Meditative Prose
Tuesday, 1 July 2008
The Storm Rolls In
Last week I started reading The Hobbit again, after finishing it (and the three books of The Lord of the Rings) not more than six months ago. Sometimes I feel bad about re-reading books when there are so many good ones out there waiting to be discovered — but I just can’t resist returning to books I’ve enjoyed in the past. There is a kind of comfort there, particularly with Tolkien’s books, that is an excellent remedy for the malaise that sneaks up on me now and again from dealing with our insane culture. It is such a breath of fresh air to meet characters who are fully engaged with the land they live on and travel over. However unrealistic elves, dwarves, hobbits, and wizards may be, at least they have an honest relationship with their world. I keep coming back to The Hobbit because the characters seem so much saner than the people I see every day.
The universe is truly awe inspiring to those who pay attention — and I include myself in that group only as a beginner. I am almost twenty-four years old. In another time, another culture, I would be a man by now, wise in the ways of the Earth and confident in my place here. As it is, I am still a child in that respect, and my learning has just begun — but I am comforted that I am at least aware of my deficiency and taking corrective measures. Sadly, very few people seem to think it is a problem if they don’t know the names of the trees they see, or where their food comes from, or which direction is north, or any constellations aside from the Big Dipper. How did this happen?
If I had to guess, I’d say that the emergence of the industrial economy made it unnecessary for people to know these things to survive. So we forgot. Now, food comes from the supermarket. North is an arrow on Google Maps. And constellations? Why look up when you can look at the TV?
I think we can all be forgiven for falling into the trap of the industrial economy. Even the folks who dreamed up this nightmare were merely seduced by their own greed — a common enough problem in any society. But now that we see what this system has done to us, what it is doing to the planet, we cannot be forgiven if we don’t try to reverse course. This way of life has turned us from wonder-filled beings, inhabitants of a magical world, into interchangeable, replaceable cogs in a machine designed to make rich people richer. It has turned the planet itself into a farm for “natural resources,” where nothing has value unless it can be sold. If we continue on this path (or is it a ten-lane highway?), we forget what it means to be human. We may even forfeit our right to exist.
Humanity is in its wild teenage years and, despite our youthful indiscretions, we could have a bright future ahead of us. Thanks to the exquisite human mind, we can understand and interact with our world in ways that other animals cannot (yet). Maturity for our species will mean using that power to master the art of living in harmony with the land, and protecting our common habitat for future generations of human and non-human life. The first step on that path is a bottom-up movement to resist the control structures that have been imposed on us and define our own destiny. It is already starting.
We have been looking up for a hundred thousand years or more. Why stop now?
