Reading to accompany this blog: Chapter Two of “The Wizard and the Prophet” by Charles C. Mann and the essay “Staying Alive” by Mary Oliver
“As I watched the flocks, day after day, against gray skies, against blue skies and blue sea or, more often, the dark green sea rich in plant food, or against the varied, muted colors of the desert and coastal range that edge the Humboldt Current, I could feel myself part of that cosmos. The stuff of my bones was the stuff of their bones. Through their metabolic system coursed primeval molecules, perhaps used over and over again; they were transported to the ancient, irrigated field of the coast, and through plants and flesh back to our table on the island.” -William Vogt
When I read this paragraph, I was stopped in my tracks. “The stuff of my bones was the stuff of their bones” felt like a lightbulb moment. After all, what are we doing if not constantly mimicking one another? Imagine seeing a bird, as Vogt did, and immediately recognizing within it a part of yourself. This made me think of the mockingbirds hidden in the trees above me, recreating every noise they hear. And then I began to think of airplanes, which I can only reason are our best attempts at mimicking the birds we see outside. This is such an elaborate cycle we are in, each observing and recreating what we see in one another.
What would the world look like if we lived in this way? I can’t be sure, but I feel inclined to assume we would approach life forms outside of the human with much less detached indifference. If I look at the cow and see within its eyes a sort of recognition, how would that affect my relationship to it? Yes, I may think twice before consuming it, but there would be something else. Something I would argue is even more important, and that is a level of respect that may not have existed before. If we start to see the cow as a jumbling of the same things that created us, how would we approach it?
When my nieces were born and began growing up and learning how to use their hands and lift their heads, one of the first things they learned was how to recreate animal noises. Cow, pig, chicken, you name it, and they could say it. It didn’t stop there though. They didn’t learn this language in the same way they learned to recite the alphabet. They really became these sounds. The amount of times I was informed they were actually cats or birds or elephants were too many to count. They recognized something we block out as we get older, and that is the semblance between us and the creatures around us. Our ability to observe, and in many ways become, one another.
The way my nieces approach learning about and becoming animals reminds me a lot of an essay I read in Mary Oliver’s Upstream. In this essay she says,
“Deep in the woods, I tried walking on all fours. I did it for an hour or so, through thickets, across a field, down to a cranberry bog. I don’t think anyone saw me! At the end, I was exhausted and sore, but I had seen the world from the level of the grasses, the first bursting growth of trees, declivities, lumps, slopes, rivulets, gashes, open spaces. I was some slow old fox, wandering, breathing, hitching along, lying down finally at the edge of the bog, under the swirling rickrack of the trees.”
Oliver was undoubtedly bold in the way she lived her life. She took the time not only to sit on her porch and watch the creatures around her but to also become the creatures. Just as my nieces spend some of their time as cats and dogs and Vogt recognized within himself the inner makings of a bird, Oliver spent a period of time in nature as a fox.
This is possibly just a longwinded way of advising myself to be more than a spectator. To look at all the life around me and recognize that seed of life within myself as well. Observing is a key step in admiring and understanding the natural world, but at some point, you have to live among and within it.