Courting Woe

Despite the title, what follows is not about woe. It is rather a brief telling of the difficult passage which faces all of us, and of the beautiful promise of what lies beyond. It is a song of hope, that we will not cling to what will be lost, and perish altogether in the attempt, but rather, like the small, brave, determined wildlife in the picture above, whose true name no human knows, we too will win through to a flowering which will mark for us a new and ageless beginning. For more about the origin and meaning of this tale, please see the other pages on this website. ________________________ Thus far during the fall of 2008 there is much concern in Los Angeles and many other human communities about an impending economic depression, which, it is widely proclaimed, may be unavoidable. This concern, and sometimes fear, I share with my family since we are still in this culture of madness and can surely be harmed by it. Another source of concern for our economic future, at the moment pushed to the edge of the stage by the more conventional threat to our money, homes, and jobs, is the idea and the reality of global warming. It is declared by many meteorologists and scientists in related disciplines that Mother Earth's atmosphere is becoming warmer, that we are the main cause of this warming, that it may greatly diminish our ability to feed, clothe, and house ourselves, and that this economic decline is already taking place. Global warming is denied by others, who claim either that it is not happening, or that there is nothing we can do about it. Carbon emissions into the air are not, they contend, a problem. While I am sometimes alarmed by these generally perceived dangers, I am even more concerned about the danger, and the opportunity, which is not perceived. This blindness nests not only in our unwillingness to hear that our planet incorporates us, and is organically aware, perceptive, and capable of acting. It is also, more intimately, sustained by our misunderstanding of the wild, and wilderness, which is her character and ours. This blindness and the behavior which it permits is the greatest danger confronting us today, the impending woe our stubbornness courts. Urban Life

Those who, like me, live in cities typically think that we are separate from wildness and do not live in a wilderness. Even in small cities, we see and hear and smell and feel about us the enormous collection of tools (including domesticated plants and animals) and people which have been gathered. The tools, we believe, largely serve and protect us, although some tools much more than others, serving some people much more than others. Apart from the polluted air, muted earthquakes, wild fires, occasional moderate floods, and small variability in the weather from season to season, most of us in Los Angeles are focused only on these tools and ourselves. Mother Earth is at best a sometime thing. The largest of these tools in L.A. are the freeways, made of concrete, steel, and tarmac, covering thousands of acres. Next are the skyscrapers, downtown in the City of Los Angeles, and in other urban centers scattered around the region. The flood-suppressing dams and the many ancillary miles of concrete or rock-walled flood prevention channels are also among the largest L.A. tools, though they are seen by relatively few Angelinos.

Also prominent are city streets, the many other buildings, sidewalks, cars and other vehicles, and the tools which inhabit the interiors of the buildings and vehicles, or are carried on our bodies, including clothes, purses, wallets, cell phones, keys, iPhones and similar devices. There are certainly zoos, parks and gardens, both public and private, and these are important to the lives of many Angelinos. However, the only wildness evident in such places, to most of us, is the threat from muggers and L.A. gang shooters. What almost all of us daily choose to ignore in Los Angeles is that even the deepest penetration of these tools into the planet – the oil wells of our region – reach less than .05% of the distance to her center, and the bottom of our other structures are far shallower. The most potent achievements of our cities and towns sit precariously within the top layer of Mother Earth's skin. Immediately beneath the sidewalks, gardens, streets, freeways and shining towers is a great, organic, unknowable wildness which is our intimate creator. Some have called her Turtle Island, but though turtles and tortoises are - like us - part of her, she is beyond our understanding, predictability, and control. It is truly a wonder and a continuing act of the most appalling foolishness that we do not sense the opportunity and in these days the impending woe upon which, just below our feet, we presume. We do not ignore the atmosphere, the outermost layers of her skin, within which we are imbedded even in cities. We do not because we cannot, though we attend more to the weather than we do to the consecutive instants of our lives in which we breathe this skin, this small portion of her flesh, and it sustains us. Our concern for air quality, the poverty of which in Los Angeles brings early death, is legitimate yet manages to see no corporate implications for this region's effect on Mother Earth and her response to that effect. Few of us think of air as earth, as inseparable from earth as mountains. And still fewer consider that the air, like soil and rock below, is guided by a form of sentience incomprehensible and yet active, the pleasure of which is essential to our own survival as communities and as a species. Mother Earth and her sense of our rightness, or enmity, through the earth beneath our structures and the air above embrace us each moment whether we know it or not. Were we to know ourselves and our role in her, there would be no cause for alarm. It is our powerful thrust through our tools to disconnect from this role which has brought us today to court woe. This is true in not only the urban areas of Los Angeles. It also informs our behavior outside our urban shields. On The Edge In L.A., many communities have been built away from the urban centers, on the edge of visible, undeniable, wilderness. This includes mountains, deserts, ocean, and combinations of mountain-desert or mountain-ocean. The earliest of these European-inspired communities were founded upon a local economic activity, usually mining or agriculture based on irrigation. These were conscious, willful, honest invasions of wilderness, and their inhabitants regarded the surrounding area as a resource to serve their own hopes of tool-defined prosperity. Many of these communities have abandoned or greatly reduced the original activities which were critical to their formation, as the mines were exhausted, food was imported from other regions, and the human population swelled, making water and land more expensive. For most of those now living on the edge in Los Angeles, the remaining wilderness is no longer an object of destruction, expected to yield up its substance for human consumption. It has become a place for play, or "recreation," immediately accessible to those on the edge while more distant and rare for central urbanites. It is also seen as a place of beauty and even wonder, and living next to the wild is for many very appealing. Those living near the ocean or in the higher elevations of the mountains also tend to have cleaner air. All of these features have made living on the edge relatively costly, except for residences in the deserts, where the air is especially poisonous and hot. The prices of homes in mountain or coastal locations tend to exceed the reach of most Angelinos.

Living on the edge in Los Angeles has also become costly in another sense, particularly for those in hilly or mountainous areas. During the dry season from April to November, uncontrolled fires in the adjacent forest and chaparral weakened by air pollution often consume houses and gardens. In the cooler rainy months of December through March, slopes thus denuded by fire can become mud slides which carry away other homes and the supporting earth. Mountains and hills denied sufficient vigorous living plant roots deliver floods to rivers and streams, and, where free from dams, can work their displeasure on homes within reach of the furious waters. And homes at the coast face the rare but real prospect of ocean storms and earthquake-enabled tsunamis. Despite these evident risks, living on the edge is coveted. Unhappily, the blessed – or lunatic – inhabitants of these places almost never grasp the terrible audacity of their choice.

This unsustainable audacity does not lie in the acceptance of potential disaster. It springs rather from the wild, loving, and yet eminently deadly presence of Mother Earth herself, who is not pleased by the baggage which they bring to the edge, nor by their inability to know her and the small agony which their attachment to the baggage, rather than to her or themselves, causes her to suffer. Their typical acceptance of the destruction their homes' creation brings to wilderness, and their comfort with the resulting dwellings, is intimately alarming to Mother Earth and her wild creatures who already suffer the larger disaster of nearby towns and cities. Their learned persistence in seeing the wilderness they may believe they love as a disassembled collection of individual if inspiring parts – rocks, streams, trees, agaves, hillsides, whole mountains, sky, birds, deer, mountain goats, wild flowers – and their deafness to her organic, vocal, purposeful, vastly energetic oneness, is a source for her, not of despair, but of a profound and unacceptable disappointment.

Those whose dwellings are at or near the beaches and cliffs which join the land and ocean are generally even less aware of the awe they reject, and the peril they court. Their backs are turned against the land, and they face an expression of the planet about which they are even more ignorant, their Mother's most potent gathering of her waters that we call in English the Pacific. Full of life among which we cannot abide, though we study it with much misguided effort, itself another expression of a far greater whole, those on its edge are still able to enjoy what they see, hear, and feel as a diminished collection of wonders, on the surface, in the shallows and the imagined deep.

They know that the ocean is strong and mysterious; but they allow themselves the fiction that their daily lives can be, are, largely independent of it. They have some sense of its power, but if they are not attending to it, the ocean for them becomes an occasionally difficult but generally pliant, willing, unobtrusive pet. That they are bound to it, and their lives and homes exist only with the Pacific's and more importantly Mother Earth's tolerance, is an overriding reality which their culture, and they, reject. They, human and so earth, do not realize that the waves striking the shore, which are also earth, are deciding the fate of the insensate humans rooted on its edge. Inside Wilderness

So far as I know, no one and certainly no group of people now live in and draw all their essential needs from any part of the Los Angeles wilderness. The current descendants of our region's original native peoples do not, although some of them live close to wilderness; and no one else living in Los Angeles has the knowledge, the natural tools, or the legal right, to do so. Almost all Angelinos who go into the wilderness today go as hikers and/or campers. There are scattered villages surrounded by wilderness, but their construction and durability depend upon contemporary tools of unnatural materials and strength which are a willful barrier against the encompassing wild, blocking the vulnerability and the inclusion which hiking and camping permit. Of course, a number of the residents in these villages hike in the wild when their other commitments allow. The ability to walk down the street and onto a hiking trail is one of the reasons why they are in the village. But even hikers and campers are courting woe. I am a hiker, usually solo, and I too do not, cannot, behave in the wild as Mother Earth expects from humans. I lack the tools, and the skills to make and use them. I lack the support of a community which is a part of wilderness. The very clothes which I wear when I hike have damaged the wild, during the extraction from earth of the materials which constitute them and through the machines used in their fabrication and marketing. To undomesticated creatures, they have an alien smell. None of us living in the prevailing Los Angeles culture are free of the harm it does. However, what I am able to do and cannot refuse to do when I hike is hear the earth, her one voice and the multitudinous voices of her creatures, as I rest in and move through the wild. I believe that all humans can do this. I do not mean our audible recognition of the wind in the trees, the movement of water in a stream, the cry of a hawk, the thunder as rain approaches, the whispering scurry of a lizard or the huff of a bear. All of these are wonderful, and all hikers and campers recognize these sounds on some level. What our culture and its antecedents have bred us to reject is the other creatures' and the planet's recognition of us in wilderness, as two-legged creatures which belong there as much as the others and yet have become uniquely dangerous intruders. Worse still, we reject not simply the fact of these responses but the active communication which they invite. In the presence of this vast community to which we belong but from which we have too long banished ourselves, we are expected to listen, hear, and understand as humans are able, and speak as humans are able. We are also expected to act with respect, acceptance of our vulnerability, and a restraint which our tools, made of metals, petrochemicals, other artificial materials, often with their own fabricated power sources, do not know. This invitation to join in the planetary song, and play our role in the almost infinite planetary dance, is offered in wilderness by all its creatures, at many levels. Each kind of tree, distant and nearby, recognizes us and responds. So does every bird, bush, stone, snake, mosquito, stream, and every other individual and group present. And overlaying, infusing, all of these distinct voices is that of Mother Earth herself. When we fail to accept the invitation, fail to hear it, fail to believe it is possible, we court woe. Hard Times and Paradise The U.S. and global economy may well be in for hard times in the weeks, months and years ahead. When in the 1980s I labored as a political economist for the Canadian churches (strange but true), I invited Canadians to consider this coming depression and its human causes and solutions. Few, too few, were interested in taking steps to prevent it, or prepared to ease the pain it will bring to billions of my species. I was not alone in speaking and writing about this now seemingly urgent subject, but again we were too few. Unhappily, the great majority of Canadians preferred to court economic woe, which offered itself in the form of ballooning mountains of unsustainable yet highly seductive debt. Today, among many others, Canadians and Angelinos are wed to this woe. These hard times, which are, some twenty years later, unfolding for almost all humans to see, fear, and struggle against, are no longer suspect. They have us by the throat. Nevertheless, it is widely agreed that to this woe there are limits, a bottom, and a rising back eventually to something like material prosperity. At least, this is what is expected. The woe we continue to court in our relations with Mother Earth is of quite a different order.

It is not that ignoring her as she is, and ignoring what she and her other wild creatures ask of us, will lead to a woe without end. It is not that from this woe, if we wed it, there is no release, no bottom, and no recovery. It is true that the disaster we are inviting, largely in ignorance, may end only with our deaths. It is certainly true that for most of us this woe requires a passage which we will not survive as humans. It is true for those of us who continue that most will need to understand prosperity, and delight, quite differently than now. Accepting our own human deaths as a stage in a much longer journey within her wilderness which we all, uniquely, take is but one part of this new, and ancient, understanding. Mother Earth will do us no harm, because we are flesh of her flesh and she is no masochist. Even if we wed and cling to the woe of our alienation from her and our assaults upon her, she will do us no harm. But we will be transformed, I hope as humans, and inevitably also through death into other streams in her creation. And when it is done, if we are not extinct, we will be vastly diminished. Our courting has already led us to this. We will also have returned home, admittedly with a history that makes us something other than our ancestors were before we began our worship of tools, our pursuit of human immortality, our flight from her natural garden. We will be taking up again our roles in her, rejoining boulders, wild flowers, coyote, sage, pines and the practically infinite unity of herself and her abundance.

We can only make this return gentle, however, if we see the woe which may come before, and turn from it. Waiting until she forces our conversion through a harvest of destruction wrought by earthquake, storm, drought, and other expressions of her manifest power is terribly foolish, far beyond the economic folly the fruit of which Los Angeles and the global economy are now reaping. How do we win this gentle return to her? She is looking for very practical steps away from tools and towards the wild, taken socially, by communities acting together in consensus and encompassing their region. In Los Angeles, one of the first of these steps is removing our large flood-suppressing dams. These dams are a powerful, clear and present barrier to wilderness welcomed by Angelinos, and a strong symbol to Mother Earth that we prefer separation and a fool's dominance. Personally, and in small groups, she offers us a less tangible but greater challenge which, if we respond, will inform our communities and begin our individual and social liberation. It is simple. Each day sense her with your whole self, listen for her creatures, seek the song which surrounds and invites us in every place, especially in wilderness, and join it. Consider that we currently survive, and can still flourish beyond our knowing, in an immensity of closely-related, intricately-bonded creatures who would recognize and welcome us as fellow children of Mother Earth, mortal as they, immortal as they, journeying in her, with her, through daily satisfaction and surprise and through endless adventure. Breathe with awareness, touch a tree, talk to a raven, walk beside a free stream, welcome the wind, sit with permission upon a stone, be grateful to those you eat and those who will eat you, and accept that in all these acts you are heard, and have much to hear in return. In doing this, you will be on the trails for which Mother Earth has made us. You will also be courting, not woe, but unimaginable joy in the planetary dwelling-place which today we call wilderness and tomorrow may, if we can become wise, call paradise.

Bill Luttrell, one voice of Mother Earth