The earth never tires. This line from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself always comes to mind on days like today when I come home from teaching bone-tired. At least there is something stronger than me, the earth continuing to turn day after day, year after year, pumping out perennials with abandon despite the discouragements of snow and cold.
The earth never tires because the earth doesn’t care. She doesn’t get her hopes up: the earth, in fact, neither hopes nor despairs. The earth continues to bear the weight of all our human souls, all our human heartbreak, while floating in the icy isolation of space. The earth neither waits nor wants–the earth simply turns, simply orbits, simply soaks sun on one side while blushing into shadow on the other.
The earth sometimes shudders with quakes but is largely immune from the paroxysms of human pain. The earth doesn’t care about your day, your week, your life: the earth simply soldiers on, heeding nothing but gravity and her own magnetic impulses. The sun is her star and the moon her vassal.
The earth never tires, but I do. I tire and I waver. I am prone to mountainous highs and valley lows. I ebb and flow–I tire by night and am revived by morning. I am heliotropic, my moods manipulated by light, hunger, and the vicissitudes of time. The earth never tires, but I do: I rise and fall with the sun, my spirit willing but my body weak.
Hoarded Ordinaries 
Mar 31, 2023 at 1:15 am
I guess we can take comfort in the idea that the earth is implied by our existence. Our bodies come with minds and limbs to help us navigate, manipulate, and contemplate. We’ve got holes for ingestion, excretion, and breathing. We’ve got eyes and skin that react to sunlight, legs and feet that say something about the ground we walk on, lungs that indicate how we process air. An astute alien scientist could learn much about our world by studying our bodies—our gravity-tolerance, our ability to swim in water but not breathe it, etc. In a weird way, the earth might depend on us as much as we depend on it. Assuming those alien scientists are friendly, our very existence might, for those aliens, point the way homeward.
Of course, as a mental exercise, we could take almost any living thing or inanimate object and work out the same implications about the earth—and further, the universe: to have an earth is to have a solar system, after all, and to have a solar system is to have a galaxy, and so on. With everything implying everything, all of reality is the Jewel Net of Indra from the Avatamsaka-sutra.
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