We must make ourselves indegenes, natives returning to a lost landscape still somewhere in our hearts and minds, the Paleolithic ideal, a country of abundant wildlife, rich in fruitful native vegetation, pure water, and fresh air.The italics and bold above are mine.
It's very difficult for us to step outside the literalness of our culture. I don't think Chipeniuk is suggesting we all go back to some previous time and place, a time and place that clearly does not exist in most of the world any more and could not exist for many of us, given how many of us there are now.
The emphasis I would place in asking the questions we're all contemplating here is how do we allow ourselves to once again fall in love with the earth, our one and only home, the home we share with countless other expressions of life that are not human? How do we follow the genetic drive within us to be on, in, and of this earth? How do we allow, once again, that dying is part of living? We kill to eat. We will one day be eaten. How do we allow ourselves to seriously question what it is we really need?
OOOOH! Now I think I get it--instead of posing a question to arrive at a solution, you're posing the question for pondering. So from the other end of the solution continuum, I'm thinking: "Yo ponderers, fear not, the solution will impose itself."
ReplyDeleteProblem is: maybe we should be fearful, an awful lot of us may not like the solution Gaia imposes.
--Kay
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ReplyDelete