What Do We Do With the Eggs?
“The point is, there is no mainstream and no secondary or outsider-stream.
It’s One Stream or No Stream.”
The dilemma isn't that sometimes a comment or a person or a headline feels outlandishly insulting (though it does). It isn't that sometimes this whole culture we live in is hurtful and offensive (though it is). It isn't even that we don't know how to behave, how to get along, how to make lemonade from the lemons of our blunders: it's that we depend on this abhorrent culture to survive, whether we feel insulted and invisible or not. We're like that old joke Woody Allen tells in the movie Annie Hall about the guy whose brother thinks he’s a chicken. The man’s psychiatrist asks why he doesn’t turn his brother in. The fellow replies, I would, but I need the eggs. We know this culture is crazy, but we need the electricity and the light switches, the phones and the computers and the internet and the freeways and the supermarkets.
Our current roster of leaders cannot get us out of this mess because they get even more eggs from the system than we do. If I read too much news, I walk around in a haze of upset and disappointment. I am appalled by the brutality of the world, and the lack of imagination of our leaders, except to imagine ways to be yet more greedy and corrupt. It’s easy in the abstract to love a country and hate what the government does, easy to love humanity, but tricky to love violent extremists. We love the idea of loving extremists, though we don’t actually feel love at all so we let ourselves off the hook by saying we merely dislike them.
But dislike is a smokescreen. It sanitizes words like hate that we - I - allow ourselves to use in the privacy of our own minds. If we had the power to erase a handful of humans we abhor, to wave the magic wand of our thinking and make them disappear, what then? Would we be tempted? Might we try to justify getting rid of a handful of the worst offenders and start fresh? Welcome to the thinking of the despots that did and still do ‘disappear’ those they perceive as a threat.
It comes from the same impulse that allows us to hate an insect and smash it. Then the negotiation begins: if we don’t hate spiders, and do our best to save them, what about other, less easy-to-love critters? How about cockroaches and scorpions? What if we had the power to erase the insects and animals we think of as ‘vermin’, or to banish the illnesses and pathogens we think of as unnecessary because they’re harmful to humans? Would we go ahead if we could, knowing that every living thing serves its ecological purpose though it may be lethal to us? That slope is already more slippery than we care to admit.
We’re in a cultural bardo. The way we live is killing us and everything else, but we don’t yet have a viable alternative, even inside our own heads, never mind the double-binds of wanting solar panels and wind turbines to be the progress we crave despite the horrendous ecological destruction required to manufacture and dispose of all those energy-saving gadgets. It seems like all our available choices are either-or dilemmas. Back at Square One, we decide our only option is to take things one difficult conversation, and one awkward moment at a time. Sometimes it boils down to one full-throated growl at the computer screen between deep breaths.
Machaelle Small Wright, whose quote introduces this post, faced several of these kinds of dilemmas at her farm, Perelandra. In response, she learned to communicate with the Intelligence of each problematic being she encountered in order to work with them in partnership rather than enmity. She tells this story of negotiating with moles:
The moles had taken over our lawn… I sat down on the lawn, got inwardly quiet and asked to be connected to the Deva of the Moles… I explained that I didn’t want the moles to leave Perelandra, that I understood that they were part of the life cycle at Perelandra. But would they consider living in the woods or in an open field area about 200 feet from the house? … Assuming my efforts a failure, I returned to the garden. But about half an hour later, I heard leaves rustling. I looked up and saw a band of moles - at least a hundred in number - scurrying along the woods’ edge, heading for the open field.
-Machaelle Small Wright, Behaving As If the God In All Life Mattered
Her experience asks us to consider the possibility of taking the time and making the effort to relate to our fellow Earthlings in these ways. How might it transform us and, therefore, this culture, to make this kind of shift? At the moment, it seems easier (and safer) to negotiate with a cockroach than with a human holding a gun.
A few days ago, I arrived home to find three deer in the meadow by my house. Three young bucks. They're the same ones who like to eat the California poppies just as they're opening. I watch them tug at the flowers and nibble them like pieces of apricot-orange candy. They pause and look up as they chew. They wander my garden and the windswept field beyond the gate. Sometimes they feed on the fresh grass in the open space along the highway. I saw one a few months ago on the shoulder of the road. A car passed and he startled. He tried to leap the barbed wire fence to the safety beyond it, but he was too close, and couldn't get a running start. His hind leg caught on the barbed wire and he couldn't pull it free, though he tugged and tugged. He tried harder. More desperate. More panicked. Ears twitching, tail flicking, nostrils flaring. Just as I pulled over to try to help him (with no idea how), his leg tore free and he bounded toward the forest along the ridge. He needs the barbed wire and the highway even less than I do.
And so we must ask ourselves whether we’re finally willing to live the understanding that human survival requires the survival of all life, including those we abhor, from the incomprehensible behavior of certain humans right down to the out-of-balance ‘vermin’ that challenge us to move past our impulse to exterminate. In the meantime, what do we do with the eggs?
