Imbolc 2010 - a reading (on YouTube)
Some days I want to start again. Days when petty, niggling events build up until they seem overwhelming, a to-do list where items never get crossed off, only added one by one. Today is just such a day.
But today is also Imbolc, the festival of candles celebrating the first local signs of spring. The first indication that nature has set her schemes in motion to repopulate the world after the long, bleak setback of winter. The day the ancient Celts marked that the ewes began to lactate in anticipation of welcoming new lambs into the world.
When does life begin? That question forms a crosscurrent rift in our society today. I think the question is framed all wrong. Life doesn't begin so much as continues. Cells consume resources, divide and die. Organisms do much the same only on a grander scale. But the fundamentals of life propagate from one generation to the next without pause. What we think of as a new life is just a synthesis of two sets of genetic code from two existing organisms that merge to create a new individual, albeit a completely dependent one in our mammalian and avian cousins. From the moment that two fuse into one, all the information is present to forge a new creature. Switches are poised for explosive growth when thrown in the proper order. Experience is ready to be gathered, stored and processed. The organism awaits only the stamp of a symbol for humans to consider it unique. An individual with a name.
If you ask a Daoist, he'll tell you all life, from the simplest to the most complex, is interconnected. If you ask a Buddhist, she'll tell you all life, from the simplest to the most complex, is sacred. When Buddhist monasteries develop what we call "a pest problem," they tend to get overrun. There are no Buddhist exterminators. Convincing ants or rats or termites into accepting another home is a delicate negotiation at best. Much like their human counterparts, each colony has its own agenda that it abandons only reluctantly, usually under duress.
If you want to impress me with a pro-life stance, don the saffron or orange robes and take orphaned tigers into your care against the protests of your community.
I don't say this to be confrontational. Or maybe I do. Maybe, like most life, I am just staking out a territory and preparing to defend it against all rivals. Do you think you can take it? Do you feel lucky?
Life, like birth, is messy, full of blood and bodily fluids, conflict, struggle and pain. Anyone who doesn't believe that needs to watch a hunter kill its prey. Do you feel sorry for the baby rabbit struggling in a cat's jaws? Then ask yourself whether you could dispassionately watch a kitten slowly starve to death. If so, congratulations: you might be ready to start a new career as a serial killer.
When I was younger, I kept a garter snake in a dry aquarium in my bedroom as a pet. Snakes are fundamental predators, cold and emotionless. We don't endow them with the nobility of lions. We don't envy their abilities like birds of prey. More we loathe and fear them, on a good day pity them for having to slither across the ground. Perhaps that's why they earn so much derision in our culture and religion. We have no mutual language or admiration, no points of commonality to establish empathy. They are alien to us.
Like any pet, a snake needs to be fed on a regular basis. Unlike other carnivores we entertain as houseguests, snakes don't eat anything predeceased. They only consume live prey.
So every few nights, I trolled the neighborhood with a flashlight, looking for toads on the sidewalk. Toads were as plentiful as a plague, and more importantly, easily caught. I didn't have any grand strategy, any method or formula to choose the lame or infirm or least likely to be missed by toad society. I was completely egalitarian. To me and the snake, one toad was as good as the next. So the first unlucky soul that stumbled through my light became the designated sacrifice for that night.
The hardest part of keeping a snake is feeding it. More specifically, watching it eat. This snake's aquarium had dirt in the bottom, some branches for topography and a screen across the top. With nothing else to distract it, the snake focused immediately on any new visitors dropping in. The toads, on the other hand, knew there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, though they always did their best to defy the odds. Few creatures accept their position in the food chain willingly. Each was eventually caught and eaten, some forwards, some backwards, some with more or less struggle as they were consumed.
In the end, I gave the garter snake its freedom. I had too much empathy for the toads to watch them die and felt too responsible for my pet to turn away. I decided we both would be happier if it played its part in the cycle of life out of sight in the yard, where it had lived before someone else had trapped it and given it to me.
On days like this, I feel like we as a species are involved in a series of similar life or death confrontations. Each discussion, each decision, each disagreement becomes the ultimate question of right versus wrong, my way versus yours. No compromise is possible, no quarter asked or given. A battle to the death over whose colors are brighter, whose claws are sharper, whose teeth are stronger, as though death won't ride our way soon enough. While we need not fear that pale horseman, I see no reason to wish him Godspeed by laying winter offerings at the feet of his companions of famine, plague and war.
Days like this, I struggle to remember that even in midwinter, the fields are not dead but sleeping. Soon enough, the crocuses will wake beneath the bed of snow and push it aside as they seek the sun to warm their brightly colored heads. Until they do, we'll light candles against the darkness, huddling together for comfort and protection, listening intently for the footfalls of the Green Man as he dances our way again.
© 2010 Edward P. Morgan III
But today is also Imbolc, the festival of candles celebrating the first local signs of spring. The first indication that nature has set her schemes in motion to repopulate the world after the long, bleak setback of winter. The day the ancient Celts marked that the ewes began to lactate in anticipation of welcoming new lambs into the world.
When does life begin? That question forms a crosscurrent rift in our society today. I think the question is framed all wrong. Life doesn't begin so much as continues. Cells consume resources, divide and die. Organisms do much the same only on a grander scale. But the fundamentals of life propagate from one generation to the next without pause. What we think of as a new life is just a synthesis of two sets of genetic code from two existing organisms that merge to create a new individual, albeit a completely dependent one in our mammalian and avian cousins. From the moment that two fuse into one, all the information is present to forge a new creature. Switches are poised for explosive growth when thrown in the proper order. Experience is ready to be gathered, stored and processed. The organism awaits only the stamp of a symbol for humans to consider it unique. An individual with a name.
If you ask a Daoist, he'll tell you all life, from the simplest to the most complex, is interconnected. If you ask a Buddhist, she'll tell you all life, from the simplest to the most complex, is sacred. When Buddhist monasteries develop what we call "a pest problem," they tend to get overrun. There are no Buddhist exterminators. Convincing ants or rats or termites into accepting another home is a delicate negotiation at best. Much like their human counterparts, each colony has its own agenda that it abandons only reluctantly, usually under duress.
If you want to impress me with a pro-life stance, don the saffron or orange robes and take orphaned tigers into your care against the protests of your community.
I don't say this to be confrontational. Or maybe I do. Maybe, like most life, I am just staking out a territory and preparing to defend it against all rivals. Do you think you can take it? Do you feel lucky?
Life, like birth, is messy, full of blood and bodily fluids, conflict, struggle and pain. Anyone who doesn't believe that needs to watch a hunter kill its prey. Do you feel sorry for the baby rabbit struggling in a cat's jaws? Then ask yourself whether you could dispassionately watch a kitten slowly starve to death. If so, congratulations: you might be ready to start a new career as a serial killer.
When I was younger, I kept a garter snake in a dry aquarium in my bedroom as a pet. Snakes are fundamental predators, cold and emotionless. We don't endow them with the nobility of lions. We don't envy their abilities like birds of prey. More we loathe and fear them, on a good day pity them for having to slither across the ground. Perhaps that's why they earn so much derision in our culture and religion. We have no mutual language or admiration, no points of commonality to establish empathy. They are alien to us.
Like any pet, a snake needs to be fed on a regular basis. Unlike other carnivores we entertain as houseguests, snakes don't eat anything predeceased. They only consume live prey.
So every few nights, I trolled the neighborhood with a flashlight, looking for toads on the sidewalk. Toads were as plentiful as a plague, and more importantly, easily caught. I didn't have any grand strategy, any method or formula to choose the lame or infirm or least likely to be missed by toad society. I was completely egalitarian. To me and the snake, one toad was as good as the next. So the first unlucky soul that stumbled through my light became the designated sacrifice for that night.
The hardest part of keeping a snake is feeding it. More specifically, watching it eat. This snake's aquarium had dirt in the bottom, some branches for topography and a screen across the top. With nothing else to distract it, the snake focused immediately on any new visitors dropping in. The toads, on the other hand, knew there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, though they always did their best to defy the odds. Few creatures accept their position in the food chain willingly. Each was eventually caught and eaten, some forwards, some backwards, some with more or less struggle as they were consumed.
In the end, I gave the garter snake its freedom. I had too much empathy for the toads to watch them die and felt too responsible for my pet to turn away. I decided we both would be happier if it played its part in the cycle of life out of sight in the yard, where it had lived before someone else had trapped it and given it to me.
On days like this, I feel like we as a species are involved in a series of similar life or death confrontations. Each discussion, each decision, each disagreement becomes the ultimate question of right versus wrong, my way versus yours. No compromise is possible, no quarter asked or given. A battle to the death over whose colors are brighter, whose claws are sharper, whose teeth are stronger, as though death won't ride our way soon enough. While we need not fear that pale horseman, I see no reason to wish him Godspeed by laying winter offerings at the feet of his companions of famine, plague and war.
Days like this, I struggle to remember that even in midwinter, the fields are not dead but sleeping. Soon enough, the crocuses will wake beneath the bed of snow and push it aside as they seek the sun to warm their brightly colored heads. Until they do, we'll light candles against the darkness, huddling together for comfort and protection, listening intently for the footfalls of the Green Man as he dances our way again.
© 2010 Edward P. Morgan III
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ReplyDeleteNotes and asides:
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I've probably been watching too many Natures and Novas on PBS. Or keeping up with too much in politics. Does it show?
Anyone who thinks they know my stance on choice versus life from the above is likely wrong. My position, which I won't go into or defend, is more nuanced. My experience and that of people who have confided in me has me taught me to understand the merits of portions of both sides of that debate. It is neither black nor white to me, but a shade of pearly gray.