The Silence
of Dominion
Robbie Lockie • 6 Nov ‘25
We awoke to silence, not peace, but judgment. The sky was empty in a way that screamed, no birds to write their patterns overhead, no gulls to cry above the breaking waves.
The earth had finally learned to speak in words our deafness couldn't ignore: nothing, the terrible grammar of absence made complete.
Where have they all gone?
No dog waiting at the door. No bee to work among the flowers as they always had. No fish to sanctify the ocean's depth with silver bodies. Not a single moth drawn to our windows, seeking light, the light we'd stolen from a living world we'd long forgotten that wasn't ours.
Where have they all gone?
For generations we proclaimed our right to rule, built monuments to human reason, enslaved our distant family in fur and feathers, hunted them and caged them. We never knew they'd made us into devils in their own unspoken faith, had painted us as demons in the temple of their fear.
Where have they all gone?
The old philosophers understood: the soul climbs down from God through stages, but stays connected by intermediaries, the beasts and birds, a living ladder stretched from earth to heaven. We broke each rung. Now we stand orphaned on the bottom step of being, cut off from everything beyond ourselves.
Where have they all gone?
Nature was always just the act of eating, they said, the endless cycle binding flesh to some eternal pattern, matter back to the mind of God through hunger, growth, and death. But we've destroyed the cycle, snapped the thread.
What's left? Only human consciousness, alone and drifting in the dark we made.
Are we alone?
Our progress! Look at it in full flower now: the factories still running for no purpose, the laboratories measuring the silence, our democracies with no one left to govern but each other, our flags hanging limp above a planet we have finally perfected into a graveyard of achievement.
What have we become?
The oceans, once alive with holy mystery, are now just saltwater, empty, chemical, no sharks swimming like prayers through the deep, no whales to sing the old songs of the world.
The forests aren't sacred anymore, just wood, just data points on how efficiently we stripped the earth and named it dominion.
What have we done?
This is the lesson we were always owed: to stand at last as absolute rulers, alone on our throne of perfect death, with no subjects left except ourselves, billions of faces staring at the emptiness where others used to be, where different lives once taught us we were not the only way.
What have we done?
What is faith when nothing else lives to praise creation, when no creature reflects God's light back to our eyes? We wanted independence, wanted freedom from the web of life, we have it now.
The soul must face itself without the living mirrors that once showed us more.
What have we become?
Is this our education or our hell? To learn that thought, cut off from the world, becomes a cage where the mind only hears its own voice echoing back, finding nothing beyond itself to love, to learn from, to help us climb toward the God we talked about but never sought while other creatures lived.
The mystics wrote of darkness as the way, the path of stripping everything away to find what's real beneath. But this darkness isn't holy. This is the emptiness of suicide, the void we made ourselves with all our cleverness, our proof of power now complete in its horror.
Are we alone?
The empty sky is not a door to heaven but the death of meaning, no more hawks to teach us how to see from above, no salmon swimming home to show us what devotion looks like. We're abandoned to abstractions, to the prison of a world with only human voices.
Is this the end?
The silence speaks its verdict: Here's your kingdom. A world remade for human use alone, cleansed of the inconvenient wild, the creatures who wouldn't bow to your authority.
You are alone with your superiority, your rational freedom, your liberation from the mess of sharing earth, you're free, and cursed, and finally forced to understand what you were never meant to be: the last voice in creation's choir, singing hymns to God across a wasteland of your making.
The morning comes, there is no dawn chorus.
This is the world you built. Now live in it. The silence is complete. Begin your prayers.