Wise Words: We Need Animals In Order To Breathe

… the reason people once could talk to animals was not because people understood a language that we have since forgotten, but because we and the animals were and are aspects of the same being(s). This is what we have forgotten or forsaken.

The repression of our knowledge of this original kinship with animals constituted the primal moment of splitting that has enabled humans to erroneously imagine ourselves as separate from what we have corralled off and designated as “nature.” This splitting has led some of us to think that we can destroy “nature” without destroying ourselves. This initial moment of fission made possible all subsequent ones, including rape, atomic fission, gene splicing, vivisection, and so on.

The word animal is derived from a Latin word meaning “breath” or “soul.” Many human cultures, particularly my own, participate (along with our machines) in the torture and annihilation of animals. Yet as we do, it is our very souls that we are sacrificing. One of the great dangers of deforestation is the attendant depletion of the oxygen content of the atmosphere. According to Alice Walker, humans are “connected” to animals as closely as we are to trees. She warns us that by destroying animals we lose “the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.” Without wild animal life, “‘Magic’ intuition, sheer astonishment at the forms the Universe devises in which to express life—will no longer be able to breathe in us.” 

… it is only when we are living in harmony with “familiar values”—when there is a communion between animals and people—that we can work magic.

(Jane Caputi, Gossips, Gorgons & Crones: The Fates of the Earth, Bear & Company, Santa Fe, 1993, pp. 152–153)

Capturing The Sky

Capturing the sky in a net as large as universes, complexity within its folds, its weave of colours, forms—light and energy made flesh. The sensuous is the sacred, the mother-matter that is all, and we dwell within Her body like cells of Herself, our own fire mingling with Her’s; our hearts beating with Her’s, blood flowing like rivers, ocean tides, a great breath—in and out, within and without, over and over, inside Her eternity. A constant unfolding is what She is, the change that never ends, the process that draws forth life, and beckons death, and makes the Wheel of Fortune turn, revolving on its axis of Love—the energy of Life, the gravity that merges all together. To hold love in your hands, to feel it in your bones, surging through your blood—a love-stream—is to know true joy and wonder, to have truly lived. To feel is to know, to have words of truth on your tongue. Truly, there is nothing more important than the language of life, its sensuous fabric.

Rivers run and free themselves from the constraints that bind them. They flow where they will, at will, and into my heart, which is nourished by the gush of liquid life, the purity that writes across the landscape in curvaceous lines, the serpent-body of which there is a small part in everything—the double-helix, the blueprint for life, held inside every body, to twist and dance through time, spiralling around in a lover’s dance, rhythmic and Eros-filled, pulsing inside flesh, blood, bone. The breath is a bond that opens us to All, that suffuses our bodies in invisible connection, with each other, and the Divine. Crossing boundaries is how magic happens, to influence events, to know what is beyond us—to perceive the ancient symbiosis of Life. Perception becomes Truth: the sensuous world is what leads us to wisdom. Small beings dart within us—the birds of emotion—winged and glorious, bathed in beauty. What is is sacred, it is whole, and we carry it within ourselves, as it carries us within itself—that great body of reality—full of storm and calm, a terrible beauty, that enlivens and nourishes. We live and die inside Her flesh—and there is nothing more nor less.

Singing the Sky, felt tip pen and gold pigment ink (2018)

Wise Words: Two Dimensions Of The Same Thing

The way humans lived before civilization was a lot less work, because the planet naturally produces, naturally renews itself. It offers itself to us not only for food, but in the sense of offering wonders, and its presence. There’s none of this separation of the sacred and the secular in the natural world, both spiritual and physical well-being are offered at the same time, because—and this is what is most important—the physical and the spiritual are two dimensions of the same thing.

(Thomas Berry, quoted in Derrick Jensen, How Shall I Live My Life?: On Liberating the Earth from Civilization, PM Press: Oakland, California, 2008, p. 49; my emphasis in bold)