Category: Words and Life

Education in foraging cultures is hardly distinguishable from everyday life, and the notion that education should be standardized and formalized and fitted with scientifically verified outcome-based procedures would be entirely incoherent.

Formal education as it occurs in modern civilization has two overarching purposes: psychological reprogramming and behavioral standardization. A civilized life is above all a domesticated one, one in which thought and behavior need to be channeled and directed away from natural proclivities and toward goals that no one would ever consider pursuing otherwise. And it is also necessary to train children in the many specific skills and habits of thought necessary to interface with the complex technological and bureaucratic systems of global civilization.

The question every child is asked multiple times starting at a very young age, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a psychological booby-trap. It offers the child a standardized palette of options from which to choose; the child is expected to assume future aspirations that correspond to a limited number of stereotypical occupations (doctor, farmer, teacher, astronaut, fireman, dog groomer, etc.); it prepares them for their own inescapable objectification.

This simple and seemingly innocuous question contains invasive spores that can grow into a vine that strangles the child’s uniqueness. It also firmly embeds the idea that the child is not sufficient in what they are right now, that they are somehow imperfect, unformed, that their present being is somehow deficient.

This idea will be cultivated and reinforced and solidified over and over again until it becomes a durable feature of their adult psyche, an open union joint for easy attachment to the machine.

Human rewilding is not a simple matter of convincing people to abandon cities, re-inhabit natural spaces, and adopt the physical and social trappings of a gatherer-hunter lifestyle. Although, ultimately, that is what needs to happen if we are to continue much longer as a species, the most significant features of our present material situation involve things that fall outside of our control.

In addition, there are some seemingly insurmountable obstacles to immediately re-inhabiting natural spaces. For one thing, civilization has managed to usurp, corrupt, and despoil much of the once-inhabitable space with the corrosive dross from industry and resource extraction. Over a third of the Earth’s land mass is agricultural, with 11% devoted to industrial monoculture. Although only three percent is covered by cities, asphalt roads alone account for 3 million square miles of terrain in the continental US. And not a single river or stream flows clean of the toxic chemical taint of civilization.

Also, there are simply too many of us at this point—even if all of the Earth’s prior natural space was open and unspoiled it would not be enough to sustain 8 billion people pursuing authentically human lifestyles. A slightly less insurmountable, but nonetheless challenging obstacle is the lack of knowledge regarding how to live outside of civilization’s technological cocoon. We have carelessly abandoned several millennia worth of experiential wisdom in our eagerness to embrace our own technological dependence. A five-year-old gatherer-hunter child already knows orders of magnitude more about how to live on the Earth than the average civilized adult.

Rewilding implies not only that we make sweeping external changes in our collective physical circumstances, but that we enact radical internal changes in our psychological orientation to the world around us as well. And it is only the latter that is truly up to us as individuals.

Human rewilding, if it is to happen intentionally, must start with this. It must begin at the most local level, with those few things that are actually up to us—each of us as individuals, you and me. The fact that there are still a handful of five-year-old children who understand their human place in the world should give us hope. Not all has been lost beneath civilization’s smothering embrace. The Earth is patient and will not abandon its life-nurturing essence. Natural cycles of renewal and rebirth are still active. There are still trees and fish and birds and cleansing spring rainstorms. Our discontent itself, that vague sense that something is wrong, is a sign that we still retain core elements of our human nature. A wild human yet resides in each of us. We need only find ways to encourage its free and open expression.

All journeys start with a first step. In many cases, that first step is enough; once that first step is taken, the rest is just a matter of inertia. The first step begins with a decision, a choice. But, sometimes making that choice can be exceedingly difficult. There are a variety of psychological barriers when it comes to intentional personal change. Status quo bias, for example—people often prefer to maintain the status quo even though there are clearly better alternatives available. Merely considering whether a change might be needed in the first place can trigger an avoidance response—even positive change can be stressful.

In terms of making the decision to take the first meaningful steps toward human rewilding, I see a close parallel in the case of overcoming substance addiction. Many of the central features of civilization are addictive in more than just a metaphorical sense, and the personal psychological obstacles that we are likely to face while extracting ourselves from civilization seem to be of a similar form to those faced by a long-term addict attempting to conquer her substance dependence. Perhaps the psychology of addiction recovery can provide some useful insight.

According a popular theory of addiction recovery, intentional personal change of all kinds occurs in identifiable stages of progression: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance, and termination. During the precontemplation stage, the person is in denial about the need to change. Either the situation has yet to become desperate enough, or the mere thought of change is too scary to consider, or, perhaps, the person simply feels helpless and has reconciled themselves to living Thoreau’s “life of quiet desperation.” For those privileged few enjoying the many accoutrement benefits of civilization, the first of these is certainly the case. For those at the very bottom of the power hierarchy, it can only be the latter. I suspect that for the vast majority in between, the thought of change is simply too scary, and there are plenty of distractions available to keep us from recognizing the true precariousness of our situation.

Contemplation is the stage at which the person has fully acknowledge the need to change, but they have yet to take that first step. It is easy to get stuck at this stage, and, for an addict, this stage can be a form of limbo. Awareness that a change is desperately needed and committing yourself to doing something about it are entirely different things.

Preparation is the process of deciding how to take the first step. This stage involves planning a strategy of attack and mustering the determination to act.

The action stage is the stepping part of taking the first step, and can be, from a psychological perspective at least, the easiest part of the process.

For those struggling with overcoming addiction, relapse is a natural and expected part of recovery. This is where maintenance comes into play. Freeing yourself from daily dependence does not eliminate your cravings for the substance, and during periods of stress it can be easy to fall back into old habits of coping. Likewise, successful rewilding does not mean that civilization’s coercive influence will have been permanently vanquished. It is likely that residual tendrils of the past will linger for some time. Those of us born into civilization will carry civilized thought-forms with us for the rest of our lives, and the temptation to fall back on civilized modes of being will be ever-present. Islands of relapse are to be expected.

Termination is the stage at which the change has become a permanent feature of life, and the risk of falling back into old habits has entirely passed. However, for many and perhaps most people who have successfully recovered from substance addiction, the termination stage is never fully attained, and maintenance continues for the rest of their life. For all intents and purposes, we can assume maintenance to be the terminal stage for personal rewilding as well, and the termination stage will likely have to wait for future generations, for a time when the residual stain of civilization has sufficiently faded.  

Rewilding, like sobriety, is not an either-or proposition. And it is not something that will likely happen all at once. It is a process of growth, an intimate personal journey. With any important journey, it can be tempting to overemphasize the future destination while ignoring the present path. This is part and parcel of the civilized factory-production mindset, a mindset that places all value on the final product, the end result. How you get to that end result is largely irrelevant from this goal-centered standpoint, although efficiency demands that the path is as fast and direct as possible—finding shortcuts and cutting corners where possible.

The journey of rewilding is not a destination, however. Rewilding involves learning to let go of oppressive civilized notions, such as the notion that there are destinations in the first place, the notion that life is purposeful, and the notion that purposeful action must be directed toward external goals and benchmarks and measurable results. Becoming human is not a result to be obtained or an objective to be achieved. The term rewilding does not describe an end-state or goal, it refers to movement along a particular kind of path: movement away from lifestyles grounded in mediation and control, movement toward increased human freedom and authenticity. Rewilding, to the extent that its pursuit possesses any goal-like qualities, merely provides a kind of focal orientation, a general direction of travel.

And the path of rewilding is unlikely to be straight and smooth. There may be abrupt switchbacks and steep ascents and dangerous crossings. These are essential parts of the journey; not merely difficulties to be endured, but opportunities to be embraced. Becoming human is not about reaching a shining mountain summit in the distance. It is something ongoing, something that occurs right here and right now, in this place and in the present moment. It is, quite literally, a “becoming,” an unfolding, a growing, a relearning, a moment-by-moment emerging into a more human state of being.

All change starts with the present moment. All intentional change involves a comparison between a current state and a desired state that is imagined to exist in some future now. The comparison itself can serve as a potent obstacle to change. The gulf between reality and desire can seem insurmountable. What is frequently lost in this comparison is that the space between the present moment and the imagined future now is not an empty void. It is a rich and abundant landscape, infinitely furnished, and filled to the brim with present moments just like this one.

The present moment is all we ever have, and all future moments are grounded in what happens right now. So, we should act right now, in the present moment, as if the desired state has already been achieved. Some Buddhists believe the very moment that you sit, cross your legs, and assume a meditative posture, you have already at that point achieved enlightenment—the end is not something that can be separated from the beginning. And there is this from Nietzsche:

“If someone obstinately and for a long time wants to appear something it is in the end hard for him to be anything else. The profession of almost every man, even that of the artist, begins with hypocrisy, with an imitation from without, with a copying of what is most effective. He who is always wearing the mask of a friendly countenance must finally acquire the power over benevolent moods without which the impression of friendliness cannot be obtained—and finally these acquire power over him, he is benevolent.”   (italics in the original)

---

You are not human.

You never have been.

You and I are not living authentically human lives. We do not move like humans. We do not sleep like humans. Much of the food we eat is not human food. Our relationships are filtered through an electronic membrane and molded to fit a mechanical template. Our thoughts are forced from the womb prematurely, attenuated and displaced by perpetual distraction before they are allowed to develop their full human potential. Our time is spent chasing goals that are not human goals, goals that are not of our own free choosing, goals that are not in our own long-term interests, goals that run directly counter to the interests of the rest of the living planet.    

Most of us are not aware of this, at least not on a conscious level. We might be aware that things don’t feel quite right. We might have a vague sense that there is something missing, that there is something about the current state of the world and the current flow of our daily lives that is somehow off. But it is difficult to articulate exactly what is wrong. It can be easy to misattribute the source of this vague sense to something about our superficial place in the scheme of things: if only we had more money, or a better job, if only we lived in a better place. It is perhaps easier to misattribute the source to something about the scheme of things itself: there is something amiss with the current political or economic system. If only we had the right people in power, or the right policies in place, if only the system was designed to address human needs rather than the “needs” of corporations, for example.   

These misattributions are not entirely off the mark. It is indeed something about our place in the scheme of things that is off, but our particular station is not the real issue. And the scheme of things itself is truly a problem, but the problem is not in the specific details; the problem is not in how the scheme operates. The real problem is the very fact that there is a scheme to begin with. It is not that we have a defective or dysfunctional system. It is the very existence of a system. The problem is that we are being forced to live systematically.

The problem is that we have been civilized.

We are born carrying the active residue of several million years of evolutionary preparation for life entirely immersed in the natural world as a foraging species of social primate, and at least 250,000 years of genetic fine tuning for life in small, self-contained, nomadic or semi-nomadic, and intensely egalitarian gatherer-hunter* bands. We are born to inhabit natural spaces and to engage with each other and the many other inhabitants of the world directly and as equal beings. Instead we are forced to separate ourselves from the living world in isolating and insulating built environments, and to align our thoughts and actions with the arbitrary mandates of mindless planet-eating systems of power.

If there is a single word that could describe life in corporate-consumer-industrial civilization, it is the word mediation. Civilization is a vast collection of hierarchically arranged and violently enforced mediators, means of preventing individual people from engaging with each other and the world around them directly and on their own terms. We don’t usually notice this, though. The ubiquity of mediation makes its presence invisible to us. We have very little in the way of direct, unmediated interaction with which to compare. We are fish who don’t notice the water that is all around us. Or, perhaps a better use of the metaphor, we are fish who think our isolating aquarium, with its artificially-colored gravel, plastic adornments, mechanical filtration, chemical conditioners, and manufactured food, is the wild open ocean we were meant for. And this is the real problem: that we don’t realize the scale of our dependency and the degree to which our world has been diminished and restricted. It is difficult—and for most folks, perhaps, impossible—to see how not-human our daily lives actually are. 

There are both internal and external reasons for our inability to come to grips with the reality of our civilized situation. Internally, features of our evolved psychology, potent psychological phenomena such as cognitive dissonance, proximal thinking, status-quo bias, and fear-avoidance make us not only resistant to change, but motivated to ignore the true depth, scope, and severity of the problem. Externally, there is civilization itself—its very purpose as a collection of physical and social technologies of control designed to corral, colonize, redirect, and subdue our wild human nature, so that our thoughts and actions can be applied to the pursuit of ends that are not our own, ends that preserve and expand the scope of the civilization’s capacity to corral, colonize, redirect, and subdue, ends that are not at all human.

The internal/external distinction is an important one. In most cases, we have little influence over our external circumstances. We cannot decide when or where we are born and who our parents are. We cannot control what other people think of us, or the choices they make as they react to their own vague sense that something is wrong with their lives. We cannot change past events. We cannot predict the future or guard against unexpected calamity. However, we can have some limited ability to shape certain features of our own thought, and we have some perhaps not-so-limited command over our own actions. We have the ability to reflect on past events and our present circumstances, and the capacity to adapt our present and future thoughts and actions based on these reflections. We have the ability to choose if, when, and how we respond to the external demands of civilization—and even if our participation is inescapable, we can openly recognize this fact and refuse to assent willingly.

The stoic philosophy of Epictetus is relevant here (a philosophy echoed in the well-known serenity prayer). According to Epictetus, there are things that are up to us, and things that are not, and we create unnecessary pain and suffering for ourselves when we fail to clearly distinguish between these two. We need to put our whole being into those precious and few things that are up to us, and not concern ourselves with those many other things that fall outside of our limited scope of influence. We cannot change the raw fact of civilization, we cannot rewrite history or reverse the massive damage that has already been done to the natural world. But we can change how we respond to our immediate situation. We can change how we engage with other people. We can change how we acknowledge and express our intimate connections with other living beings. We can work to interact with the world around us more directly, and learn to recognize and reject mediation in all of its myriad forms. Moment by moment, we can work to revive, revitalize, and nurture our own wild human nature.

Imagine rewilding. Imagine living as a wild human—living directly in the world instead of merely on it.  

Imagine becoming human.

---

* I have chosen to use “gatherer-hunter” rather than the more common “hunter-gatherer,” mostly because it is a more accurate description of how the members of traditional foraging societies spend their time. Also, there is a strong historical undercurrent linking hunting with maleness: males are the hunters and females are the gatherers. Putting “hunter” first thus reflects a masculine bias

“Obedience to authority requires each of us to first participate in the myth-making process of creating authority figures who then must legitimize their authority through the evidence of our submission and obedience to them…” –Phil Zimbardo

There is power in subtlety. There can be more, perhaps, in nonaction, so long as you are clear on the goal. If the goal is to change the status quo, then nonaction is frequently just an expression of your impotence; and especially so in a system designed to function with or without you around. On the other end of the resistance spectrum, a head-on attack is almost always a quick path to failure. Or worse—by showing your adversary its regions of vulnerability, you have provided it with useful knowledge, and in the long run only increased its strength.  

But subtlety and nuance, these things can be nearly impossible to guard against. This is what makes satire such an effective counterpoint to belligerence, why the kings of old were forced to embrace it, to own it, to control it and contain it. In this way the court jester’s role can be more important than that of the royal guard.

With the current situation, here in the heart of civilization, at the center of the tragedy, satire has lost any hint subtlety. In a world maintained through perpetual distraction, through constant breathlessness, through evermore sound and fury, nuance is overwhelmed by noise and sparkle and spectacle. A light touch, a nudge, a casual bump, these are overwhelmed by the relentless inertia of the machine, by its sheer mass. A whispered word, regardless of its timing and placement, regardless of its relevance, its aptness, its shades of meaning, is overwhelmed by the persistent cacophony of accelerating consumption.

We are not like the kings of old. As denizens of the modern civilized world, we have chosen not to embrace our own humiliation in order to garner some power over it. Instead we quickly stuff our heads in the sheltering sands of consumable distraction with even the slightest peripheral glimpse of our impotence. And we are content to live as emasculated kings, puppets to be manipulated in a tragicomedy presented for the entertainment of our corporate court jesters.        

No, this is not a screed about Donald Trump. Although, given the title, you can be forgiven for jumping to that conclusion. Trump is a parasite of a different sort, and he operates on a level that is cruder and less sophisticated and more predictable than even something as simple as a virus—a collection of molecules that don’t even qualify as a life form.

Neither is this about the coronavirus. At least not directly so. It’s about how the virus has been framed in public discourse. It’s about how all threats to the status quo are framed in public discourse. It’s about the metaphors that we choose to talk about these things. It’s about how we are missing the whole point entirely.

It’s about how inconsequential and completely unimportant the coronavirus really is.

Let me start with the curious personal observation that even though I live five miles away from the first documented US coronavirus case, and in one of the first places to impose a state-wide stay-at-home lockdown, I haven’t felt compelled to write about the experience. Other than a few social media updates on the situation early on, and a little bit in a blog post a few weeks back, I have written almost nothing about it at all. Not online. Not in text and email correspondence with friends and family. Not in a journal where I record even my most trivial thoughts and insights. And it was this observation—an insight that I subsequently recorded in my journal—that got me wondering why. Why do I have so little motivation to write about something that has altered almost every aspect of my daily life and the lives of everyone around me?   

My first answer to this question was that maybe I just don’t have anything to say about it. Or, more to the point, I have nothing to say that isn’t already being said; I have nothing of substance to add to the perpetual avalanche of fact, misinformation, speculation, and opinion about the topic that is crashing through each day, burying everything else in its path. Here is a quote from André Gide that is framed on the wall next to me as I write this (one that I lifted from Daniel Quinn’s book, Providence):

What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it, written as well as you, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself—and thus make yourself indispensable.

So, it might be that my silence is because I am taking Gide’s advice and I think that I simply have nothing unique to offer.

It might be this, but it’s not.

In fact, I have a lot to say about this situation. However, just about everything I have to say about the topic is something that I suspect nobody really wants to hear. And my reticence to say it out loud appears to be a reflexive reaction to my mother’s frequent admonition: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all.”

So, if you agree with my mom, then stop reading this now.

Seriously.

Last chance.

The coronavirus doesn’t matter.

More precisely, it doesn’t matter in any of the ways that people have been yelling about. It certainly doesn’t matter because of all the personal inconvenience it is causing. And let’s be honest, the inconvenience is the only reason most people care about it at all. It’s such a tragedy! You can’t go to the place or do the thing. You’re stuck at home with your kids. You’re forced to interact hourly with a significant other you really can’t stand. Seriously? You pathetic privileged fuck!

If the coronavirus matters at all, it is only slightly, and only because of what is being brought to light, what is being illuminated in the background as we ever-so-slightly scale back our relentless consumption. The coronavirus is like a black light being swept across cheap hotel room furniture, exposing the stains of a civilization that has been fucking the planet to death while we have been too distracted to notice.

Consider some of the clearly positive effects of the virus that are stark and hard to ignore: clear skies in Los Angeles, no March school shootings for the first time in 18 years, Bank of America’s first-quarter profits down 45%. The drop in air travel and the sharp reduction in highway noise has done wonders for my local soundscape. But these things don’t really matter either. They are temporary, and as soon as those in power give the all-clear, things will be back to normal—and even worse, given the likely economic pendulum swing.

The virus has also shown—as if it wasn’t glaringly obvious already—how absolutely helpless and fragile and fear-driven and docile civilized people really are. Hoarding toilet paper and punching Asian people on the street and bathing in disinfectant and wearing a mask and surgical gloves to get the mail and strangling kids who aren’t standing six feet away from their friends. These things are not evidence of civilized nobility.  

How can you say it doesn’t matter? People are dying, for Christ’s sake!

Yes, people are dying. But not nearly enough for it to make a difference. As pandemics go, this one is pretty wimpy. The Black Death wiped out three-fifths of the population of Europe in the 14^th century. With 8 billion people currently squeezing all of the living juice out of the biosphere, we need something considerably more deadly than the bubonic plague to start to turn things around. We have grossly overshot the planet’s natural carrying capacity for our species, and there is no logical or moral reason that humans should be exempt from nature’s many ways of dealing with population excess. And the belief that humans should somehow be exempt from the natural order of things is the reason the virus exists in the first place: don’t forget that this virus is a product of civilization, a direct effect of a sedentary way of life based on domestication.

OK. There is more that I could say, but no one wants to hear about how their wonderful life of convenience and consumable distraction is a direct consequence of smallpox and genocide.

So, let me end on a positive note.

There is a small basketball court next to my apartment. It has been encircled with caution tape and signs sternly declaring that the court is closed due to the social distancing mandate from the State. Yesterday, a few folks, a couple teenagers and their dad and uncle, ducked beneath the caution tape with their basketball and played for several hours while some of my neighbors walked by and gave them the thumbs up. A trivial act of defiance, for sure. Nonetheless, perhaps those in power should worry that our civilized docility might be only on the surface. 

Of all possible places, those places we call home are held to be among the most important. But the modern concept of home is a fairly recent one. I’m not talking merely about home in its trivial sense, home as a place of residence, your house or apartment, the place to which you are currently confined under coronavirus house-arrest, but home in its deeper sense as well, home as a place of origin, that quasi-mythical place that forms the cornerstone in the foundation of your self-concept, perhaps also serving as an emotional anchor during trying times like these.

Places that were of formative value and that carry a sense of personal connection and attachment have probably always been part of the human milieu. But home, as a concept, as a place where you belong (be long: a place of long-term occupation) is a product of an agrarian lifestyle, a sedentary lifestyle tied to specific parcels of tended land, to pastures and fields, to villages and permanent dwellings. Home is a product of domestication—a word that itself derives from the Latin for home, domus. The verb domesticate, to tame, comes from a Medieval Latin word that means literally to make a product of the household. The idea of home is at the very core of domestication as a way of life, and part of what distinguishes the civilized from the non-civilized.

What does home mean to a nomadic gatherer-hunter? If there is anything in such a society that corresponds even remotely to the civilized idea of home, it is either something so expansive that it encompasses entire regions of habitation, or it is something that travels with them, something that involves proximity to specific other people as much or more than it does to a specific physical place, something that moves with the person, a perpetually shifting zone that is determined by the active requirements of the moment, a zone that is defined by the center—quite literally “where the heart is.”

Modern city-dwellers have become increasingly nomadic in recent years. But this is nomadism of a different kind from that of a gatherer-hunter. It is a punctate nomadism in which the person moves from one temporary “permanent residence” to another. Modern civilized life is, for many people, a series of dislocations, leading to a perpetual sense of diaspora. Home becomes nostalgia for a permanence of place that in reality rarely exists, a Norman Rockwell painting of a time out of time.

A while back I was in the car on the way home—or the place I currently call home—and listening to an NPR interview with a small business entrepreneur who suggested that people have become dislodged from traditional social groups due to the digital nature of our world, and to the high level of nomadism, moving from job to job, and that because of this we lack the durable objects of attachment that were available in former times. So, we attach to brands, to products, and to celebrities instead of the things that used to serve as the primary material of our self-concepts: place, family, and friends.

From the entrepreneur’s perspective, this was a good thing, something to be exploited. And the conversation drifted into ways to enhance customer loyalty, and thereby increase a business’ odds for long-term viability. But from a human perspective, this can only be seen as part of the accelerating tragedy that is civilization. Fandom, attachment to marketed consumables such as professional sport teams or entertainment franchises or brands of clothing reflects a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness left in the wake of our deepening sense of alienation, the void created from our inability to establish authentic connections to other people and to the physical world around us, from our inability to establish a coherent and internally-defined sense of self. 

Rewilding, becoming human again, means abandoning these superficial forms of attachment, and embracing a more expansive and simultaneously more penetrating perspective on the places we occupy right now—a perspective that acknowledges the actual physical space around us and the many other living beings who are there right beside us, a perspective that is defined by the center.

My dog tested positive for heartworms. As a result, she’s been confined to a crate for the past month and a half. Heartworm treatment involves three painful injections of a potent antiparasitic drug, the first two given a month apart, and the third given the day after the second. During the entire time, and for 6-8 weeks afterward, she has to remain under severe exercise restriction—basically no exercise at all beyond a couple brief trips outside each day to relieve herself. As the dead worms start to break apart, the risk of pulmonary embolism is extremely high, so it is important the she remain as still as possible until the worm carcasses have disintegrated to the point where they are no longer a threat.

It occurred to me today that the dog’s situation, confined to her cage, is a microcosm of my own present circumstances: confined to my apartment as a result of the State’s “stay-at-home” mandate. The difference, of course, is that for me, at least for the time being, the parasitic threat remains on the outside.

We can learn from this virus, I think. The coronavirus has highlighted vulnerabilities that are an inherent part of civilized life, vulnerabilities that no amount of hoarding of toilet paper or stockpiling of personal protective equipment can eliminate, vulnerabilities that are built into the very nature of civilization itself. The virus has given us a small taste of the depth and scope of our dependency, and a concrete sense of our powerlessness as individuals. And it has also brought the inside-out priorities of our corporate consumer system into high relief. The truth is being stated publicly and unabashedly at this point: the well-being of the economy is vastly more important that the lives of actual persons.

And about that $2 trillion coronavirus bill? Let’s be clear, the recently passed stimulus bill is not at all about people. It is about keeping the corporate parasites alive—a kind of reverse heartworm treatment approach. Its sole purpose is to keep the economic system from stroking out while the virus forces consumer markets into severe exercise restriction.

I ran across this on a hike today. Someone, kids, perhaps, had scratched spirals in the ground at the base of a tree, and then filled them in with pinecones and twigs. The sight of these pinecone-twig spirals made me smile—a response that was entirely unlike the angry visceral reaction I had to the gratuitous stacks of rocks that I came across on the trail the other day.

And I need to figure out why the difference.

Maybe it has something to do with placement. Most of the cairns were above ground, on top of tree stumps and logs, outside of a rock’s natural habitat, so to speak. By contrast, and ignoring the spiral pattern, the pinecones and twigs seem quite at home on the ground at the base of a tree.  

Maybe the dramatic difference in my reactions is partially due to aesthetic differences in the two cases. While some of the rock stacks have a kind of pleasing and unexpected symmetry to them, there is not much else about their form or arrangement that I find appealing. They are just individual rocks piled on top of each other. On the other hand, the pinecone-twig spirals are compelling beyond just a surface symmetry, and as soon as I saw them I was reminded of Bonnie, my very good artist friend (the word good applies to both artist and friend) who makes extensive use of natural forms like these (see the cover art for my books Stones and Born Expecting the Pleistocene for examples of her work). The spiral forms lightly scratched into the ground are a kind of fractal mirror of both the structure of pinecones and the needle patterns on the twigs.

I strongly suspect, however, that the difference reflects something about me that has changed since I first ran across the cairns on the trail, something about my way of thinking about these acts of forest vandalism.

In her reply to my post about the rock stacks, Ria suggested that interacting with natural forms in this way is a clumsy attempt to fill a void. Civilized humans are drawn to re-embrace their wild nature, but don’t know what to do about it. Like a 4th-grade boy who has a powerful crush on a girl, so he pulls her hair and calls her names.

We are born carrying the active residue of several million years of evolutionary preparation for life entirely immersed in the natural world as a foraging species of social primate, and at least 250,000 years of genetic fine tuning for a life in small, self-contained, nomadic or semi-nomadic, and intensely egalitarian gatherer-hunter bands. The gulf separating (so-called) life in civilization and our inborn physical, psychological, and social expectations is an ever-widening canyon. Yet, on some level at least, we can still feel the other side, and stacking rocks and arranging twigs and pinecones in a spiral pattern might reflect trifling but legitimate attempts to make contact.

Rather than become angered that people are compelled to leave their mark on natural spaces, perhaps I should celebrate some of their unconscious motives for doing so. The fact that the impulse to interact with the natural world is still present is a sign of hope. It is a sign that civilization hasn’t completely snuffed out our wild human nature. After all, someone took the time to search out these pinecones. They carried them against the skin of their hand and felt their texture, and they could smell the woody musty scent of the earth beneath the tree as they bent down to arrange them. And, maybe, for a fleeting moment, they got a tiny glimpse of the other side of the canyon.

Meadowdale Park today: cold, but intensely sunny on the beach. I’ve missed this place—a knee injury has kept me off the steep trail for the last few months. In the interim, someone has raised several small cairns, stacks of rocks, some only two stones high. They have been placed on stumps, along the sides of fallen trees, and on the backs of the benches spaced at intervals along the path.

I am bothered by this. On some level, I find the cairns aesthetically pleasing. But they don’t belong here. They are entirely unnecessary as trail markers, and they are entirely out of place surrounded by mossy limbs and nurse trees, the white trunks of leafless alder, and the sound of the rain-engorged stream echoing up from the base of the ravine. The stacks of rocks are an act of forest vandalism—more than that, they are a defilement, a desecration.

And I want to knock them all down.

What is the motivation to stack rocks like this? I suppose that it is the same motivation that lies behind all acts of creation, all acts of artistic expression. We seem to have a need to leave behind physical traces of ourselves. The cairns are symbolic monuments to their builder’s passing presence: “I was here, in this place, and here’s the proof!”

All monuments serve this function to some extent. The motivation behind the cairns is, at its heart, an attempt to cope with personal mortality. It is the same motivation that lies behind skyscrapers, perhaps. The desire to leave a physical mark in the world has its source in the awareness that your life is temporary, and the gnawing suspicion that it is also completely trivial.

I probably won’t knock the rock-stacks down. At least not today. Even if I don’t knock them down, the weather eventually will. Or a squirrel. All attempts to leave a lasting trace of yourself behind are ultimately doomed.

And, in time, the rocks themselves will eventually find their way downhill and take their place in the sand on this sunny beach.