If you were ever to ask me what inspires me to write, I’d have to say that I have few muses.
I’d very quickly explain to you that the many wonderful dogs I’ve known are an inspiration. The ghosts of at least two dogs loom heavily in every word I write here.
But in the end, they aren’t my true muses.
My true muse is nature.
I grew up in the middle of a forest. In many parts of the world, people plant trees around their homes as a way of landscaping, but in most of West Virginia, a home is just a place where the trees got cleared off enough to have a yard and a driveway.
I spent my childhood catching lizards and nonvenomous snakes, filling jars with insects of every description, and spending lots of time in the woods with dogs.
You can learn a lot from reading about the natural world and watching nature programs on television, but I had hands-on experience.
And that’s an education unto itself.
All around me were people who had an even better education than I did.
My grandpa admired people who had a lot of experience hunting and trapping. He referred to this as having “a Ph.d. in the woods.”
I don’t think I’ll ever have more than a mere associate’s degree.
But that’s more than most people in the West will have.
Most don’t even have an eighth grade education.
When I was a believer, I saw God in nature.
It was how reconciled all the dense scriptures I read.
There was a God because in nature I saw His handiwork.
Now I know that nature is nothing more than a compilation of catastrophes. There is no intelligence to it.
It is merely life that has survived horror after horror. It is not so much survival of the fittest as it is survival of the luckiest. Did my phenotype make me more likely to survive or reproduce?
But there is something beguiling about the products of the horrors.
The truth is that I am as much a product of those horrors as a mouse or a wolf or an oak tree.
My species is the great contriver. From the time we began to shape flint tools to this modern era when I can have conversations with Facebook friends in Europe. we have contrived, rebuilt, and reshaped.
It has created a kind of delusion– perhaps the most destructive delusion of it all.
It’s the delusion that we are not part of nature, but the truth is everything that we own and everything we use came from nature.
Materials get manufactured and refined, but it all comes from nature.
But because we have advanced so much and so quickly, we think that we’re above nature.
In our minds, we’ve become as supernatural as the Christian God, but we’re still mortals.
We’re still animals, and no matter what we do, the resources of the planet do have some finite nature to them.
I think that this may be one reason who people are so hesitant to accept evolution. If one accepts that man evolved, then one has to accept that man is a part of nature and that somewhere along the line, we have to deal with natural realities.
We can’t continue to treat the ocean like a giant septic tank. We can’t continue to fill the atmosphere with all that carbon dioxide.
But in order to fix those problems, we’re going to have to change the way we live– maybe even change the expectations we have for what a good standard of living actually is.
And that’s an anathema to our species. For tens of thousands of years, we’ve used our brains to make ourselves more comfortable, more entertained. and more withdrawn from the simple realities of nature.
But we can withdraw for only so long, and at some point, things will fall apart.
It won’t be an Apocalypse. It’s not a doomsday scenario, but at some point, it will just be harder for us to live the lives we want.
And then we’ll wonder why we didn’t try to fix things sooner.
But even with all that high-minded talk, nature is ultimately my true muse for another, much more selfish reason:
It’s never let me down.
I know that there is no compassion in nature. When Werner Herzog described the jungle as obscene, he was talking about the simple reality that nature is the compilation of horrors.
These are the same life shaping horrors that I described earlier, but they are nothing compared to my utter disappointment in my own species.
This is the contriving and conjuring species.
This is the species that can think about doing big things, and it can think about its own legacy and role in the world and in the universe.
And I grew up in the nation that did big things. We were founded upon Enlightenment principles. Empiricism was meant to form our decisions on how to rule ourselves.
But we’ve long since kicked empiricism to the curb. If it’s not fundamentalist Christianity then it’s New Age hokum.
It’s really any excuse to avoid critical thought. If we thought critically, we’d see the problems very clearly, and then our consciences would require us to do something.
Now there certainly are some bright green shoots that give me some hope. The re-election of Obama and the growing rationalist and skeptic community among the younger generation certainly do give me hope.
But there is still too much darkness about.
Over the past month or so I’ve thought of Camus’s basic philosophical question.
That question is very simple, if a bet stark and disconcerting.
Why don’t you commit suicide?
I didn’t write this to shock anyone, but it’s a fundamental question.
And it’s one that is very hard for nonbelievers to answer.
I don’t see a lot of hope for this world, and I also see very little purpose in my own life. Further, even if there were a purpose, it would eventually end. Judging from my own family medical history, it would either end with cancer eating out the last bit of my organs or the Alzheimer’s destroying my brain bit by bit.
Neither is worth looking forward to.
The only answer I have is that I, like all living things, derive from ancestors who had strong instincts for survival.
I never had to worry about Smilodon or short-faced bears, but my ancestors had forage in world full of such fell beasts.
If they wanted to eat meat, they had to kill. They just couldn’t pass the buck to someone else by going to a grocery store.
Even my more immediate ancestors lived in much this way.
I am only three generations removed from people who essentially lived like the Siberian in the taiga.
During the Great Depression, ruffed grouse provided much of the poultry my great grandparents ate.
They lived in a world in which fascism was on the rise, and fascism was worse for human dignity than anything current proposed by the religious right of today.
They survived it.
And so shall I.
I will survive because my instincts says I should live.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
There is no more meaning to existence than this.
My muse provides balm to my wounds.
And Ill use this space to celebrate her.
That’s really all I can do.
Don’t pin too much hope on Obama. Despite gaining a second term I don’t see him overcoming your powerful gun and Israel lobbies nor dealing with your banksters, those crooks largely responsible for the sub prime scandal which precipitated the world financial crisis in 2008. Spare a little thought also for the abused people of Palestine. No good them looking to Obama or America for any justice in this world.
Hi Peter; The election of Obama was more about rejecting the insanity represented by the GOP’s far right fringe, than about endorsing O’s world view or policies (NDAA, the Drone Program, TPP, Israel & the Palestinians, our continuance in AfPakistan after destroying UBL, etc.)
If our political system had offered a practical and sane 3rd choice, most of us would have opted for it. (We did have sane 3rd choices, but none of them were politically practical, they would have been throw-away votes. We couldn’t afford to throw them away this time around, no matter how strong a statement that might make.)
My take on him is that he is essentially a decent man operating in an indecent system.
I knew fully well he couldn’t change everything, but he’s done some good. We’re out of Iraq, and we have a health care reform bill that will insure more people. It’s not perfection but it’s the best he could have gotten from our political system.
I don’t like the drone strikes at all. I don’t like NDAA, and of course, I want justice for the Palestinian (though electing Hamas wasn’t the most intelligent thing for them to do on their behalf).
But our political economy and political system are just weighed against those things and it will take lots of struggle to get those things righted.
Electing Obama means that you get some of the progressive ideals into practice, whereas if you let Romney or anyone else win, you get nothing.
I’d rather not get nothing.
The progressive movement is a long game. It can’t all be brought in over night. It’s also a cultural war that will take the rest of our lives to complete.
Retrieverman… Well written.
Yes, well written indeed.
Now that I’m in the fall of my life, I consider the big question more often. My answer is that I truly love life. And though I despair of humanity as a whole, I value and enjoy people as individuals, not to mention dogs and wildlife and flowers and dark chocolate and good beer and the smell of August rain on a hot road…well you get the picture. Is there ugliness and brutality, especially among our fellows? Yes, but there is also still so much beauty…beauty that will still be here well after my atoms have been recycled.
I’m reminded of a foraging hike I took many years ago. My kids were off doing other sportsy-type things, but Frank, a neighbor’s young son, raised in a stout Roman Catholic family, had asked to go along with me so I still had good company. As we were walking, he asked me why I never went to church. I looked around at the trees soaring above, at the water spread out before us, at the tasty natural buffet we were gathering, and said, “But Frank, this is my church. I attend it almost every day!” Frank, now a family man w/ 2 young kids, ended up getting a degree in marine biology (his parents will half-ruefully tell you that it was my influence.) He now works as a field biologist, daily worshipping in that very same ‘church’. Just that one triumph in itself would justify my existence…and its only one of many.
Truly a great share from your life massugu.
“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
This is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
this is the way the world ends
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
As a species, I think we have two choices: we can go on reproducing without care, and watch our rights and resources disappear, or, we can institute strict reproduction limits for several generations, bring the population down to a sustainable size, and then have a good life for everyone. I made my choice, I had no children.
I had one biological child, he has none.
One is better than 2, or 3, or 4….
From what I remember from a course in leadership that I took some 10 years ago, for each human, there is a ‘Circle of concern’ and then a ‘Circle of influence’.
‘Circle of concern’ can be a big one: For me it includes, as Ariana Huffington would say to Obama, “we have become a third world America. Please do something to bring it back to the first world”. It also includes concerns of increased influence of lobbies in the White House, ranchers and conservationists fighting it out over the status of grey wolves in northern Rockies, getting rid of Talibans from my country of origin, getting rid of religious right from governing various countries, educating people to get out of extremist / fundamentalist religious mindset, etc.
However, it is the ‘Circle of Influence’ that I focus on: Funding conservationists, campaigning for liberal / democratic political parties in the USA and Canada, influencing those who can influence others (working on the philosophy of 6 degrees of separation), reading other blogs to gain knowledge to better present may case to people who I need to influence, so on and so forth.
Due to our bigger ‘Circle of Concern’, we should never give up hope and go in despair because that would be a selfish thing to do. We should chose our battles carefully to work better on our ‘Circle of Influence’. We form a very important link to the chain that is and will bring positive change.
Here’s a bit of though-provoking science for ya’ll:
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2012/bio12009/bio12009.pdf?WT.mc_id=USNSF_124
If you haven’t watched “Richard Dawkins – Neil deGrasse Tyson :The Poetry of Science” on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGenk99YDwY). Not only is it extremely instructive its also very entertaining–Dr. Tyson is a stitch!
Yes, that’s the sub-arctic Wild Honey Wolf out there in the woods .