giving habitat purely for the sake
of appealing to the local community's concept of "neatness" is
abomination before the spirit of the Creator.
For, when you look into the
Universe and at the web of life on our little Earth, you see plainly that the
Creator blossoms diversity out of nothingness, evolves sophistication out of
awkwardness, and leaves strands of interdependency among all things. Whatever
in spirit goes against this grand and beautiful theme of the Creator is
"abomination."
The bushes and trees along that
little ditch across the field provided a tiny island of habitat for a gorgeous
diversity of living beings. A thriving local ecosystem of mutually dependent
living things existed in an ocean of ecologically unstable monoculture grass.
It was a polyphonic song sung in a desert.
And its destruction for the sake of
neatening up the landscape is an abomination.
*****
NERVOUS, UNSATISFIED PEOPLE
My friend Jarvis in North Carolina
sent the following lines:
"Carl Jung wrote about a
conversation he had with a Native American chief who told him that his
impression of most white people was that they have tense faces, staring eyes,
and a cruel demeanor. The chief said, 'They are always seeking something. What
are they seeking? The whites always want something. They are always uneasy and
restless. We don't know what they want. We think they are mad.'"
Jarvis continues:
"Commenting on this, Eckhart
Tolle writes, 'The undercurrent of constant unease started long before the rise
of Western industrial civilization, of course, but in Western civilization,
which now covers almost the entire globe, including most of the East, it
manifests in an unprecedentedly acute form. . . This collective dysfunction has
created a very unhappy and extraordinarily violent civilization that has become
a threat not only to itself but also to all life on the planet.'"
I can understand how the uneasy and
restless manners of our Northern European ancestors evolved, as can anyone who
has endured northern or central Europe's
spirit-crushingly cold, sunless, wet or snowy falls, winters and springs.
Imagine what it must have been like for ancient Europeans living in caves and
primitive huts. During Paleolithic times, anyone who wasn't uneasy and restless
with regard to gathring in plenty of firewood, of properly curing furs and
storing nuts, roots and the like -- didn't survive long enough to produce us as
their descendents.