"So quero ser livre". Graffiti in Portugal. Photo by mar. Translation: "I just want to be free".
In a column in the NYT yesterday, Verlyn Klinkenborg writes:
Lately, I've been thinking about the volume the birds around us
occupy. I don't mean the vast migratory territories they mark out over
the course of a year. I mean the spatial dimensions of their ordinary
lives among us. This is a thought that has been working away in my head
for a long time, ever since I saw a red-winged blackbird perched on a
cattail and realized that the bird and the wetland in which the cattail
was rooted were nearly synonymous. "Habitat" sounds awfully
general. It turns out to mean not some willful choice — the kind a
human would make deciding to live in Dallas rather than in Denver — but
a profound correlation. The marsh is who the red-winged blackbird is.
Klinkenborg
claims that humans are the only species that is not defined or limited
by place. I'm not so sure. I've lamented before
the fact that we humans are all homeless, and that the homeless and
addicted are the perfect metaphor for all of us living in civilization.
We are all lost, looking for home, some place where we belong,
and we are all addicted to consumption and debt and the false comforts
of civilization just as much as the guy in the alleyway desperate for the next fix of his drug of choice, anything to get out of the pain of really living in this moment, here, now.
I've also written before
that I would, in a heartbeat, give up everything to be, instead of
human, a bird, with the ability to soar into the sky, to live
comfortably, joyously, absolutely free, and connected to all the rest
of life in my place, and
through it connected to all life on Earth, and to live for just five
years in 'now time' possessed of such unimaginably acute senses and
with the intense emotions I believe go hand in hand with sensory acuity.
I
once wondered if the homeless people I see in the streets are trying to
emulate birds, as if the prison that is our civilization is just too
unbearable, and anything --
the bitter winter cold and risk of death from exposure, the constant
nagging hunger, the disdain and indifference of other people -- is
better than living in that prison. Not for them the addiction to
consumption and property and the other seductions of civilized humans.
They are in a way freer than any of us.
But as Klinkenborg says, the birds are the opposite
of homeless. They have given up no comforts, no freedom and no
connection to others to be at home -- in fact they are more comfortable
and connected than we could ever imagine being. Birds are home ("the marsh is who the red-winged blackbird is"), and free. We humans are neither.
For
our first three million years on Earth we were both. We just recently
(thirty millennia ago) gave up our native homes and our freedom because
it was the only way our stupid human brains could devise to survive,
when the ice rolled in and the extinction of the great mammals left us
without food to eat (we had lost the knowledge of how to forage as
vegetarians, and the new lands we occupied were ill-suited to this way
of living anyway). So we moved to these strange new lands and
sacrificed our freedom for the apparent security of massive settlement
and catastrophic (monoculture) agriculture, the foundations of
civilization. We cast ourselves out of the garden because it could no
longer support us.
And since then we have been instinctively longing
for the home and for the freedom we gave up in that grim bargain. Our
three-million year old DNA, our genetic memory, tells us we are not meant
to live a nomadic, homeless existence, disconnected from our true home
and place and apart from all other life on Earth. It tells us we are
not meant to live a life of slavery and confinement and fear and struggle and suffering, of dependence on others and meaningless work.
It
is questionable whether the homeless people in the street have found
freedom; they certainly have not found their way back home. There are
some who live close to the land, nearly as much a part of it and
indistinguishable from it as the redwinged blackbird is from the marsh.
But while they may have found some vestige of home, they have not found
freedom. In this brave new world we are all dependent on each other, on
the imported oil and water that lets us grow our simple, vulnerable
foods in places they were never meant to grow, and sell them to others
in return for other necessities of life that are not native to this
hostile place we wishfully call 'home'.
The garden we cast
ourselves out of is gone, and besides there are too many of us now to
fit in it anyway. Perhaps that is why we now look to the stars and long
for another world where, maybe, we can find a place where we can be
home, and free. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
