Life protecting life
It’s raining today, snow melting, tractor waiting for me to be brave enough to do my work. The garage has ice and snow weighing down a roof gone fifty years without care.
In the first rains of spring the snow melts and anything that thought it could keep it out on the roof of the garage gives up. Ice has found its way in, opened tiny pores and cracks, and for a week my garage will rain inside and out. Next month I can patch it up, I can air it out, I can try to recover what water touches. I want desperately to force a dichotomy here - that water gives as much life as it does destruction, but the truth is that it is returning minerals to the earth, and that has always been the norm, rot, and rust, and the washing away. It is myopic, human, almost violent of me to think that my tools should stay as they are, my garage should stand firm. One day when I am rich enough for reinforcements I will fight back better, but I won’t do that any longer with the hubris that I am right in my pursuit.
Industry then on any scale is perhaps a blip of cruelty far more insidious and destructive than anything we’ve created so far. And on the scale it proliferates now. Staving off the endless rain, an earth crying for its children to come home. To put down their deadly toys.
I wonder what it was like around the campfire as one tribe noticed another settling down. Seeing their friends, their enemies,
their companions in spirit
laud a new way of life, of growing and tending, a short and seemingly peaceful endeavor that began in short time to erupt in broader class disparity and less cohesion. With a small group of people you need to work things out, you need to stay balanced and willing to adapt to each others needs and the present conditions.
Let me not fetishize the conditions of a small wandering group and still honor that the cohesion required to make that work has largely been forgotten. There was at one time in our history that there was not “another fish in the sea” in the sense that everything and everyone is replaceable.
Maybe it is not important that I’m necessary in a group.
But somewhere in my caveman bones I crave it.
The harmony to get along, the skills to provide for years for people I know the names of, and a deep knowing that I will be loved and accepted even when I am not or no longer able to gather.
So for now I will fix my tractor and plea with my garage. But I will also remember that before tractors, before garages, this land provided. And after tractors, after garages, this land will provide.
Every feeling is life protecting life. Every rain drop is life protecting life.
