I fell in love with compost precisely because of its' disintegration existing as an outline for bringing it back -the alive, the vibrant, as Ackerman concludes, "the things of this earth that perish". I guess going somewhere is important to me. Maybe I'm attached in some way to this closed feedback cycle because I want living & dying to mean something outside of self.
Moments of health gone awry, bodily distress and illness can easily serve as camouflage, as with the beloved leaves, for the first time a newness about what being o.k. means is revealed, what we're really made of gets noticed. My 1st time in the ever-so-wet Amazonia, I had a few days to register the images of neon-colored frogs, vistas of the innumerable clouds of canopy above and dig up some yuca before my brain went to sleep and my body turned into an oven. My fever awakened this other part of me that was aware, patient, slow, that kept me alive in quite a different way than my regular self perceives being alive. Even being upset about being sick was too exhausting -I quickly made peace and not war. In some ways, I'd like to hear Pyle coming out of such a situation, a scenario that beckons for more than "nature bats last".
Perhaps he's already experienced a spiritual fast or something and being cynical is just his true self -just his truth (in this lifetime, of course). I just don't see it on the scale to which he bring things to: is it really a battle on earth? the winning/losing game, "the ravaged land" and qualms about postponing departure...maybe we'll just have to find rapture here on earth. After all, it is where spirit embodies an earthly form. I guess undoubtedly, I see -us- as an extension of existence made of earth. Because its' sooo fleeting, giving a damn is part of the justice question.
Maybe an intrinsic part of a healing in flux Earth, is the possibility for humans to engage/receive/work through/ offer healing ourselves, as a species. While reading Pyle, my brain recalled Paul Shepard's How Animals Made Us Humans, and the idea that we -as humanity- are stuck in a stagnant kind of way- within these Jungian archetypes of adolescent boy/male behavior in which we have become somewhat helpless. There's a whole more to that, but I pictured it for some reason while reading him. A rebirth/coming of age sounds more like what we're heading for, hopefully other Pyles will be willing to be awake for the ride.
It's not that I can't identify with such feelings of hopelessness and despair -I come from a place in which such disparities are in your face. And its' somewhat a privilege to give up hands down, perhaps not having stakes against you offers up that luxury.
Rather than operating from a place of struggle, perhaps if we understood the role of compliance in affirming the "ways things are"/ "business as usual" we could deal with the turmoil on a different note. If I really think about it, my biggest umph with Pyles' writing is that its' ultra -"acting right toward the earth" is an expression of relationship (on a spectrum of good & bad, sure -what ever makes most sense for you) not a means of "cheating death" or mortality. Since he brought up his "catholic tastes", perhaps there's some revisiting of fear that could offer up more to his coyote lifting a leg.
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