Let’s sit down here, all of us, on the open prairie, where we can’t see a highway or a fence, free from the debris of the city. Let’s have no blankets to sit on, but let our bodies converge with the earth, the surrounding trees and shrubs. Let us have the vegetation for a mattress, experiencing its texture, its sharpness, and its softness. Let us become like stones, plants, and trees. Let us be animals, think and feel like animals.
This is my plea: Listen to the air. You can hear it, feel it, smell it, and taste it. We feel it between us, as a presence presiding over the day. It is a good way to start thinking about nature and talking about it. To go further, we must rather talk to it, talk to the rivers, to the lakes, and to the winds, as to our relatives.
Some of you have impaired our ability to experience nature in the good way, as part of it. Even here we are conscious that somewhere beyond the marsh and its cranes, somewhere out in those hills there are radar towers and highway overpasses. You have not only contaminated the earth, the rocks, and the minerals, all of which you call “dead” but which are very much alive; you have even changed the animals, which are part of us, changed them into zoological mutations, so no one can recognize them.
There is power in an antelope, so you let it graze within your fences. But what power do you see in a goat or sheep, prey animals with no defenses? There was great power in a wolf, even in a fox. You have inverted nature and turned these animals into miniature lap dogs.
You have also made some types of wild birds into chickens – creatures with wings so impaired that they cannot fly. There are farms where you breed chickens. These birds are kept in low cages, forced to be hunched over all the time. Having to spend all their lives stooped over makes unnatural birds.
That’s where you’ve fooled yourselves. You have not only altered, declawed, and deformed your winged and four-legged cousins; you have done it concurrently to yourselves. You have plastic surgery, apply synthetic make-up, and take countless drugs. Your homes are filled with families disconnected from one another but tied to their own mobile devices and social groups.
“Watch the crumbs; don’t eat crackers on the couch, you will stain the fabric. Watch the goldfish bowl. Don’t lean your head against the wallpaper; your hair may be greasy. Don’t spill liquor on that table, you’ll peel off its delicate finish. You should have wiped your boots; the floor was just cleaned. Don’t, don’t, don’t …” That is absurd! We weren’t made to endure this type of “repression”. You live in prisons which you have built for yourselves, calling them homes, offices, or factories.
Sometimes I think that even our pitiful small houses are better than your luxury mansions. Strolling a hundred feet to the outhouse on a clear wintry night, through mud or snow, that’s one small link with nature. Or in the summer, in the back country, taking your time listening to the humming of the insects or the flapping of birds’ wings, feeling the sun warming your bones through the nodding branches of trees. However, you don’t even have that pleasure of coexistence with nature anymore.
You subscribe to the belief that everything must be germ free. No smells! Not even the good, natural man and woman odors. Eradicate the smell from under your armpits, or from your skin. Rub it out, and then spray some botanical odor on yourself, stuff you can spend a lot of money on, ten dollars an ounce, so you know this has to smell good. Why do you keep such a distance from your bodies’ functions, cavities and smells that you’ve alienated yourselves from the natural world, of which you are an integral part?
I think you are so afraid and intolerant of the world around you. You deplore the natural world; you don’t want to see, feel, smell, or hear it. You are detached from it. The feelings of rain and snow on your face, being numbed by an icy wind and warmed back up by a smoking fire, coming out of a hot sweat bath, and plunging into a cold stream, these things are the spice of life, but you don’t want them anymore.
You’re cage dwellers, residing in boxes which shut out the hot humidity of summer and the chill of winter, living inside a body that no longer has a scent. You’re hearing the noise from the hi-fi instead of listening to the sounds of nature. You’re watching actors on TV having a make-believe experience when you no longer experience anything for yourself. That’s your way. It’s no good.