John Darling

July 7, 2006

I’ll Shut Up — Right After This

Wealth that steals the soul

By John Darling
Tidings Correspondent

It’s Sunday afternoon and an unusual hubbub signals something strange in these backyards five blocks above the library. A bear is walking along, nibbling trees, ambling across a tennis court, finally ending up in its favorite cherry tree, where, as a dozen neighbors gather only 20 feet away to snap future screensavers, it nibbles, scarce casting a glance at us.

A week later, about midnight, same area, I see what looks like litter and my car passes over it, but at the last second I see it’s an owl. I stop and walk back. The small bird is laying on its side in the road. Another car is coming, so I take owl up in my hands and move to the side of the road. It soon stands up, taking hold of a finger, and checks out its world. It seems like an adolescent, eight inches tall. In time, it flies up on a big limb ten feet from me and sits there for an hour, longer.

We “talk,” which means we hang out in the same space and I listen and keep looking at its beauty and my little world is full of importance, but I don’t think this creature has much to say about it. But he and the bear are definitely saying, folks, you’re in our environment and you leave a big footprint.

As the cougar has many times, the bear makes the news, but for what? The news is that the bear has been living, mating and dying in these hills for tens of thousands of years, like all the other animals. “Bear goes in park,” so shouts the news. Well, folks, she got there first, by many millennia. The real news is: humans get here, wipe out buffalo, wolf, grizzly, Indians, build urban thing, put up fences, force animals to cut new trails, put lots of yummy garbage by the curb every seven days.

A study of the cave art that went on in Europe for 20,000 years shows our distant ancestors painted animals almost exclusively — few representations of humans and none of gods. Talking about this, we wonder if humans saw that all possible attributes of the sacred — fast, fierce, graceful, determined, wise, loyal — were covered by all the animals. Whatever quality you could learn about or offer devotion to, there it was, galloping, flapping, swimming, crawling before your eyes in plentiful nature, in numbers vastly larger than human numbers. God ‘r’ us, they said.

That’s reversed now and vast numbers of humans, living in an animal-phobic world, demonstrate the qualities — speed, power, wealth, importance, abundance, implacability, supposed wisdom, even global warming, if you want to stretch it — that we devote ourselves to in our gods.

Jenny, the cousin of an old friend, comes to erect her dome in my big backyard. She bicycles here, often towing her tiny daughter behind her in a two-wheeled cart. I once offered her a ride back up the hill. No, she says, “I’m strong.” She wants to leave the smallest carbon footprint possible.

At the Co-op juice bar, another woman says she’s looking for a place to put up her tipi and live. This is how most of us are going to be living in half a century, I can feel it. It’s how I started here three decades ago, in a tipi I made. But then came the lure of millions to be made in real estate and my whole generation bought it. But I’m tired with even the paperwork of it, which feels evil and is. I’m tired of this wealth that steals your soul. I loved waking up in that tipi to stir the embers and put twigs on the day’s new fire as the winter sun burst over the Siskiyous. I’m going back there. It’s not only good for the animals, it’s good for everything.

John Darling is an Ashland writer and rebirther – jdarling@jeffnet.org

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