Bird of Paradise, photo from ATPM.com
We are all dislocated people.
We
were not meant to live in cities, in climates that our naked bodies are
not suited to, in lands where finding wild and healthy food isn't easy
and delightful. We are creatures of the jungle. There is no room for us
now, in the jungle, and we have forgotten how to live there anyway. And
within a few decades the jungle will all be gone in any case. If we
long for that home we will do so in vain.
A couple of years ago I wrote a passage, from the perspective of a duck, that I still get comments on from time to time:
I thought I would offer this blog's human readers some advice on how to be human. From what I can see from my pond, homo sapiens
isn't very good at it. I suspect that's because you've only been around
for three million years or so, unlike us longer-term residents who have
had more time to figure out the rules. Here are a few of them for your
edification:
- The flock is everything. A flock
is a tribe. A flock of ducks is known as a raft or a team. A flock or
tribe is much more than a family (in every sense) and nothing like your
human culture's towns or ethnicities or nations. The tribe teaches you
most of what you need to know to live successfully. You (plural) are
the tribe. Without the tribe you are nothing.
- Senses
are honed by exercising them, but you humans spend much of your life in
abstractions. Look until you really see what's happening and why it's
happening and why it matters. These are important learnings, not
minutiae. The devil isn't the only thing in the details. If you stop
listening, seeing, learning, you are no longer really alive.
- Know
your place. We are all part of a web, a mosaic, and we all travel, but
ultimately we have our own place, our 'home'. If you're not totally
connected with everything and every creature that is part of your
place, then it isn't your place. If you don't have a place, then you
don't yet really exist. A house is not a place, though if it's open it
can be part of one. A mind is not a place.
Study
us ducks, or even your cat and dog companions, and you will learn more
about teams and tribes, about how to 'come to your senses', about the
meaning of home, and about how to really belong in this world, far more
than you will ever learn in books and classrooms and blogs and the
workplaces where you meaninglessly slave away your lives.
I could tell you much more, but that's enough for now. As your T.S. Eliot says, Human kind cannot bear very much reality.
When
I wrote this, I had been sitting quietly at the edge of my wetland
home, watching the ducks and imagining what they could say to me if
only I understood their language. And I began feeling 'homesick'. Not
the nostalgia for the sanitized, idealized past, in the place I grew
up. Not the insecure yearning for a simpler, secure,
responsibility-free existence. Rather, a longing for a place I had
never known, calling to me.
My current home is a lovely place,
one that I leave as rarely as possible and spend as much time as
possible exploring and learning more about. It is my connection to this
current home that allows me to hear the call of my true home, in some
faraway jungle that exists only in my imagination and in my bones and
in my genetic code, my intuition. I can only describe it as a joyful
ache, because the mere thought of it, and what I, and others for whom
it is also home and with whom I am meant to be living, would be doing
there, if only we could make our way forward to that place, makes me
smile.
I am very content with my current home. It is the best
home that one could hope to find in this terrible, crowded modern
world. It has allowed me to discover a great deal about myself and what
it means to be human, and alive. And it has enabled me to
Let-Myself-Change. But it is not my true home, and much of the learning
I ache for is not possible here or anyplace that is left for humans to
choose to live.
This is what makes me despair most about our
future. With all the challenges we face in this century, we are not
very well equipped to know what we must do, because we are so
disconnected from the only place, our true home, from which such
knowledge can come. We can, of course, adapt to any place, learn to
call any place home; that is the great strength of our species. But in
that adaptation so much learning and knowledge and capacity is
inevitably lost. Even indigenous peoples -- who appreciate this far
more than most, and more than I, lucky as I am to have found a
wonderful half-way surrogate home -- cannot really know what must be
done. And as they, and we, become further displaced, again and again,
by what we strangely call ‘progress’, that knowledge fades even further
from our grasp. We may call these astonishing places ‘home’, but we do
not belong here.
Most of the very bright people I know have
spent all their lives in cities, and when I speak to them about this it
is as if I were speaking a foreign language. They have no idea what I
mean. Soon, this will be true for all of us. We will have such
knowledge as the world has never seen or imagined.
But it will
not be the knowledge we need to be human, to be who we really are. We
will have lost the final compass that could have shown us, at last, the
way home.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
