The Myth of Dominion

Crossing the Nullarbor is like crossing the threshold into another consciousness. The horizon stretches out in every direction until you lose the sense of where you end and the land begins. Jonah pressed his face to the window, whispering, “It feels like the earth is breathing.”

Out there, stripped of complexity, the truth was undressed too:
We are not above nature.
We are within nature.

The myth of dominion — that humans are the final word of evolution, entitled to shape the world to our will — crumbles under a sky that has watched a million species rise and fall.

In the vastness, our illusions shrink.
No economy can command a drought.
No technology can rewrite ecological limits.
No ideology survives without water.

The boys chased each other across the red dust at a rest stop, their footprints temporary signatures on an ancient canvas. Choni stood with her eyes closed, palms open to the wind, feeling something older than language.

Watching them, I felt the divide inside myself — between the part of me trained to dominate, optimise, and control… and the deeper part that longs to belong, to participate, to listen.

The Nullarbor didn’t judge our species.
It simply reminded us of scale.

We are small.
We are fleeting.
And if we forget that, we risk becoming the only species to engineer its own extinction.

But humility — real humility — is regenerative.
It brings us back into rhythm.
Back into relationship.
Back into the truth that we are nature remembering itself.