The other day Michael Herman and were talking about compassion and mutuality. The idea is that mutuality is making someone appear as real to you as you appear to yourself.
Naturally this means understanding that the person sitting across the room from you at this moment is full of an inner life that is as rich as yours. Confidence, self-esteem, confusion, love, pain, grief, celebration – all of these things are known to them too.
It sounds so trite on one hand, but it is incredibly powerful the more I dig into this thought. So often we see others as “punching bags” able to absorb hurt that we project without any internal effect. And yet, we know damn well how it feels to be cursed at (or smiled at for that matter).
To say that someone appears as real to you as you appear to yourself is to understand that when we think of ourselves we rarely think about our bodies. As Douglas and Catherine Harding would say, we don�t even know we have a head. We don�t see our back…we only see a small percentage of the body that other’s see. What makes us real to ourselves in our inner lives of thoughts emotions and sensations. With practice it is possible to sense that every other person in the world also has this inner life, despite that fact that we usually only perceive them as bodies.
* * *
In a related move, Euan Semple at The Obvious? points me to The Global Rich List, which tells me that in an average year I am about the 50,000,000th richest person in the world, which puts me in the top 0.836 percentile.
I have a lot of work to do to understand compassionate relations when 5,949,632,435 are poorer than me. Five billion is a number I can’t even conceive of, but it does put minor aches and pains in context.
A picture of earth from the edge of the solar system, by Voyager 1
Carl Sagan: Relfections on a Mote of Dust
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there � on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
The picture at the top of this entry is a close up of the Voyager image of which Sagan is speaking. It was one of the last photos taken by Voyager 1 as it left the solar system in February 1990 to embark on its journey into interstellar space. The earth, a pale blue dot, appears suspended in a sunbeam which is basically solar glare on the camera lens. For a larger picture, with a lot more black nothingness surrounding our tiny, tiny home, click here. It sometimes brings tears to my eyes.
Grasslands National Park in southern Saskatchewan is an amazing place. It is natural shortgrass prairie and home to all kinds of interesting plants and animals. Over the course of three days there in 1994, we saw badgers, mule deer, pronghorn antelope, burrowing owls, ferringous hawks, black tailed prairie dogs, rattlesnakes, and red foxes. We saw teepee rings on the top of bald buttes, unused for maybe 100 years, but each stone cast off the bottom of a skin teepee and gently placed in a ring for another time. We saw buffalo stones; huge erratic boulders rubbed smooth by centuries of buffalo who scratched themselves against the cool stone.
But initially, it wasn’t easy to see all this. Grasslands is wide open and one can travel anywhere on foot. We decided that we would visit every tree that we could see in the park (4 in all). During the first evening of looking around we saw none of the wildlife we expected. The next morning we spotted a coyote trail and decided to follow it.
Suddenly the world revealed itself to us, The trail took us past deer beds and badger dens, prairie dog colonies and owl burrows. Past a bleached skeleton of an antelope and down to the muddy Frenchman River, the northern most reach of the Mississippi River Basin.
And the trail wound on, almost aimlessly, yet connecting each of these living places like a songline. I got to wondering how long that trail had been there…200 years? 1000 years? How long had the coyotes been patrolling the valley, checking on every possible chance for a meal?
I soon became convinced that these trails had no beginning and no end. To follow them you simply hop aboard, like a depression era drifter riding freights, and see where they carry you. Other trails join, and sometimes the path splits in two. But there is no beginning and no end. In theory, the continent is laced with these paths, the original story of the land etched gingerly into the natural surface of the earth. In most places these paths have been covered over, but I am sure that the acquired energy of thousands of years of animals walking has left an imprint. If one was sensitive enough, one might even be able to feel the trail humming beneath concrete or blacktop, honouring only the topography and natural contour of the land.
We can find these stories again. We have to dig beneath the layers that have grown over the trails like grime. But the story is there. It reveals itself the same way a dirt path emerges across a grassy urban park, in complete defiance of the paved plan . There are natural ways to navigate within space. By honouring them, the real story emerges, and the living places reveal themselves to us.