5.4.2009
6:15pm
I’ve been thinking a lot about Native Americans, land, systems of organizing people, personal and collective heritage… well it’s a lot of stuff that’s not easy to list out. I’ll start with a Wendell Berry essay I read recently called The Body and the Earth, taken from his book “The Unsettling of America.”
In this essay, he talks about rites of passage, wilderness, and what it means to be human. The point of bringing all that up, of course, is to provide a meaningful critique of American culture. Rites of passage, he says, are a human tradition by which an individual faces his or her smallness (really mankind’s smallness) in relation to the created order and then comes out with a better understanding of mankind’s place in it all. Another way to say it is that one goes into the wilderness to face death and be reborn.
His point is that we don’t have any wilderness left; therefore, we cannot place ourselves meaningfully within creation. Rather than measure ourselves in relation to nature, we measure ourselves according to the manufactured world. By disconnecting ourselves from the earth, we have made it that much harder to understand what it means to be human. Thus, we further disconnect ourselves as we build a society centered on industry and information.
Reading this essay made me think about the couple days I spent in the Sierra Nevadas last summer. I’ve never understood why being in nature stirs me like it does, but part of it, I’ve come to realize, is because nature itself is counter-cultural.
Let me explain.
The environment which shapes our way of living and thinking and understanding our experiences is contrary to the natural order. Therefore, alone in nature, you have to understand yourself through a different rubric. You are not only removed from the modern infrastructure, but also the modern mindset.
The things around you are foreign. They do not depend on gasoline. They are not producing anything to market or sell. They were not put in place by a human thinking human thoughts. A tree does not measure its progress as it grows. An ecosystem does not study itself to figure how to maximize profit.
To be isolated in nature is to dwell in a realm not dominated and shaped by man's ambitions.
Technological advances in the last couple centuries and urbanization have created a world where a lot of people live their entire lives farther removed from nature than ever. We mostly live, as Berry says, in the world we have created. Basically everything we come into contact with has been fashioned by other people, most of it by some kind of business.
Just sitting here looking around my bedroom, I see products brought to me by Shwin, Dell, Work ‘n Sport, Basic, Bic, Morgan, Panasonic, Mirra, and a bunch of others. We forget that all the stuff these companies use to build their products comes from the earth, one way or another. Sometimes, we even forget this about the grocery companies!
Someone told me the other day that scientists have figured out how to grow meat! Imagine that! A slimy chunk of meat sitting under a plastic bubble in some lab, growing from the tubes stuck into it!
No wonder it felt so strange to spend two days by myself in the mountains last year—away from the sight and smell and sound of all our crazy inventions. No wonder if felt foreign to a mind shaped by such a conundrum from 23 years! We have so removed ourselves from the natural realm and the humility and wisdom it holds for us, that is feels un-natural to spend any significant amount of time within it.
Jeepers…
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