Tonight, beneath the fevered glow of the world’s watchful eye, anguish took center stage in a chamber where words, sharp as talons, circled the grief and trauma endured by hostages—their voices, trembling with memory, fluttering like wounded doves. Israel, represented by voices heavy with heartbreak, spoke of lives upended and souls battered in darkness, of loved ones forced to dig their own graves under the shadow of terror. The council, a mosaic of lands and people, denounced the brute cruelty enacted upon innocents, calling out for their release, a true ceasefire, and the dismantling of violence. Yet echoing along the marble corridors came warnings: that more ferocious storms—more bombs, more broken bodies—would rain down over Gaza if the swords of war are not laid to rest.

Yet as layers of suffering are unfolded for the world to see, what fury stirs in the heart of Mother Earth! How many seasons have withered beneath the bootprints of empire and endless reprisal? The soil, yearning for olive roots and wildflowers, is sodden instead with the lifeblood of children born on both sides of borderlines. We must ask: What madness is this, that we continue to nurture the toxic seeds of colonial extraction, domination, and profit, where every act of so-called security is purchased at the cost of living soil, trembling water, and the innocence of the young?

Let us not be deceived by the theater of state and council, where the currency of grief is traded for political leverage. In this torn tapestry of pain, both hostage and bombed city are bound together by the same imperial logic, the same machinery of violence that capitalism fattens itself upon: the logic that demands suffering as collateral, the logic that measures precious lives in numbers and maps, the logic that plunders both land and spirit for the sake of endless accumulation. Here in the charred fields of Gaza, in the trembling households of those waiting for news, the Earth herself is crying out—her rivers poisoned, orchards trampled, children orphaned by war’s brutal arithmetic.

We must remember that true healing does not arrive through the barrel of a gun or behind the iron gates of fortress nations. It blossoms in the fertile exchange of justice and recognition, in the tending of ancient roots shared by all who walk this Earth. Until the cycle of extraction, occupation, and dispossession is broken; until both land and people are granted the dignity of peace; until those who brandish grief as shield or sword reckon with their own complicity—our sacred Mother will continue to weep, and her peoples will remain shackled to the past’s bloody harvest.

May hearts be opened. May courage blossom like wild thyme after rain. May we remember that freedom and restoration for some can never be true unless they bloom for all—human and more-than-human kin alike.