The earth itself is in need of transformation; we need to learn to adapt to a new earth because the old earth is passing away. Churned out by the collective unconscious, the vision is a map of our global near-death and inner transformation. It is also a response to a life-threatening situation. The species, not just the individual, is on the threshold of near-death. Indeed, all species of life are threatened; hence, catastrophe is pictured in geologic imagery. Person and planet are at risk…”

Michael Grosso: The Final Choice, 1985

 

At length, the waters cover the North American aulacogen and much more. The collapse has taken but a few short weeks to complete. Aftershocks continue for twenty five years, a very brief instant geologically. A new generation of human descendants does not care whether fracking or warmed seas caused this fast evolution of North American topography. Very soon their children are forgetting that it evolved at all. And in any case, for many years from 2215 on, human attention is preoccupied with adapting to the old nation’s division by this expansive new “inland” sea – which isn’t really inland at all, as it now is the aquatic divide between the two stringbean continents that used to be the east and west portions of that old North America. A surviving U.S. government, no longer situated in swampy, fast submerging Washington, pragmatically adapts its governance over remaining lands between the new sea and the Atlantic coast.

 

And to the west, to no one’s surprise, California leads a coalition of state and provincial governments in establishing hegemony over the great landmass between the Pacific coast and the new sea’s western shore. From Alaska southward, the Canadian provinces, western states and much of Mexico presently join the coalition, all designing their new nationhood. Their new joint constitution will have surprisingly few changes from that of the much reduced United States  (the late Electoral College being a prominent exception). With both descendant nations still in survival mode, there is surprisingly little political argument over these practical responses to the new geographic exigencies. Eastern Canada quickly evolves into the new nation called Quebec. Most amazing of all, these changes occur without armed conflict, except for two former residents of western Kentucky, one of whom kills the other and seizes the fertile farmland both had claimed atop scenic bluffs overlooking the new coastline.

 

In perspective of geologic time, these changes are fast evolution indeed. But by around 2250 – less than two human generations later – all has settled down and become the new normal. The great Father of Waters called Mississippi is a legend to the young, who will never experience it. Their very real experience is of blue ocean waters that lay calmly over a vast stretch of the former central plains northward as far as Saskatchewan and Alberta, far on up into Manitoba and Ontario. Above drowned Minneapolis-St. Paul, over the drowned Red River, across Lake Winnepeg and up the old Nelson River valley, the new waters flow freely from the old Gulf of Mexico into old Hudson Bay. From the sea’s equatorial south, warmed currents flow northward and change both climate and agriculture clear to the Arctic Circle. Ocean currents are permanently changed around the world. Though global warming has caused disruptions across the earth, none equals the changes in North America. Its surviving parts come to be called “the twin continents.”

 

As if in recompense, climate in the Americas eventually becomes generally mild and pleasant around the new sea. This sea isn’t terribly deep by world standards, but the old Gateway Arch, if it still stood, would no longer be visible. In the way of ever-evolving human language, people call it M’sippisea – an old Indian word, the children tell younger siblings, and theirs is the historical memory which will endure. Despite the horrendous changes it once wrought on that segment of humanity known as Americans, few adults and no children at all perceive it as merely the most recent – coincidentally rapid – development in the long evolution of earth and life on earth. It just is.

 

 

By 2315, three hundred years hence, M’sippisea has been an accepted feature of life in the twin North Americas for a century. People born after the cataclysm have no memory of those violent birthing days, and the most senior elders who did remember have long since died away. Now there are new elders, and they live a lifestyle far different than that of their recent ancestors. Like those pre-Columbian native Americans and their living descendants, these new elders are close to nature, knowing themselves integral with it.

 

From birth The People are naturally adapted to the natural rhythms of natural systems. They understand themselves at one with nature, because the natural earth which sustains them is one of the endless manifestations of God and God is everything so nature is also everything on earth, including themselves. Natural stewardship of plant life and animals is the cultural norm, and especially loving care is taken of those beasts which provide so much of the working power in their scattered communities, such necessary augmentation of their manmade technological power. The people and animals exist in respectful symbiosis with the natural world, and God indeed is everywhere.

 

Around the sea’s edges, the surface rifts and gullies left by The Great Quake have mostly filled or turned to stream beds. The new generations know only that M’sippisea has always been there, remembered since their childhood, beloved for its inviting beautiful blue waters in which to swim, fish, go sailing and be joyful in their robust health and wellbeing. That’s how M’sippisea felt in my dream.

 

 

Thus in twain divided forever that lost old America land, the very earth itself acting out in affirmation that terrible dividing which began in the hateful mindsets of men when they sought to divide and conquer, to prevail and control regardless of cost to fellowship and feeling of community, to gather in to themselves all the wealth and all the power over others, over their fellow humanity, when they cleaved, yes, when with uncaring and selfish denial of their brothership and sistership, they despised each the other and ignored in wanton abandonment the unconditional endless love in which God’s evolution had fashioned them and their very inner selves from his love which also made Sun and World.

Harmon Elmr Bland Lightday, History Keeper