Becoming Earthian through the word that wants to remember us

Proem: Becoming Earthian

In fire, in fury,

In soft caressing

We are born

Of this Earth.

Star-stuff, made Earthian.

Breath and soil,

Flesh and longing.

Finding relation

Through rupture

In torment,

In rites of passage.

In existential fervour,

We are torn asunder

Earthian made subject,

Toiling in the shadows

At the whims of power.

Subject made consumer,

Measuring meaning

In clicks, credit cards and comments,

Buying and optimising

Attention harvesting

To where? For what?

Why?

Consumer made citizen,

Drawn toward justice,

Yearning for voice,

Finding form,

In shapes that don't quite fit.

Citizen made Earthian.

Again. But this time,

With remembering.

To wonder.

To wander.

To weep.

To craft.

To find kinship with all life.

On our WAE home.

A world attuning,

Emerging, not as a place we stand upon,

But a field we are becoming.

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What does it mean to be Earthian in a time of rupture, remembrance, and repair?

This essay is the first in a series "Thrutopian WAEfinding within Language, Field, and Kinship with Life" exploring being "Earthian" as a thrutopian act of becoming. In a time when many are stuck between collapse and techno-solutionism, this shift in language is not cosmetic. It’s a way of walking forward through the ruins of a decaying paradigm with care, kinship, and commitment to life on Earth. A WAE.

There are a fair few layers to peel back here that I would like to share with you, my fellow Earthian. So we'll start with a story on beginnings... and becomings.

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Close to twenty years ago, I read Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Amidst the sometimes dense and spiralling prose, one m3me (a meaning-bearing memetic seed) lodged itself deep in my psyche — a seed that would quietly germinate and rhizomatically entwine itself through me in the years that followed:

"Are humans necessary? Are there experiential clues that human intellect has an integral function in regenerative universe as has gravity? How can Earthians fulfill their function and thus avoid extinction as unfit?"

- Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, p.24

It was the first time I encountered the term. Though Fuller’s framing leaned anthropocentric, something in the sound — the gesture of the word — slipped past my defences and entered the field of my being. It gave form to something I had long felt and yearned for at the same time. A belonging beyond nations, a belonging to this Earth.

A trip of becoming

Recently, my young family and I were embraced by the vast, whispering softscapes of Wiradjuri Country. Journeying to Mungo National Park.

The land itself speaks there when you’re ready to listen. A deep time presence. A place of bones, winds, absences, and Earthian echoes.

The irony is thick in the throat: a ancient lake bed wounded by the colonial mind, stripped of its ancestral trees — each one a living archive of epigenetic memory. Trees who had once held the wisdom of thousands of seasonal cycles. Now gone. They were replaced by animals redefined as “live-stock,” made to graze a dry ancient lake bed. The landscape flattened into a commodity. Yet from this void, something emerges — stories long buried surfacing like artefacts of the soul.

We met Uncle Lance, a Ngiyampaa man and ranger with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. A steward of stories. A guide between times. And my partner in life Gemma, a herbalist, permaculture practitioner and somatic healer, connected with him during a guided walk across the lunettes.

Their shared reverence for the plants, their medicine, and the land’s intelligence opened a door between them. He invited our family to return the next day as kin-in-learning, to listen to deeper stories and yarn through our own becoming.

The following day Uncle Lance shared stories of the sculpted ridgelines, the footprints kept as casts in the ground, the carvings, and the uniqueness of local flora and plant medicines. These stories were not of static relics, but as part of an ongoing ancestral theatre where a one-footed hunter is leaping across space and time and a mother is holding a child before the child runs off into possibility. The stories are alive. Felt. Felt through time.

I asked Uncle Lance about the regeneration efforts as I’d seen several signs around the area. He replied with “there is no real regeneration happening here.”

A day before on our drive to Mungo, our children looked out over the stark, treeless paddocks. They asked:

Why are there no trees dad?

We spoke of the recent past when the First Fleet arrived and land clearing began en masse. According to estimates “29 million hectares of the forests and woodlands that existed in New South Wales pre-1750 have been destroyed. That equates to the loss of 54% of the state’s original forest – an area about the size of New Zealand”

We spoke of land "given" to settlers. Of orders to clear it. Of the logic of removal of trees and of first peoples.

We wept with the wounds together. Driving the outback roads, held by the seeming silence amidst the hum of a slowly failing wheel bearing in our small Toyota Yaris, we remembered with the field.

The lands silence is not empty, it also hums. With memory. With story. With presence. The red dirt beneath my feet I walked on on Lake Mungo was once the floor of a vast lake, and long before that, part of an Earth that dreamed us into being.

At the same time, across the digital field, my hip hop track We Are Earthians was circulating. I wasn’t online, but I'd scheduled a Linkedin post to share the track on Futurecrafting Friday after I'd softly released it’s sonic message into the noosphere and field earlier that week.

The word, metabolising

Upon returning from the red dirt and dreaming silence of Mungo, I found myself pulled back into the humming matrix of digital catch-up. And amidst it all, a message surfaced. A small comment from a beloved mentor, Katina Michael, on LinkedIn:

“<<Love it Earthian brother Mathew!>> Typed this out with the biggest smile on my face and actually felt rather Earthian as I did!”

And reading this comment from Katina something landed in me again. Not just the term. But an embodied remembering of the field it opens.

Over the years, I’ve noticed this shift more and more. At first, my use of the word "Earthian" was conceptual. Simply a term I’d picked up from Fuller who I’d revered in many ways, using it to signal a broader identity beyond the nation state I had held onto. It lived mostly in the head, like a kind of philosophical and ideological shorthand. But over time, and especially in the past year while slowly metabolising the hip hop track We Are Earthians, the word began to settle into my body. It was becoming me, or perhaps I was becoming through it as a way of relating. I sense it is like a quiet invocation that is reorienting my awareness back into kinship.

Now, when I introduce myself, when I greet people — especially those I feel are more likely to be attuned to land and life — I often say, "Hello, fellow Earthian." And I notice something shift, however subtly. It’s as though the word carries a frequency of belonging. When I whisper it to the seedling I’ve just planted in the garden, or speak it under my breath while watching the kids run barefoot across the grass, or when the dogs roam around our small urban permaculture farm here on Dharawal Country, in Banksia, Sydney, Australia, Earth — it isn’t performative. It’s relational and ontological. Earthian becomes less about who I am and more about how I am, and how I’m always in relation with. It’s a strong reminder, a rhythm, and a way of coming back into the weave of life.

Why Earthian?

Spoken or read, words don’t just communicate — they vibrate.

Words are both conveyors of information, and forces that move through us, shaping our breath, our biochemistry, and our beliefs. They act on us through sound, symbol, sense, and somatic resonance, activating what we might call a neurosemiotic circuit — a full-body, full-field interaction between biology, psyche, and social space.

The word Earthian is one of those words. It’s not just what it means, but what it does. To understand why I use it, and why I believe it matters, I'm going to unpack a few interwoven perspectives on the potency of language throughout this essay series.

To speak “Earthian” is to take a kincentric thrutopian stance. It means facing paradigmatic collapse honestly, but also with a refusal to collapse into nihilism. A declaration:

We belong to the Earth, and to each other. And we are still becoming.

Language as a living organism

Another way to look at language is to think of it less like a fixed tool, and more like a living thing. Something we live with, and in many ways, lives in us.

Some researchers, especially those working in what’s sometimes called the Leiden theory of language evolution, suggest that language behaves more like an organism than a mechanism. It’s not hardwired into our brains from birth, like some kind of pre-installed app in what Noam Chomsky famously called Universal Grammar. Instead, it evolved with us — shaped by the ways our brains learn, remember, and connect.

Think of language like a cultural symbiont — a kind of invisible companion we’ve been growing alongside for thousands of years. It adapts to us, and we adapt to it. It doesn’t live inside a single person — it lives between us, passed from mouth to ear, from page to eye, from body to body, from generation to generation.

Over time, languages shift to become easier for humans to learn and use. They simplify patterns, develop shortcuts, drop the bits that don’t work, and spread the ones that do. It’s a kind of survival. Just like animals evolve in response to their environment, language evolves in response to human minds.

This means that language is not only something we shape — but it also shapes us. It influences how we think, what we notice, how we relate to others and the world around us.

So when we speak a word like Earthian, we’re not just saying something. We’re inviting in a new kind of relationship with the world we are part of. We’re letting a new strand of language root itself in us — one that carries a different pattern of meaning, and ultimately, a different rhythm of belonging.

Words like Earthian help us become more of who we might be — together, with each other, with the Earth and all life on this beautiful planet.

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In the next part of this series, we’ll explore how language functions as a relational grammar — one that can help us compost outdated identities, listen to the land, and remember ourselves into new modes of living. We’ll go deeper into the WAE.

For now, perhaps simply try say aloud "I am Earthian."

See what it stirs. And let the word do its quiet work on you.

If you'd like to deepen the praxis...

When you connect with a tree, the sky, your animal kin, a river or the ocean… try orienting through an Earthian lens. Greet them as kin. Feel into the response.

Then pause. What do you notice?

If this piece stirred something in you, I’d love to hear it.

Reply below, share your reflections, or simply whisper to the wind:

"I am Earthian."