Where the Earth Breathes

There are places where the ground gives off steam. The rock is stained yellow, the water runs pale and milky, and the air carries that sharp smell that makes you step back before you’ve decided to.

It looks like something gone wrong. It’s the opposite. It’s the planet still working.

We talk about the earth as a setting. The stage our lives happen on, more or less finished, more or less fixed, with the occasional earthquake to remind us otherwise. But the crust we live on is thin, and under it the planet is still hot from its own making and from the slow breaking down of minerals far below. That heat has to go somewhere. Where water finds its way down to hot rock and back up again, it returns carrying minerals and gas, and the ground steams.

None of this is arranged for us. That’s the part I keep sitting with.

The mountain I can see from Cape Town is older than almost anything I can name, and it is still losing itself, grain by grain, to wind and rain. Not damaged. Just continuing. In a few million years the coastline will be a different shape and nobody will have done anything wrong.

I find that steadying rather than frightening, though I understand why it wouldn’t be for everyone. We spend a great deal of energy on permanence, on getting things settled and keeping them that way. And here’s a whole planet that has never once been settled, doing perfectly well.

It changes how I think about protecting things, too. Most of the arguments we make for the natural world are about us: clean air to breathe, water to drink, beauty to look at, systems that keep us fed. All true. But a steaming hillside that no one can live on, that grows nothing we can eat and offers nothing we can use, is not less worth leaving alone. It was here first, it’s still busy, and it doesn’t require our approval.

That feels like a better foundation than usefulness, which can always be argued away. I’ve written about the unseen work underground in what we owe the soil, and this is the same thought, scaled up: the world was never a backdrop. We arrived late into something already happening, and it will carry on long after.

The earth is breathing all over the place. It isn’t doing it for us.