This is an excerpt from The Roots of Resistance, the sequel to The Dandelion Insurrection. You can order a copy here: https://riverasun.com/the-roots-of-resistance/
Zadie sensed it then, the creature that stripped bones bare and bleached the rocks. As if parting a veil, the desert whittled the night into nothing, revealing the force gathering behind the curtains of the star-strewn sky. Just beyond the edge of ordinary sight, Love churned as vast as plate tectonics and as powerful as thunderstorms. It pressed against the edges of reality, seeking to crack the barriers of awareness that blocked it. Zadie recognized this Great Love – the kind that sears the soul and hauls us back from human folly, the Love reverberating in revolutions of the heart, the Love that scorches cruelty away as it rises, the Love that breaks our hearts and turns out its contents to those in need.
Life wants to live, but more that that, it wants to love. Simple survival is not enough. Mere procreation leaves mothers turning their faces to the wall and fathers hanging from the rafters. Fallen in the wasteland, thirst alone may leave us collapsed, abandoning our bodies to the vultures. But love? For the hope of saving our children, seeing our beloved, or protecting our communities, we stagger to our feet and stumble forward on the burning sand. To save her granddaughter, an elderly woman can find the strength to lift a crushing vehicle. For his father, a son plunges into the flames of a burning house. We shoulder the unbearable, accomplish the impossible, endure the unthinkable by the intensity of our love.
These stories of love emerge on every continent, in every town. Multiplied by millions, they create a song of life louder than small-hearted survival, richer than greed mongering, more enduring than despair, and more grounded than hope.
This song reverberates in the genetic strands of humanity, woven into the biological structure of human life. Deep in history, our foremothers and fathers loved their children. Far in the future, our descendants love their families, too. In this present moment that hangs like a bead of dew on the grass stem of time, where the life of the planet lies clouded by question marks, and the body of humanity struggles, massive and sprawled in a wasteland of our own making, the love song of our ancestors and descendants is calling to us to rise.
The hymn of life hums in the throats of our brothers and sisters. The chords of evolution roar and bark, howl and hiss, warble and moan from the tongues of fellow animals. The wind strikes the harp strings of the forests and marshes, prairies and mountains. The great tympani of the world’s coasts booms and crashes across the cymbals of sands and the drum barrels of rocks.
All that is needed is to listen.