Animals are
smart. Not school-smarts (unless you are thinking of fish), just naturally gifted,
the product of evolution’s intelligent design (I’ll make an exception for Irish
Setters and other examples of not-so-intelligent human design.) Consider the wild
birds who visit our garden for the late-late harvest. It was a good year for
For all my
ignorance, I’ve at least learned that these birds will also eat the bugs that
eat our garden, birds whose songs mask the distance-muffled rushing of the
freeway. So they get seeds in the feeder and apples for dessert. But when they
get greedy and start in on a new
My cat is
smart. She knows how to hide in the deepest recesses of the big closet when my
daughter brings her wild Utah Border Collie/Blue Heeler mutt into town. Utah
Sid is coyote smart, and since she can’t keep her mind sharp on the heels of
sheep, she herds sticks with a maniacal focus that would make any Zen master
proud. But how smart was Tatiana the Tourist-eater? Was it her instinct, a hard-coded
blood lust? Was it revenge, a metaphoric warning to humanity? Did Carlos Souza die
for Homo sapiens’s sins, for our destroying the
tiger’s home and taking her prisoner for our holiday amusement? Is Tatiana
better off dead than living without liberty? Must the human race die so that
wild animals may live, so the Garden of Eden can be reborn?
Wow… dark
thoughts for sunny December day. It must be a northern hemisphere thing, going
dark at the year’s end. It must be different down below the Tropic of
Capricorn. But alas, even the Aussies are bummed, despite their abundance of sunny
December sunshine. Drenched in unprecedented drought, they are beginning to
suffer a deep sadness eerily similar to that felt by indigenous populations who
have been evicted from their ancestral lands. The people of Oz are being wrenched
away from the nature they know, not by troops and trains, but by a shifting
climate. Crops are dying and water is rationed, but more significantly, the
plants and animals that defined their homeland are disappearing. Thanks to
Australian scholar Glenn Albrecht, there is new word for this phenomenon: “solastalgia”. According to one online source, solastalgia combines “solacium
(solace), nostos (return home) and algos (pain) to connote a yearning for that which comforts
and relieves distress in the face of desolation of one’s home space or
territory.” Today’s paper, front page: “Climate change could transform
Message to
Presidential candidates: it’s the climate, stupid! Terrorism, health care,
immigration, energy, the cost of Cabernet… pick your issue and tell us how it
won’t get worse if we kick out the foundation supporting the entire human
enterprise. Tell us, God dammit!
I’m trying
to be smart. I’m trying not to break my toes on the foundation supporting the
entire human enterprise. Whenever I can I get up early and do my 30 minutes of vegitation outdoors, where I can witness the awakening day,
hear the birdy voices break the chilly silence. A few
weeks ago I heard a jaybird call, then flutter and scuffle not far from my
seat. I opened my eyes. He was holding an acorn in his beak (it was a good year
for
Note: Bruce will be taking leave
from his columnar duties for the next six months, to focus on the financial and
ecological greening of the Phoenix Theater (www.petalumaphoenix.org).
Stay in touch!
*[note to
Editor: deliberate misspelling of meditation]