Our bodies are both all we have and everything we could want. We are alive and we get to be alive. There is joy on the surface of the skin waiting for sunlight and soft things (both of which produce endorphins, so yes: joy). There is the constant, stalwart sound of our hearts. Babies who are carried against their mothers’ hearts learn to breathe better than those who aren’t. There is the strength of bone and the stretch of muscle and their complex coordination. We are a set of electrical impulses inside a watery environment: how? Well, the nerves that conduct the impulses are sheathed by a fatty substance called myelin―they’re insulated. This permits “agile communication between distant body parts.” Understand this: it’s all alive, it all communicates, it makes decisions, and it knows what it’s doing. You can’t possibly fathom its intricacies. To start to explore the filigree of brain, synapse, nerve, and muscle is to know that even the blink of your eyes is a miracle.
Our brains were two million years in the making. That long, slow accretion doubled our cranial capacity. And the first thing we did with it was say thank you. We drew the megafauna and the megafemales, sculpted and carved them. The oldest known figurative sculpture is the Goddess of Hohle Fels, and 40,000 years ago someone spent hundreds of hours carving Her. There is no mystery here, not to me: the animals and the women gave us life. Of course they were our first, endless art project. Awe and thanksgiving are built into us, body and brain. Once upon a time, we knew we were alive. And it was good.
(Lierre Keith, ‘The Girls and the Grasses’, Deep Green Resistance News Service, https://dgrnewsservice.org/resistance-culture/radical-feminism/lierre-keith-the-girls-and-the-grasses/)
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| Venus of Hohle Fels, carved from mammoth ivory, dated to 35,000–40,000 years ago (Source: Wikimedia, by Ramessos) |
a wonder indeed...how far we have come from that early sense of wonder. not all of us: those who pay attention---the children, the biologists and ecologists who love and revere what they study, the poets, the artists, the kindlier gardeners, the writers minutely observing, those who are still at least partially enmeshed in the great Matrix, anyone who knows Nature as home---they still know, and give thanks. often i think that what we need more than anything is a great remembering...
ReplyDeleteThat we most certainly do.
DeleteWe are 'fearfully and wonderfully made', aren't we? Amazing!
ReplyDeleteThank you, Claire. And I forgot to say last time you commented, it is lovely to have you back after your absence. I hope all has been well with you. x
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