The Holy Bible. Genesis. Chapter One. 26. “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

“Human beings are empowered to exercise dominion over nature and even to be participants in creation; and yet, at the same time, there are strictures against idolatry, which is a kind of overreaching and confusing human beings’ role with God’s.”
Michael Sandel

I have been pondering the word dominion; a word to describe the human shadow cast about our wondrous planet like a suffocating inversion of smog. Post-pagan spirituality and the far-reaching tentacles of capitalist ideals seem to have combined to culminate in plutocracies formed in dominance hierarchies as opposed to circular relationships and complexity. Consequential value-prejudice and subsequent decisions based on those values brings great pain and suffering to certain human groups, to microbes, to blue whales (and all life). Fluministic processes that perpetuate life itself break like glass. Exploitation of the many by the few has been the false summit. Any belief in a Logos of nature to be founded in aggression and competition by the few over the many may well be the single biggest conscious mistake our species has ever made.

Dom ~ a religious hierarch, a man.
Dominus ~ the master of the house, nus meaning ownership or relationship.

Dominion – the sovereign or single power over territory, the subjugation, therefore, of all others.

Human dominance being a wrong in itself, and stemming from a male oriented hierarchy.

I propose a counter, a word that rids itself of hierarchy between all living beings, at the same time, affirming life as relationships.

Vita (latin) ~ life.
Vitanus ~ Life is relationship.

Vitanance being the right in itself, stemming from diversity, proliferation and of the complexity of all life.

How do all life forms relate to this living world of over 4 billion years in the making, a complex flourish of organic processes? With vitanance!

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