Unearthing

Text and playlist by Laura Cabezas

“My whole body changed into something else. I went up… I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn… they teleported me and I was down on [a] stage with them. They wanted to talk with me…. They told me to stop [attending college] because there was going to be great trouble in schools… the world was going into complete chaos… I would speak [through music], and the world would listen. That’s what they told me.”

Sun Ra on his abduction experience by aliens, 1930. 

My mother’s closeness to the earth used to make me feel poor. I aspired to a classier way to life, bonded with elegant artifice and synthetic sophistication, emulating natural selection with layers programmed and substituted every season. Grandiose and ephemeral. One day I learned to play capitalism to fund my own curated world. I did it and it was beautiful. So seemingly organic, it appeared natural to the right people. 

When I was little, I used to ask my mother if God was real. She said that God was in every tree, its flower and fruit, every ray of sun, way of life and drop of water. And in all of us. We are all one, connected, she said. But mother, if we’re all God why do we live in Earth? She smiled. Because we’re not eternal, my dear. For some, Earth won’t be enough and they will live in space. One day in the future, you’ll see it. 

My mother would peer at the sky every night. 

Hippie shit, I thought. 

Now, I take small steps on my bare feet by inertia.