 100% part of the natural landscape that we live in can still seem alien to us. Not just other, but frightening, unnerving, scary.
And, I think even if we have our most evolved, naturalist hats on, there’s some of these that make us go, “what the heck is that?!” Consider…
After having David Attenborough on the brain last week, I think of the deep sea creatures that so often produce alien-seeming creatures that are new to science, and certainly new to us.
These things are alien to us because they are so unfamiliar, so unknown.
But knowing one another goes both ways, doesn’t it? If we don’t know these creatures, then doesn’t that mean that we are as alien to them as they are to us? Except, perhaps we are even more terrifying, even more threatening than they are.
What if we’re the aliens? What if the rest of nature sees us and thinks, “what the heck is that?!”
How does the world look if we don’t think about all the things on the Earth that seem strange to us? What if we saw our own strangeness and considered how we might get to know the world better, to understand it better, to stand within it instead of so often being apart from it?
Sometimes it is hard to tap into our spiritual selves or find time to nurture our creativity and intellectual curiosity. Here is a section that reflects on some nourishing materials from around the web and related media channels in order to get us thinking, get us feeling, and get us reflecting on the lives we are living in this big world. **Some Adult/Mature Themes May Appear in Links and Other Attached Material**
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Allan T. Georgia, MDiv, MTS, PhD
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