Once upon a time, there was a fragile ape, too scared from climbing down from their tree, lest they ended up as a dinner for a hungry lioness just like their relatives once became. One day, there was this heavy storm, and a serpent made of a million suns climbed down from the skies onto the tree; the tree became a sun itself. The ape quickly jumped to a far branch and fell from it while trying to grip themselves to its tip.

They looked at the tree branch they’ve got at their hands and realized it was also becoming a sun-serpent. Before the ape could even process their own fright, they couldn’t help but realize every animal was running: suddenly, the lioness was fleeing instead of jumping onto the ape. Drowning under their own epinephrine, the ape came to a conclusion which I could translate as “lioness fled, me still standing, me have sun-serpent, sun-serpent friend, me fearsome”.

The ape smiled, before realizing their fur were being eaten by the sun-serpent, and this was painful as hell; they got struck by this sudden urge to keep running, until they accidentally fell into the river, and the sun-serpent stopped consuming their fur; but this was too late: they lost their fur. Now the furless ape found themselves in a covenant they didn’t ask for: they lost the only thing that was barely protecting them from the maw of a lioness, but they got this sun-serpent to protect them, so they got to keep this sun-serpent with them.

Fast-forwarding to present time, the furless apes, the “modern” homininæ, are running in circles. Some of the apes have since been drowning the entire big blue tree a smart ape once called as “Pale Blue Dot” under the breath of the sun-serpent while desiring so badly to climb to this distant big red tree they call as “Mars”. They’ve made big funny phallic rocks become big birds by attaching the sun-serpent to the bottom of big funny phallic rocks. An ape with orange hair have been trying to become the owner of the entire big blue tree and expecting all apes to hand him all bananas from big blue tree. Other apes are trying to make square rock become god-ape by making sun-serpent breathe onto it.

These are a few apes trying to control all the other apes like they (think they) control sun-serpent. As for the majority of the apes, they are too busy trying to be part of sun-serpent controlling underneath the whims of another furless apes, furless “boss” ape, hopefully in exchange for a banana by the end of the month because trees got scorched and no bananas can be harvested other than trees that furless “boss” ape control (and these bananas aren’t even edible bananas to begin with, the tree is a fake plastic tree).

Among them, there’s this strange ape writing a lengthy text about the history of apes using a small decade-old square rock, aware he’s also ape but unable to revert his own nature to fully live in the arms of Mother Nature, because other apes require him to be among apes.

And we apes call this “civilization”. Could this funny strange ape writing long text about history of apes call it “self-inflicted suffering”, other apes would throw rocks at him.

Yet here we are, in a self-inflicted suffering, me included. We’re apes who think we lost our home and have since then wandered around and yearned for a new tree, only for the sun-serpent we carry within us consume every new tree we finally got to stumble upon.

We’re too afraid to return to that old, scorched tree and try to climb it again: we fear sun-serpent would wrathfully descend from the skies again… yet we’re holding sun-serpent at our furless hands and we think we can control it. We fear the sun-serpent because we fear ourselves. Then we want to think we can control sun-serpent because we got no control over ourselves. Because we’ve been seeking to become sun-serpents ourselves; in this pointless endeavor, we’ve become too alienated from the very fauna and flora we belong to, too afraid of begging Mother Nature Her pardon (She is very unlikely to pardon us).

!asklemmy@lemmy.world