HOW I BECAME AN EARTHLING, OR SHRINKING THE BEAST - Shan Overton

I stopped during a dog walk recently to greet a friendly neighbor, and we fell into a conversation about Joan Didion’s book of brilliant essays, Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968), which he is reading for the first time. It’s been a while since I have read the book, but I told him that the impulse to take it up seems to be a good response to the current moment. Our conversation returned me to the poem that gave Didion’s loosely related essays a book title and a more-or-less central image or storyline. That poem, “The Second Coming” (1919), written by William Butler Yeats, also provided Joni Mitchell with the title and most of the lyrics for her wistful song on the album Night Ride Home (1991). Yeats narrates an ominous end brought about by an ancient nightmare. All three writers were working with the poet’s final question: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” This question, asked and answered in these different voices, continues to arise in our time, as it did in 1919 (at the conclusion of the first World War), 1968 (during the tumult of Vietnam and assassinations in the U.S.), and 1991 (the U.S.’s Persian Gulf War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union). I see it written everywhere, in all manner of words, this: What rough beast is coming into our lives right now in 2025? What is coming apart at the seams? How will we deal with the monster in the manger, the things falling apart? 

Yeats’ inquiry seems menacing and pitiless as his beast, but it is, at its core, a story about birth. It’s about the arrival of the new and of our response to it. The poet seemed to be of the mind that things were, in fact, falling apart, and that the time in which he lived was giving birth to something horrible. No sweet baby like the one envisioned in Christian nativity scenes, this was something else altogether. But it’s all too easy to go down a dark rabbit hole, to doomscroll our way into depression or anxiety or anger or a nihilistic combination of all three. Maybe we need to remind ourselves that birth is never without pain and blood, that birth is always cataclysmic in some way, it always requires profound change. And it holds infinite possibility.

Everything that was, is different after birth, even a much-wanted birth. If you’re a parent, you already know this: birth made you a mother or a father, which you were not prior to that event. If you’re a writer, you know this: birth made you an author, a maker of a book or a song, and that changes you. An artist becomes so only through the making, the birthing of the painting or sculpture, which transforms you. And sometimes, what is made, what is new, is ugly at first, is ungainly, is preposterous. No one said it was going to be pretty. At the same time, it’s entirely possible that this dreadful thing might become something else, an ugly duckling transformed into a swan, given a chance and some nurturing. The monster in the manger might just be a regular little baby, a drooling and toddling toddler, depending on our angle.

I suspect that the conversion of the rough beast into another kind of creature is possible. And I suspect that this change might begin closest to home rather than far away in some other city or in the capital of a nation. Transformation usually begins with working on one’s own house, clearing up the underbrush or the mess of toys in the middle of the living room before going to try to clean up another house. The flight attendants on a plane always tell us to put the oxygen masks on ourselves before we put them on the baby, which seems a good piece of advice for the flight we are currently on as a nation.

To take in some fresh air, to stretch my understanding of birth, I’m posing another question about it, trying to see things from another perspective, maybe transform my attitude a little. This has taken me back to my own beginnings. I’ve been asking myself about the birth of awareness, the launch of my sense of being alive in the world. How did I (or you, or anyone) come to know we are alive? How did we feel ourselves to be present on the earth? This moment (or moments) may not arise as a memory, exactly, but it could be a whisp of a recollection that we can claim or reclaim. It could be a feeling or an image, a fragment of film, or maybe even a word, a sound, a small gesture, a taste. Whatever it was, pleasant or unpleasant, this moment is a key to unlocking the ground of your being, to feeling your human-ness, your aliveness on the planet. It is also a starting point for shrinking the rough beast into a smaller, more manageable animal—a human animal just like you or me. 

So how is it that you gave birth to yourself in conscious awareness? Tracing my own process, I went all the way back to toddlerhood and a snippet of memory – and to an image of my smallness and the feeling of the world’s great-bigness. Also, to the feeling of my belonging and of the world’s embrace of me as a creature. Probably two years old, maybe almost three, I pushed open the back screen door of my family’s house on Grayswood Avenue in Nashville. Standing on the stoop, I looked out across the yard and became aware of the trees, tall and thick with green leaves, and of the lawn, which seemed to stretch on forever. I looked up, and the sky was vast and blue. Alone, I felt so tiny, and everything else seemed so big. I was awed, but I did not feel afraid. Instead, I felt amazed. I felt wonder. I felt the world embracing me, claiming me as one of its own.

As I reflect upon it now, I can see how, as a creature, I knew deep in my bones that I was part of the fabric of things here and that nothing and no one could strip that away from me. Entitled as any creature to be alive, yet bound by the limits of the earth, I simply existed and needed no permission to be here. Recognizing the birth of awareness of my aliveness, of the rightness of my being, was not something I put words on then. It’s taken me years of pondering and studying and meditating and praying to understand what that moment was—a unitive experience that people seek by traveling the world, searching for gurus, taking mind-altering drugs, paragliding off of mountaintops, surfing the largest waves, or any number of other activities. As a child, all it took for me to have the experience was to walk outside and let the world take me into itself, into its own arms. My guess is, that most people have had that kind of experience, too. The question is, do they (do you? do we?) remember it? Do we bring it back to mind and reground ourselves through the gift of it?

The sense of my own birth as a conscious being on the planet gave rise to my sense of being an earthling, and so I have always thought of myself as an earthling first. Even when others have tried to foist identities on me, even when I have tried those identities on myself, the deepest truth is that I am a creature of this Earth, a whole creation made in the image of the incarnate Divine. Before I am anything else—a member of my family, a Christian, an American, a teacher, a woman, a white person, a straight person, an intellectual, a writer, a gardener—I am an earthling. Whatever labels I put on myself or others put on me, I’m an earthling first, a person embraced by the place she inhabits. This is the wide window of awareness, this birth of groundedness, that provides another angle on the rough beast clambering across Yeats’ desert. 

When I look out across the expanse of the lawn that remains in my mind from childhood, or when I look out across the expanse of the nation as it is now, from the position of my identity as an earthling, I do not see a rough beast to fear. What I see are other earthlings who have forgotten their own births as conscious beings, their own connectedness to the place they live, to the other creatures (including humans) with whom they share it, and to the sacred green fuse that gives all of us life. What I see, from my small place on the back stoop on Grayswood Avenue, is a world where so many of us have lost touch with the ground of our being. So I am putting my feet down on the ground, feeling the energy coming up from dirt, and the life emanating from within that dirt, and I am feeling the tremors of Yeats’ beast lumbering across the lawn. The closer the beast comes, the smaller it becomes—until it is just another person like me, someone so unaware and out of touch in so many ways that he cannot feel, does not know a feeling when he feels it. He slouches because he is not in the right orientation to the planet, its creatures, or its maker. He has forgotten he is an earthling and has decided he is something else. He is pretending.

Sooner or later, the displaced identity of the beast will shrink and collapse like a balloon that holds its air until, finally, the latex or mylar gives out and slowly releases the invisible substance it has sequestered until it is a limp figure on the ground. Or maybe the balloon pops due to heat or the prick of a pin or the stomp of a foot. Turns out, the beast is only human, after all. It is an earthling just as all of us are earthlings, subject to the laws of physics and biological realities, subject to the revolutions of spirit that come on the wind, subject to the limits of its own consciousness, its own mind.

Here from my stoop on Grayswood Avenue, I can see how small the beast is in comparison to this beautiful Earth, our home, and how much the beauty of the green trees and the expanse of the sky outdo any human maneuvers to best them. At the end of the day, the only things falling apart are the people who do not let themselves know the depths of their aliveness, the connectedness of all living things. Until we reclaim our status as earthlings and our pure joy of being alive, until we realize our welcome of the lives we were gifted, we will fear the beast. But perhaps the arrival of the beast in such a bold manner can remind us of our own birth. If we would pay close attention to our own human experience, this moment can provide an opening, a space where rebirth can occur, showing us that we are not characters locked into a narrative told by others. The birthing process may not be painless or pretty, but it can lead to regeneration, a resurgence of curiosity, wonder, and imagination that extend us beyond the foreshortened boundaries of the stories we keep telling ourselves.

Shan Overton is an educator, writer, and gardener living in Nashville. Her essays and poems have appeared here in The Porch and in other publications, including Belt Magazine. She currently serves as The Porch's Poetry Editor and is Dean of Academics at American Baptist College, a liberal arts HBCU.