Anne Rhodes is a playwright living in Ithaca, NY.  The following is the prologue from a play she is working on.  The speaker is the Narrator, who returns throughout the play.

This is the Story: Prologue

This is the story
Of being
On the earth.
A being,
Me,
You,
The child,
Your great grandmother,
The man who checks to see if the roof is leaking,
The woman who checks,
Or the person sitting next to you.

The story
Of a being in the natural world
At a time – now – when things are moving very fast,
Changing,
Speeding up,
Breaking apart,
Throwing us back on ourselves,
Jostling us against each other,
Crowding us in,
Making us look…

Look for balance.
Is nothing sacred?
What can we count on?

. . .

Also,
This is the story of the Natural World
Where you are
Under your feet
Rushing into your lungs
Alive in your arteries and neurons
As you sit here.

. . . .

The Natural World remains in balance
Over the long haul,
And that balance sustains all things,
All creatures, us,
The newt,
The white pine,
The river,
The genome,
The oriole.

. . . .

All things in the natural world – animate and inanimate – support each other.
All things move in a cycle,
Move toward balance, unfolding, naturally,
Complete at every moment.
There is no striving,
No anxious worry
No progress.

Hmmm

In the Natural World everything is sacred.
….

Why does it not seem so?
Why can we not relax?
Breathe in , breathe out.
A tree does not wonder what it should do next.

Some say
It is because
Human beings have removed ourselves from the natural order
They say we are not bio-logical in the normal sense.
Normal biological  animals stop eating when they are not hungry.
And stop breeding when there is no sense in breeding.
Each creature takes only what it needs and no more.
We are, they say, not bio-logical
But bio-mythic,
Controlled by the stories we tell ourselves.

Hmmm

We got the stories wrong.
We thought “dog eat dog”
We thought “survival of the fittest”
“every man for himself”  “if you’re not with us you’re against us”
“it’s the good guys against the bad guys”
We said “Bigger!”  “More!”
We told each other “Time is running out”
We called ourselves ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’
We told our children “What makes you think you’re so special?”
“We can’t all be heroes.”
“Father knows best.”
“If you don’t get caught you can get away with it.”

Hmmm

So, these were our stories.
You can see them everywhere,
In all the structures and forms we create
Asphalt, concrete, square boxes, bonuses for crooks, bombs, drop ceilings, PCB’s, water in plastic bottles, special rooms for children to learn in, nursing homes, hierarchical structures, domination, apocalypse.

. . .

For a long time our un-natural behavior did not threaten the natural world
But now it does.
So now …
We need to change our stories

. . .

What will we tell our young people now?  Can we change the story of power
from one of power-over
to one of power-from-within?
From one of power over the earth,
Power over each other
To one of power of connection, of interdependence, of all things being sacred …

The natural laws are implacable.
They never bend.
Water seeks its own level.
When you use all of something it’s gone.
Only things that have what they need to survive will survive.
We can’t argue or bargain with the natural laws.
These laws cannot be violated.

Can we tell this truth?
Stop teaching the old stories we have been teaching the children for 10,000 years –
The hero, the warrior, the martyr, the servant, profit, endless growth, the prince and sleeping beauty.
Are we so fond of these old poison stories
Which have almost destroyed us?

The levees have burst.
The time of the lone wolf is over.
It is time to love yourself just the way you are,
As you sit here
Your feet in your shoes
Your heart inside your chest
You breathing in and breathing out
With the natural world under your seat
Your arteries and neurons alive
With wisdom
A fellow traveler’s hand just inches from your own.

This is the story of how we move away from the plagues of the fourth world.
We spill out drops of wine
Onto our plates for the suffering
That has been endured.

The inquisition
The crusades
The invasion of Turtle Island
The slave trade
Extractive technologies
The holocaust
Atomic weapons
Genetic modification of life
Climate chaos
Species extinction

…

This is the story of how we change the stories.
Of how we become who we really are,
Of how we take our place in the natural world.