Poems
From EARTHSEED: THE FIRST BOOK OF THE LIVING. By Lauren Oya Olamina.
All that you touch
You Change.All that you Change
Changes you.The only lasting truth
Is Change.God
Is Change.
God is Change,
And in the end,
God prevails.
But meanwhile…
Kindness eases Change.
Love quiets fear.
And a sweet and
Positive obsession
Blunts pain,
Diverts rage,
And engages each of us
In the greatest,
The most intense
Of our chosen struggles.
God is Change.
God is Infinite,
Irresistible,
Inexorable,
Indifferent.
God is Trickster,
Teacher,
Chaos,
Clay—
God is Change.
Beware:
God exists to shape
And to be shaped.
Why is the universe?
To shape God.Why is God?
To shape the universe.
Do not worship God.
Inexorable God
Neither needs nor wants
Your worship.
Instead,
Acknowledge and attend God,
Learn from God,
With forethought and intelligence,
Imagination and industry,
Shape God.
When you must,
Yield to God.
Adapt and endure.
For you are Earthseed,
And God is Change.
Prodigy is, in its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive
obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of
the moment. Without adaptibility, what remains may be chan-
neled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there
is nothing at all.
In order to rise
From its own ashes
A phoenix
First
Must
Burn.
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING. By Lauren Oya Olamina.
Here we are—
Energy,
Mass,
Life,
Shaping life,
Mind,
Shaping Mind,
God,
Shaping God.
Consider—
We are born
Not with purpose,
But with potential.
We give our dead
To the orchards
And the groves.
We give our dead
To life.
Darkness
Gives shape to the light
As light
Shapes the darkness.
Death
Gives shape to life
As life
Shapes death.
The universe
And God
Share this woleness,
Each
Defining the other.
God
Gives shape to the universe
As the universe
Shapes God.
Chaos
Is God’s most dangerous face—
Amorphous, roiling, hungry.
Shape Chaos—
Shape God.
Act.Alter the speed
Or the direction of Change.
Vary the scope of Change.
Recombine the seeds of Change.
Transmute the impact of Change.
Seize Change.
Use it.
Adapt and grow.
Death
Is a great Change—
Is life’s greatest Change.
We honor our beloved dead.
As we mix their essence with the earth,
We remember them,
And within us,
They live.
Darkness
Gives shape to the light
As light
Shapes the darkness.
Death
Gives shape to life
As life
Shapes death.
God
And the universe
Share this wholeness
Each
Defining the other:
God
Gives shape to the universe
As the universe
Shapes God.
We have lived before
We will live again.
We will be silk,
Stone,
Mind,
Star.
We will be scattered,
Gathered,
Molded,
Probed.
We will live
And we will serve life.
We will shape God
And God will shape us
Again,
Always again,
Forevermore.
To shape God
With wisdom and forethought,
To benefit your world,
Your people,
Your life,
Consider consequences,
Minimize harm
Ask questions,
Seek answers,
Learn,
Teach.
Javier Verdugo Ortiz
We, your people
Welcome you.We are Earthseed.
You are Earthseed—
One of many
One unique,
One small seed,
One great promise.
Tenacious of life,
Shaper of God,
Water,
Fire,
Sculptor,
Clay,
You are Earthseed!
And your Destiny,
The Destiny of Earthseed,
Is to take root
Among the stars.
Civilization is to groups what intelligence
is to individuals. Civilization provides ways
of combining the information, experience,
and creativity of the many to achieve ongo-
ing group adaptibility.
Any Change may bear seeds of benefit.
Seek them out.
Any Change may bear seeds of harm.
Beware.
God is infinitely malleable.
God is Change.
God is Change
And hidden within Change
Is surprise, delight,
Confusion, pain,
Discovery, loss,
Opportunity, and growth.
As always,
God exists
To shape
And to be shaped.
The child in each of us
Knows paradise.
Paradise is home.
Home as it was
Or home as it should have been.Paradise is one’s own place,
One’s own people,
One’s own world,
Knowing and known,
Perhaps even
Loving and loved.Yet every child
Is cast from paradise—
Into growth and destruction,
Into solitude and new community,
Into vast, ongoing
Change.
Partnership is giving, taking, learn-
ing, teaching, offering the greatest
possible benefit while doing the
least possible harm. Partnership is
mutualistic
symbiosis. Partnership is life.
Any entity, any process that
cannot or should not be resisted or
avoided must somehow be part-
nered. Partner one another. Partner
diverse communities. Partner life.
Partner any world that is your
home. Partner God. Only in part-
nership can we thrive, grow,
Change. Only in partnership can
we live.
Purpose
Unifies us:
It focuses our dreams,
Guides our plans,
Strengthens our efforts.
Purpose
Defines us,
Shapes us,
And offers us
Greatness.
To make peace with others,
Make peace with yourself:
Shape God
With generosity
And compassion.
Minimize harm.
Shield the weak.
Treasure the innocent.
Be true to the Destiny.
Forgive your enemies.
Forgive yourself.
As wind,
As water,
As fire,
As life,
God
Is both creative and destructive,
Demanding and yielding,
Sculptor and clay.
God
Is Infinite Potential.
God
Is Change.
We can,
Each of us,
Do the impossible
As long as we can convince ourselves
That it has been done before.
Choose your leaders
with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
is to be led
by the opportunists
who control the fool.
To be led by a thief
is to offer up
your most precious treasures
to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
is to ask
to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
is to sell yourself
and those you love
into slavery.
Beware:
Ignorance
Protects itself.
Ignorance
Promotes suspicion.
Suspicion
Engenders fear.
Fear quails,
Irrational and blind,
Or fear looms,
Defiant and closed.
Blind, closed,
Suspicious, afraid,
Ignorance
Protects itself,
And protected,
Ignorance grows.
When vision fails
Direction is lost.When direction is lost
Purpose may be forgotten.When purpose is forgotten
Emotion rules alone.When emotion rules alone,
Destruction…destruction.
Self is.
Self is body and bodily
perception. Self is thought, memory,
belief. Self creates. Self destroys.
Self learns, discovers, becomes.
Self shapes. Self adapts. Self
invents its own reasons for being.
To shape God, shape Self.
Take comfort.
Each move toward the Destiny,
Each achievement of the Destiny,
Must mean new beginnings,
New worlds,
A rebirth of Earthseed.
Alone,
Each of us is mortal.
Yet through Earthseed,
Through the Destiny,
We join.
We are purposeful
Immortal
Life!
The Destiny of Earthseed
Is to take root among the stars.It is to live and to thrive
On new earths.It is to become new beings
And to consider new questions.It is to leap into the heavens
Again and again.It is to explore the vastness
Of heaven.It is to explore the vastness
Of ourselves.
All prayers are to Self
And, in one way or another,
All prayers are answered.
Pray,
But beware.
Your desires,
Whether or not you achieve them,
Will determine who you become.
Beware:
All too often,
We say
What we hear others say.
We think
What we’re told that we think.
We see
What we’re permitted to see.
Worse!
We see what we’re told that we see.
Repetition and pride are the keys to this.
To hear and to see
Even an obvious lie
Again
And again and again
May be to say it,
Almost by reflex
Then to defend it
Because we’ve said it
And at last to embrace it
Because we’ve defended it
And because we cannot admit
That we’ve embraced and defended
An obvious lie.
Thus, without intent,
We make
Mere echoes
Of ourselves—
And we say
What we hear others say.
All religions are ultimately cargo cults.
Adherents perform required rituals, follow
specific rules, and expect to be supernaturally
gifted with desired rewards—long life,
honor, wisdom, children, good health, wealth
victory over opponents, immortality after
death, any desired rewards.
Earthseed offers its own rewards—room
for small groups of people to begin new lives and
new ways of life with new opportunities, new
wealth, new concepts of wealth, new challenges to
grow and to learn and to decide what to become.
Earthseed is the dawning adulthood
of the human species. It offers the only
true immortality. It enables the seeds of the
Earth to become the seeds of new life, new
communities on new earths. The Destiny of
Earthseed is to take root among the stars,
and there, again, to grow, to learn, and to fly.
Are you Earthseed?
Do you believe?
Belief will not save you.
Only actions
Guided and shaped
By belief and knowledge
Will save you.
Belief
Initiates and guides action—
Or it does nothing.
We are born
Not with purpose,
But with potential.
Purpose
Unifies us:
It focuses our dreams,
Guides our plans,
Strengthens our efforts.
Purpose
Defines us,
Shapes us,
And offers us
Greatness.
To survive,
Let the past
Teach you—
Past customs,
Struggles,
Leaders and thinkers.
Let
These
Help you.
Let them inspire you,
Warn you,
Give you strength.
But beware:
God is Change.
Past is past.
What was
Cannot
Come again.To survive,
Know the past.
Let it touch you.
Then let
The past
Go.
There is nothing alien
About nature.
Nature
Is all that exists.
It’s the earth
And all that’s on it.
It’s the universe
And all that’s in it.
It’s God,
Never at rest.
It’s you,
Me,
Us,
Them,
Struggling upstream
Or drifting down.
Earthseed is adulthood.
It’s trying our wings,
Leaving our mother,
Becoming men and women.We’ve been children,
Fighting for the full breasts,
The protective embrace,
The soft lap.
Children do this.
But Earthseed is adulthood.Adulthood is both sweet and sad.
It terrifies.
It empowers.
We are men and women now.
We are Earthseed.
And the Destiny of Earthseed
Is to take root among the stars.
Octavia E. Butler. Earthseed. Parable of the Sower, 1993. Parable of the Talents, 1998. (Page 7, 11, 13, 27, 59, 59—60, 60, 61, 64—65, 66, 66, 87, 101, 126, 127, 141, 153, 155, 167, 187, 199, 214, 215, 249, 265, 277, 293, 313, 324, 324—325, 337, 343, 353, Seven Stories Press First Edition.) Copyright 1993, 1998 Octavia E. Butler.