We fed the stars but forgot to feed the condors, or, we still have imagination—let’s feed it well.

This week, with some of my beautiful friends from Cuerpo Enjambre—a group formed from the rich but gentle imaginings of Mundo Común—I sat tired on a Zoom call, wrapped in my fluffy pink strawberry cardigan, thousands of miles from the Amazon. Listening.

Abel was speaking—Abel, now one of us, a bee who has joined our hive with his wisdom and calm and startling clarity. He was sharing Takuna stories. Or as he corrected us, facts. Because calling them myths makes it seem like these things aren’t real. But they are. The reality that Takuna and many other Indigenous cosmologies are rooted in is not metaphor. It is structure, breath, origin. It is what holds the world up.

And there I was, sat in England, clutching a mug of marshmallowy hot chocolate, relying entirely on a Zoom AI captioning tool to try and understand the Spanish (for the thousandth time I wish I spoke Spanish!). In any ordinary meeting I think AI would manage fine. But when we’re talking about deep time? When the conversation slides into non-linear rhythms, when it’s not speaking from a Western, Eurocentric tongue, the system starts to stutter. AI does not yet know how to translate from the sacred.

So instead of fighting it, or getting frustrated, I leaned in. I listened—not just to Abel, but to the awkward, often poetic mistakes AI was making as it tried to process ideas it had no training for. And I started writing them down. Because maybe even the broken machine can still speak prophecy. These five “mistakes” from my captioning tool make up the heartbeat of this post.

“We fed the stars but not the condors.”

This line makes no sense in the paragraph it came from, but it has not left me since. We have fed the stars—haven’t we? Poured our imagination, our money, our longings into the heavens. First through religion. Then telescopes. Then rockets shaped like missiles and egos. We’ve yearned so hard for ‘out there’ that we forgot the sacred ‘right here’.

We forgot to notice the hummingbird wing-beat. The night call of the condor. The ceiba tree with its spine to the sky. The jaguar’s eye holding a glint of something too holy to name.

We forgot to feed what is already feeding us.

If we are to forge a new way in this Anthropocene, we must remember to feed our condors, too.

“Then they saw there half a shadow and half a joy.”

I know the word “joy” was meant to be the name Yoì. AI got it totally wrong. But I felt this sentence like a punch.

Half a shadow and half a joy.

That’s where most of us are living right now.

In-between. In the stretch. In the half-light.

Every person I know, human and more-than-human, is existing in a kind of limbo. And the line between the sorrow and the spark is so thin some days it feels like it might snap. I sometimes feel I might snap.

But here’s the thing: we need both. The shadow reminds us to rest. The joy reminds us to keep going. We are not meant to live in full clarity all the time. Some things are born in the blur.

“The territory is not hear yet.”

Yes, “hear” was a mistake. But what a good one.

Abel was talking about how speaking can bring something into being. How the power of a word can make a world.

And maybe it’s not that the territory isn’t here. Maybe it’s that we can’t hear it yet.

We’ve forgotten how to smell the sacred. How to taste truth. How to feel the pulse of a mountain in our bodies. We’ve made everything abstract, pixelated, disembodied.

But territory is not an idea. It’s not a metaphor. It’s bark. Bone. Blood. Land.

If the territory is not “hear” yet, it’s because we stopped listening. It’s waiting for us to remember how.

“Then they saw a sword-tiger.”

I’m fairly sure AI meant a sabre-toothed tiger here. But I’ve become obsessed with this sword-tiger.

I picture something half-machine, half-beast. A tiger with metal fangs and a government contract.

In the origin story Abel told us, the tiger is part of the becoming. But in my mind, the sword-tiger is what happens when we twist nature out of shape. When we try to own what cannot be owned.

We made sword-tigers.

We gave them teeth made of bombs and drones.

We called it defence.

And now they stalk freely.

They eat everything. They even eat themselves.

We have built the things that will unbuild us.

“The air came, and the things happened.”

This might be the most accidentally wise sentence I’ve read in years.

Abel was speaking of a breath. A spirit. A force of becoming. And AI reduced it to this strange, perfect sentence: The air came, and the things happened.

Yes. That’s it.

That’s the hope.

This isn’t a finished picture.

This broken world is not done becoming.

The air can still move through.

The wind can still knock over what needs to fall.

The breath can still rise in us and make something new.

As much as we’ve fed the stars, stopped listening, forgotten how to be animal, built sword-tigers and left joy behind—we still have imagination. And we can still choose to feed it well.

Because this isn’t static.

The story is still being told.

And the air is still coming.

I am now very excited to re-listen to Abel’s words with the translation intact! Abel is a walking gift of a human. But in the meantime, I wanted to capture these thoughts before they left my mind.

AI interpretation of its own mistaken language translation! Seemed apt to use it.