Do I belong among the stars?

Answering a question raised on the anniversary of the moon landing and the first page of Octavia E. Butler’s Earthseed series.

The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars.

We have enough problems down here.

That’s going to be the answer that comes when the time to leave this place arrives.

The adults will fixate on this idea of getting back to normal instead of realizing the painful truth:

Normal is gone.

But they cannot be blamed for that attitude.

After all that idea of normal keeps them going. Because it is so much more comforting than the one that lay in wake for them at the entrance of the abyss:

Do I belong among the stars?

A statement for the ages

This was the idea Octavia Estelle Butler explored in her Earthseed series. One that’s coming back into fame as it’s largely prophetic voice begins to shine on our timeline and provide a clear picture of what to expect from humanity’s darkest timeline.

Books like it, Game of Thrones, and The Hand Maid’s Tale paint a vivid fresco of this period in history with images of brutality, violence, and moral grayness that explore what happens when humanity makes survival in brutal conditions the most important thing.

But we know what those pages of history contain. We’ve been there time and again. Through Noah down to Revelations, we know it doesn’t end well.

Why is it even a question?

Asking if such a species belongs among the stars should be valid question at this point in our history. We’re at a crucial choice point.

Should we go the way of the dinosaur and perish?

Or evolve and take a chance at starting over somewhere else?

Octavia raised the idea in the series and yet the fear of what was to come in the darkest timeline nearly overshadowed her point.

She never questioned if we belonged among the stars. She knew we did.

She understood something so fundamental about us that she never bothered with exploring a thought train where we didn’t land among the stars.

In her mind a species doesn’t just get curious about space exploration one day and not belong up there the next. Yeah sure they may have their problems, what sociological construct doesn’t when the matter of Power is involved?

By that reasoning, it’d be a fair statement to say that the law of persistence would one day grab this species by the throat again and demand that we get the hell off this planet and fast.

And for me as a black woman in America, a place where my existence and humanity has been simultaneously questioned and denied based on my ability to measure up to some standard I was previously unaware of, seeing and reading a black woman say beyond a shadow of a doubt –

“Yes I belong there, and not only will I get there, but I will be bringing plenty more with me because they belong out there too.”—

Well that…that was pure power.

If you can see it, you can achieve it.

It called me back to one of my favorite episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine [the first star trek with a Black captain :salute:] “Far Beyond the Stars”, where the show’s main character Captain Benjamin Sisko, has a mild breakdown and begins to imagine himself as a black man named Benny in the 1950’s struggling to get his story of a black captain in space published. The episode concludes with Benny having a mental breakdown as his story is published, but rather than see a future with a black man not only in space but in a leadership position, the publisher decides to pulp, or destroy, the issue, and fire Benny. And as Benny’s cries of what he imagined as being real no matter how they try to keep it from becoming so, grow louder, Capt Benjamin Sisko finds himself back in his own timeline wondering if he is the dream and Benny’s reality is the truth. It’s not that deep of a stretch for a country whose cultural and philosophical foundation was built on the premise of

“All men are equal – except those guys – and the one’s whose land we took to make this place.”

But if we are Earthseed as Butler suggests, all of us – yes even the ones we don’t think should be – do in fact belong among the stars.

It is our destiny.

And the funny thing about destiny is, it has a way of conspiring in your favor. Especially when you are just about to give up. Paulo Coehlo and my boy Santiago’s run in with Melchizedek in The Alchemist, taught me that.

We are Earthseed.

We belong among the stars.

It’s time we start to look to them to find our way home over the rainbow.