Tuesday, March 20, 2012

They will make us better (if we let them)...



Humans are relational creatures. We build and shift our reality and our identity around perceived contexts. We are different when we are alone to when we are with a group of strangers to when we are at a funeral to when we are a leader of a nation. What is our perceived context as a species and how might we evolve such a massive and under-considered thing?

My mission is to use the immediate, penetrative, emotional, consciousness-expanding properties of the arts to weave threads of awareness for all living things into the cloth of individual consciousnesses. As we (in the West) plunge deeper into a 'reality' framed by techno-economic civilization, my gut tells me that we'll need good reminders of the natural and instinctual forces we're working very hard to distance ourselves from.

I find animals to be our most enduring hope for maintaining soul in the face of soullessness. If we can allow ourselves to look at animals as mirrors (without discrediting their own lives), we will discover startling reflections in them: Our blind spots, our lost powers, and our self-intoxication on the one hand, and our grace our strength and our true creativity on the other.

It seems we've been killing god for a long time now. Showing him or her (even though he or she is dead right?) that this is our game now, that anything it can do we can do better.

Tell that to a tomato. Or a baby octopus. Or a mandrill with a toothache.

2 comments:

The said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Bill said...

It was Chief Seattle that said that whatever happens to the animals, so too shall it happen to man for without animals, humanity shall die of loneliness of spirit.
We are all mammals and have evolved, some co-evolved in the instance of Africa, to maintain our lives. Very seldom it seems does humanity consider the cost of replacement to which other animals have evolved to maintain. It seems that monetary cost is the decisive factor so in this manner, it has been said by such people as EO Wilson that the cost of replacement would be in the billions. We simply can't make this a game by taking sides because if we don't win this game, we lose big because extinction is forever.