Is this what other beings ask themselves while glancing at us side-eye, as we crash and barge around the planet, ripping everything up in an insatiable quest to meet intangible needs?
Why so miserable, indeed? We humans have been asking ourselves this question for a long time, and answering it with a slew of just-so stories. Let’s skeletonize the one about the Garden of Eden and see what we can make of it, let thought tickle its old bones. It goes like this:
1) Once we lived in harmony with all things and beings.
2) Then we learned the truth.
3) Now everything is hard and sucks.What is this awful truth that destroyed the dulcet tones of all good all the time, that left humans wandering about with a propensity for bad attitudes and destructive behavior?
I propose that it has something to do with the basic life plan of being a creature on Earth: we all eat each other and are eaten in return; we are individuated, and that individuation ceases when we die and become recombined back into the pattern.
We take turns. That’s the game plan, whether we like it or not. (And, really, we don’t. We are creatures made of care and love, with a hankering for stability, and all the coming and going is a lot to endure.)
Our modern gloss on the just-so story morphs the phrase “survival of the fittest” into a sort of gladiator combat in which the winner survives. But, given that 99% of all species that have ever existed on the planet are now extinct — and 100% of the individuals are dead, or will be soon enough — survival itself is a myth. There is no survival. So let’s let that go.
And if we let that go, what’s left? Are we to stand here empty handed?
Yes.
If we understand mutation as improvisation, it’s easier to see this being thing for what it is: a play of energy from one fantastic iteration to the next, an infinite dance. Life is kaleidoscopic.
We are part of the shifting — tiny dancers, members of a vast and all-inclusive troupe. Bystanding is not an option. The only question is HOW we choose to dance, with what style, to what effect. How we treat our dance partners, and ourselves. Whether we notice and appreciate the marvelous patterning or, in futile protest, attempt to outwit it — or rip it apart.
How does that King Harvest song go? “We like our fun and we never fight, you can’t dance and stay uptight, it’s a supernatural delight …” Hear, hear. Or here, here.
Here’s to dancing in (and out of) the moonlight.
