Beltane\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Last Frost Moon<\/p>\n
“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.” – Albert Camus<\/p>\n
Dogs behave like dogs.\u00a0 Ticks like ticks.\u00a0 Ravens steal.\u00a0 Osprey fish.\u00a0 Shark keep moving.\u00a0 Even the heart beats, the liver and the kidney detoxify, the stomach and the gut digest and eliminate.\u00a0 The nose smells.\u00a0 The ear hears.<\/p>\n
We are the only creatures who, at a super-organism level, can refuse to be what we are.\u00a0 It is both our glory and our damnation.\u00a0 When we resist the impulse to violence, the credo of self first and the will to domination we become creatures of wonder, covered with grace and filled with light.\u00a0 When, though, we take more than we can eat, steal more than we need from mother earth, use our evolved brain to imprison other creatures when we do not need them for food, then we walk to the mouth of the River Styx and throw ourselves in Charon’s boat.<\/p>\n
Here is the first and greatest sin, perhaps the unforgivable sin.\u00a0 We imagine ourselves apart from nature, as unique and special beings, exempt from evolutionary history and immune to natural consequences.\u00a0 While it is true that our great technical and scientific skill seems to partition us off in our own special province, it is not so.\u00a0 Why not?\u00a0 Read an article about peak oil.\u00a0 Consider the consequences of peak water.\u00a0 Look at the struggle to find precious and rare metals, needed for sophisticated electronic devices.\u00a0 It leads the Polymet Corporation to the conclusion that not only could they find them in our wonderful northeastern Minnesota, they must mine them.\u00a0 Must.\u00a0 Or else.\u00a0 What?\u00a0 No more cell phones, laptops, tablets?<\/p>\n
Consider the moment of peak rare earths and metals.\u00a0 What then.\u00a0 Mother earth only has a certain cache of elements and their combinations, a cache configured in the fires of solar fusion and flung out in the processes that created our solar system and our world.\u00a0 We do not, can not, make more copper, barium, lithium, nickel.\u00a0 What gives corporations the arrogant assumption that they can use this store of minerals for their own private purpose?\u00a0 What gives humanity the temerity to arrogate to our uses all the fossil fuels, all the stored carbon, all the metals gathered in mother earth’s body?\u00a0 If this question seems naive, then ask how extinction might feel, extinction because we refuse to recognize our limits and our real location in the community of creatures and the world of things?<\/p>\n
So, I invite you to go outside this memorial day weekend and find a flower, a tree, a bird, a dog.\u00a0 Sit with them for a while.\u00a0 Notice if they try to take more than the universe has allocated for their use?\u00a0 Notice how they appreciate the water, the sun, the sky, a friend.\u00a0 Then watch one of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Beltane\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Last Frost Moon “Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.” – Albert Camus Dogs behave like dogs.\u00a0 Ticks like ticks.\u00a0 Ravens steal.\u00a0 Osprey fish.\u00a0 Shark keep moving.\u00a0 Even the heart beats, the liver and the kidney detoxify, the stomach and the gut digest and eliminate.\u00a0 The nose smells.\u00a0 … Continue reading An Unforgivable Sin?<\/span>