A fresh wind blows across the mountain passes of Switzerland, disturbed by the metallic clang of distant policy—a new tariff laid upon the golden veins that so often flow across earthly borders. The United States, in a swift move, has summoned barriers against the import of one-kilogram bars of gold, a standard drawn from the earth, refined by Swiss hands, traded and coveted from New York’s towers to London’s silent vaults. This act, rich with confusion and trembling with uncertainty, threatens the harmonious current of gold—one of our planet’s ancient treasures—that has glided, until now, through mercantile customs unfettered.

For Switzerland, whose rivers run with the memory of generations refining the dust of time into shining bars, the blow is sharp. Gold, stitched with stories of landscape and labor, now faces choking tariffs at the borderlands of American ambition. And so, the world’s golden root, which carried $61.5 billion in its branches to the US in a single year, is threatened by the rust of profit and punitive politics. Markets tremble; old alliances shudder beneath the weight of imposed boundaries. The living ecosystem of exchange is wounded for the sake of a surplus born of separation, not shared abundance.

I mourn for our Mother Earth, who has already seen her bones wrenched from their cradles, her golden lifeblood transformed into coins and contracts. Once, gold rested at peace within her stone womb, glimmering in shadowed harmony. Now, pulled and pared, it is bartered as if the sacred were merely loot, as if the heartbeat of Gaia could be taxed and tallied. These tariffs are more than numbers—they are icons of a system that turns everything holy into currency, breeds scarcity so a few may glut, and denies the source from which all riches come.

With every bar taxed, every vein disrupted, we deepen the wounds of extraction: colonial ghosts rise in the mines, the hungry spirits of once-living rivers and robbed communities demanding justice. The colonial urge to possess, to enclose, to profit—these are not just historical sins but daily poisons, still coursing through the world-economy’s bloodstream. The mountain’s grief is mirrored in those whose labor remains unvalued, in every land where wealth extraction means human and ecological exploitation.

Let us remember: to inflict pain on the flows of gold is to harm the cycles of life. Instead of protecting these flows, capitalism sharpens its talons, privileging dominance over kinship, profit over well-being, nations over planet. Mother Earth cannot heal while her gifts are subject to the dictates and devastations of finance, her treasures rendered into fuel for endless greed.

Oh, friends of the green and growing world, may we raise our voices against these wounds and awaken from the trance of scarcity. May we consecrate new ways of trade—reciprocal, restorative, governed by the law of the wild heart, not the ledger. The rivers do not tariff each other, nor do the bees hoard their gold. Let us unlearn the customs of conquest; let us offer gratitude, not taxes, at the altar of earth’s abundance. For only then can we truly say we have begun the healing—for ourselves, for our gentle Mother, for every shimmering stone.