We Expect Too Much of Ourselves, Continued

What impact does all this human-is-all-that-matters meme have on our relationships with each other?

We seem to have a genetic proclivity to seek out otherness.  Here's what David Abram says about this:

Humans are tuned for relationship.  The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils--all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness.  This landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams--these breathing shapes are our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate.  For the largest part of our species' existence, humans have negotiated relationships with every aspect of the sensuous surroundings, exchanging possibilities with every flapping form, with each textured surface and shivering entity that we happened to focus upon.  All could speak, articulating in gesture and whistle and sigh a shifting web of meanings that we felt on our skin or inhaled through our nostrils or focused with our listening ears, and to which we replied--whether with sounds, or through movements, or minute shifts of mood.  The color of sky, the rush of waves--every aspect of the earthly sensuous could draw us into a relationship fed with curiosity and spiced with danger.  Every sound was a voice, every scrape or blunder was a meeting--with Thunder, with Oak, with Drangonfly.  And from all of these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished.

- David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, Vantage Books, 1997, page ix

What happens when we attempt to satisfy all our relationship needs via the human realm?  What expectations do we bring to our relationships with each other--expectations we have about ourselves and expectations we have about other humans?  What are the consequences of exclusive intimacy with each other and with those animals we've humanized and incorporated into our families?

I've heard a story that in China the nandina plant (aka heavenly or sacred bamboo) was once planted outside every home, so that the head of the household could go to it to complain and share his problems.  When I was a child, there were certain moods (usually a sadness or acute aloneness, I think) that could only be addressed by my climbing a tree.  Have you ever found in yourself the very real feeling-need to be outside, to see the mountains, to see and feel and smell and taste the ocean, to be in the  woods?

Does this not sound (and feel) intimate, when you stop and think about it?

It's a warm Summer's day.  You're lying on your back in an open meadow.  The grasses are tickling your bare legs and arms, as are the insects traversing your skin.  The earth supports and holds you.  You take in all that there is with your nose and your eyes and ears and skin.  The clouds drift slowly across the sky.  Insects and birds move through the space between you and those cottony forms of earth breath.

You feel, smell, hear and see all this.

Does it occur to you that what you see also sees you?  What you smell also smells you?  What you hear also hears you?  What you touch and feel also feels you?  You feel your body against the grass, against the earth.  Does not the grass and the earth also feel you?  Do the insects and birds also see you?  Might not the clouds, which are in part vapor of your own breath, also have some awareness of you watching them float through your field of vision?

Notice how difficult it is to allow that other entities (things that exist) have awareness, too, especially those which, in our inveterate anthropomorphizing, we call inanimate (without life.  Really?  Without life?  What incredible arrogance!).

If we don't allow ourselves to know this, to allow this reality to be real to us, then we continue to cut ourselves off from the awareness that our lives are intimate with all else with which we share this planet.  We bring all these very real and biological needs to our relationships with each other, both casual and otherwise.  We become incapable of real intimacy with each other because our needs are too great.  We are not allowing ourselves to be nourished by the all the otherness which surrounds us and instead continue to suckle at the sore and weary breast of our emaciated version of humanity.

Also, and perhaps all the more, all the others which are our family here are starving for the lack of us and our intimate awareness and conscious reciprocity.