The Nature of Reality

After being told that I might be out of touch with reality the other day, I had to do some thinking on that...........

I am sitting here at a computer, so not so awfully far out of touch, but we don't have cell phones because we don't want to have the crazy human world reaching out and touching us at any moment, like being on a leash. I don't like instant messaging either. Email I can answer when it is convenient for me.

Back to the idea of reality. The natural world supports the activities of the human world, but the human world, for the largest and pushiest part, objectifies the natural world and destroys it, as in eating themselves out of house and home. But many have been worshipping at the alter of humans being created in the image of a god who gave them dominion over the Earth. That seems very arrogant and self-serving to me. The kind of reality that relies on the destruction of it's support system has to be a foolish one.

Mother Earth does not need humans. But humans need Her, and have been using Her, and raping Her, and now She is angry and we are having extreme weather and devastating earth quakes and tidal waves. These are warnings from Mother Earth that we had better change our ways or suffer the consequences. Like a hoard of locusts out of the Middle East, we have spread the gospel by nearly annihilating Native Humans who had respect for Earth and all of it's peoples, knowing that each depended on the other's welfare. If the Native Humans couldn't be corrupted and saved by the gospel, then they were enslaved or pushed out, forbidden their own languages and religions, until most died of starvation or disease. Talk about killing the messengers!

The Creator designed the various peoples of Earth so that if all lived in balance then there would be enough to support them. Native Humans still knew that we were not above having to live according to this natural law. We now proceed with our greed at our own peril.

That, to me, is the reality of it. That is why I see all of Nature as being the image of the Creator, and I pay attention to the words of our Native Americans, as well as those of other Native Humans of the world. Theirs was the original understanding of our place on Mother Earth, and still the right, or sustainable one.

We are all relatives

Not since Native Americans, in these United States, have we of the industrialized world (to begin with, of mostly European extraction and Judeo-Christian background) seen the rest of the natural world as equals on this earth. We judge all others by our own standards of intelligence and physical nature. If a stone feels neither cold nor pain, can't speak and doesn't move, then it is not alive.

We might study a species or a specimen to learn everything about it, but not respect its integrity as a type of person from another culture, from whom we could learn something valuable beyond the scientific facts, or worse: What can this species do for the human race?

I have always loved the natural world. I grew up in small-town America, and from the time I was old enough I was out in the woods. I have always collected bits and pieces of the things I found out there that appealed to me, but it is only recently that I have learned that these inhabitants of the wild are all other peoples. They don't communicate with words, as I would expect, judging by human standards, but by catching my attention with pieces of themselves. They have no mechanism for speech as we know it, though one could compare the wind in the branches of a tree, or in it's leaves, as a form of speech the same way that our breath, causes speech as it goes through our vocal cords and is shaped by our mouths.

Now I use these gifts as the materials of my art, which as it turns out, is more of a collaboration, than something I can call my own. I no longer know how much of an idea for a piece of artwork is mine, or how much of it might have been that of a tree who wanted to express itself in a different way through me, and left a piece of itself for me to find that planted the seed of an idea.

I have already described how Tinker and I can carry on a conversation even though he only whispers a word occasionally. Other people who come to know animal companions very well will know this too. But those who really respect their companions will learn from them as beings with their own wisdom and will naturally think of them as having rights much like any other human they know. Dogs and cats can do spectacular things like predicting when a human might have a seizure or if one has cancer.

Who knows of what else dogs and others are capable? We as humans should be humbled in the face of such abilities possessed by other creatures, and we should have a great deal of respect for them, seeing them not as property or as inferior life forms but as partners in life.

Now extend this to the natural world about you. Suddenly you as a human are not the center of the universe, but just another strand in that Web of Life. You are connected to all of the other strands, and the whole web only works as well as the integrity of all of those strands. As Chief Seattle said in 1852: "Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."