Life Goes On

"But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh, we deprive a soul of the sun and light and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy." –Plutarch


"The first step in spiritual life is to have compassion. A person who is kind and loving never needs to go searching for God. God rushes toward any heart that beats with compassion-it is God's favorite place." Amma (Mata Amritanandamayi Devi)


When we woke up this morning, three, year-old does were just awakening in the hollow by the side of our rental house in Placerville. They are no longer accompanied by the mamma doe and daddy buck that had watched over them so carefully this past year. The air was thick, humid, and almost ready to break into a soft, consistent rain as I began to take some snapshots of the surrounding landscape. This may be the last rain of the season, maybe not. The foothills have been wearing an emerald green grass coat all winter, and now almost everything, is wearing Nature’s jewelry. In the back yard, a weepy, willowy tree is strung with necklaces of soft, fragrant, pink jewels, cascading down the entire length of the tree. The Japanese elm which had spent the winter naked is now dressed in a flaming burgundy embellished with flowers like vibrant red sequins. The rich green camellia bushes that line one side of the back patio are now in full bloom, with a seemingly never-ending supply of red and pink blooms. The chrysanthemums I planted last fall in the rain boots, are still clothed in dried oak leaves, but now they have pushed new vibrant green growth out past last year’s brown stems that had long ago succumbed to the cold. The front yard is bursting with foliage and blooms in vivid greens, reds and whites and yellows. Big grey squirrels climb up and down velvety moss-covered trunks and limbs. Birds of all colors, azure, red, yellow, orange, flit about the ground and trees, as they go about their daily rounds, proudly singing out their territorial warbles. This afternoon, at 2:30, we will go to see if the rental house we are living in will be auctioned off at a sheriff’s sale, or if our landlord has been able to make an eleventh hour short sale. We have extended our lease through May, so we will go to the steps of the County courthouse building to find out who our landlord will be for the next two months. I am not puzzled why I feel sadness in leaving this house. I have come to know these creatures that ventured so close to where we have lived this past year. We have followed the lives of the pregnant does, watched their fawns prance and frolick about the yard, grow stronger and lose their spots as they reached adolescence, and, just yesterday one of them stood on the back porch sniffing the lidded bucket where I kept the feed, looking straight at me through the window as if to say, “Did you forget to fill my bowl? I think there’s still some left here in the bucket.” The wild turkey brood that visited got close enough so I could see the detail of their beautiful golden markings on their feathers. They are magnificent birds. Upon our arrival at our steep road up to the house, the red-breasted robin that lived in the yard would recognize my car, fly ahead of my car, escorting me up the hill, frequently stopping a bit ahead on the pavement to see if my car was catching up. Later the blue jays would take over and become the bosses of the air space. I would sometimes see eight at a time in the yard. All these things I will miss.

The house may have a new owner, and new occupants, but the same deer will bring their fawns to eat the grass, and bed down for the night on the side of the house, or sometimes in the protected grove in the front. Someone will watch them from the living room window as they stretch, prepare for the day and rise with the morning sun. Someone will witness the magnificent turkeys ambling their way down from the top of the hill, late on warm, sunny afternoons to search for seeds and insects. I wonder if the next occupant will have hulled sunflower seeds ready for them. The squirrels will still trek the tops of the trees, crossing from limb to limb, their soft grey tails undulating and floating behind them like furry kites. It will all continue without me. It would be quite egotistical to think otherwise. I am really the only unnecessary element in the picture. Life goes on, literally and figuratively, regardless of our pointless scurrying, our egotistical attempts to own and control it, and our abrasive attempts to exploit it. Whoever buys this property will probably watch the same deer standing up on their haunches, reaching to nibble at the new growth on the apple trees, occasionally scoring a few juicy apples. They will no doubt see the same turkey family as it strolls through the yard, the same squirrels as they conference in the front yard about who-knows-what. The new occupants will hear the same melodious birdsongs that have returned with the spring. The sun will still rise and set once every 24 hours. The moon will wax and wane each month. Soft rains will come again. Every spring, the world will renew itself, and begin again -- all of this, regardless of our ephemeral and temporary presence, will go on. And, in time, like my brother, my mother and my father, I , too, will disappear -- we all will disappear leaving impermanent, treasured trinkets in our paths like great grandmother’s china passed from generation to generation, inadequate souvenirs of ourselves left behind for those who remain. Those who remember us will speak of us as long as they remember, and, years from now, perhaps someone will tell a story or two about us that they had experienced, or, later on, perhaps a story that had been told to them by someone who knew someone who knew us, but, inevitably, there will come a time, when no one really remembers us, who we were, what we believed in, dreamed of, hoped for, strived to accomplish. Eventually, great grandmother’s dishes will be all that remain of her. There will be a few of us who will be written into history, but even then our images will be displayed on pages, and the young contemporaries will read the two-dimensional tales, find our distant deeds mildly entertaining at most, and look at the curious photographs, finding our hairstyles and clothing fashions quaint at best. We may be famous, or infamous, for an act or two, but no one will be there to remember who we really were. We will have been added to a strangely grouped, random “society” of anonymous ancestors, like those before us, shadows of who we were in life, like the faded, musty, old photos of unknowns, for sale, piled in baskets in antique shops. Eventually, our only mark on this earth will be how our generation has left it for those who followed – we will leave behind a strange kind of communal , collective “soup” bequeathed to those who follow. What will this “soup” look like after we are no longer remembered by anyone? How will history judge us?

Like others, I have hopes for the future of my species, aspects of my species of which I am proud, and aspects of my species for which I am deeply embarrassed. The science of man has far outreached the humanity of man. We can travel in outer space, grow new organs with stem cells, “see” microscopic parts of atoms, demystify our own genetic code and yet we have not mastered the simplest things: kindness, compassion, love. Mental illness, poverty and suffering are on the rise, as is global warming, wars, animosity, and pollution. We perform the cruelest, most selfish acts in the name of religion. We have all the knowledge to create sustainable cultures, yet we are still destroying ourselves, individually as well as globally. We know the dangers of plastics, pesticides and other chemicals, yet we continue to poison the earth and ourselves with them. We have all the knowledge we need to provide inexpensive holistic preventive care for ourselves, yet we continue to support an expensive, primitive, reactive approach to medicine and health care. As a species, we are guilty of eating the wrong kinds of foods that are cultivated and prepared in an unhealthy manner, food that deadens our taste buds and our arteries; with every bite, we renounce our identity as caretaker of our bodies and of the planet to feed our voracious appetite for limitless consumption. We are destroying our planet’s atmosphere, dirtying it with pollution and with methane from feedlots full of animals that we will torture and kill in a most inhumane way in death houses hidden far away from our homes so we don’t have to think about it, ignoring the most inconvenient truth of all, that to survive individually, as a species, and as a planet, we must truly become caretakers of our environment, we must stop factory farming and consumption of other living creatures for food, we must serve as an example for the generations to come. In spring, we caution the children to hold the baby chick ever so gently, teaching the child to take great care and to have compassion for its welfare and a reverence for life, and then for lunch, we serve a plate of misery and death and never broach the subject, in complete denial of the chicken’s fate. We keep the chickens in cages too small for them to turn around and stretch their wings, or in spaces so crowded they die from the ammonia fumes. We hook and hang them by their feet and dunk them while they are still alive into boiling water to make the feathers easier to pluck from their bodies. We turn cows into cannibals by giving them feed that has the ground up bodies of sick and dead cows and sheep, as well as chicken manure added to the feed as a filler and antibiotics– and then we hang them by a back leg, slit their throats and let them bleed out, many of them still alive, aware and suffering, only stunned by the pipe gun fired at their skulls–then we cut up, grind, and eat the cows. In so many ways we have become the savage, uncaring, deadly predator that we fear is lurking outside of our caves.

These are things that we must not turn away from, we must face this reality and metamorphose to more enlightened beings if we wish to be more than a brief, bright flame that will burn itself out too soon. The earth is resilient. Gaia will, no doubt, survive our ravaging, and, eons from now, when we are long gone, it will have replenished itself and will live again in some other form. If we destroy ourselves, the other creatures, and the irreplaceable paradise, the Earth will probably still, somehow, regenerate and eventually create a new paradise from the ruins of the old – without us. We will be to the Earth what great grandmother will be to the shopper in the antique mart who picks up a piece of her china.

But, still, . . . as I watch the year-old doe outside the window nibbling on new green sprouts -- unaware that in a short time she will bear her first fawns, as the turkeys amble past -- soon to nest and produce their own brood, and as the family of squirrels convene in the yard, and the trees and plants that looked so barren through the winter, now dress up in Spring colors, I feel that , like our Earthly home, mankind is also resilient. I know that there need not be a sentence of doom and gloom for our species or our planet. In fact, the trial has not concluded, and there is still time for the human species to make its case – if we act soon. We must rise and find joy in our role as caretaker of all this abundance. We have all we need to have, we know all we need to know, and we are exactly who and where we should be at this very moment – we are at the dawn of a new era, and what that era will be is up to us. A few years ago, in a television commercial funded by a religious faith, a little boy asks his father what is in his daily planner. The father answers that in that book Daddy keeps all the information about the important people in Daddy’s day. The scene concludes with the little boy asking, “Am I in that book?” We need to schedule an epiphany into our Earthly planner. If we rethink our priorities, mankind will see another Spring on Earth. I was raised to always try to return something in an equal or better condition after it had been entrusted to me. We must ask ourselves with everything we do, “What effect will my action have? Am I doing no harm? What condition will the earth be, will our human race be, when we turn it over to those who follow? -------------- Thursday, April 9th, 2009