Coming home means asking different, fearfully different, questions of ourselves - how to give back? how to contribute to the biosphere instead of merely taking, harvesting, feeding?
Even more simply, how do we recognize our fellow beings, how do we simply recognize their existence, in the midst of the ongoing destruction? It would be a small but important step simply to recognize, without sentimentality, hysteria, or other emotional excess, the existence of other beings on this planet as equals.
Yes, I am talking about animal rights, but also plant rights, and microbial rights as well. And the un-dodgeable fact that one must kill something to stay alive, that it goes on constantly, that something is being killed to feed you at this very moment, whether you are a vegan, fruitarian, breatharian or not. And, in that fact, if it can be faced squarely, which is not an easy thing even for someone like myself for whom it looms daily, is the beginning of a knowledge about living honestly on this Earth, as an animal among animals, a life enmeshed in life.
How to hold the terrible knowledge that life ineluctably feeds on life (unless one is a lithotrophic microbe) with an absolute respect for what one feeds on? How to refuse that little mental trick that makes it bearable - the one where one simply denies respect, denies existence to what one consumes? How to keep civilization from taking that question away? How to demand (and one must demand it mostly from oneself) that discomforting knowledge as a birthright, as one’s path to full citizenship on this Earth? How to keep demanding it day after day, not just as knowledge to play with in one’s head or talk about in prideful, vacuous debate, but to live and practice, to seek and ask questions about, to look for and value in the humblest of places?
How to stop idolizing the gleaming surfaces of polished glass, plastic, metal (this Mac I am writing on) and start idolizing the weeds and the trash-heap, the home-less and the broken, because they hold the key to being honest with ourselves, with finding the way of honesty, that way that does not throw anything “away” because there is no such place, and does not try to escape into some kind of childish fantasy of purity - of vegan blamelessness, or transcendent singularity (transformation into pure consciousness, really?)?
How to come home to the family of life? That humble, embarrassing, funny, imperfect but honest family that we thought we kissed off years ago.
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