“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
—Aldo Leopold
How do you experience yourself as being in community with the non-human world?
My dogs aren’t human and are very much part of my family. However, I don’t know if I feel like I’m in community with the land.
I walk in the woods almost every day, and I do feel connected to it. I don’t feel like my interactions with it are social, so I’m quite hesitant to call it my community. While I have no legal title to the forest, it does kinda feel like it’s “mine.” That encourages me to take care of it, though I wouldn’t litter anywhere else, either.
I’ve seen a lot of people treat their human community with the same respect granted to disposable commodities: vandalism, smoking in non-smoking areas, theft, vicious gossip, and so on and on. I don’t know if that means that community doesn’t have inherent value or if it means that people don’t realize that these things actually impact their community.
I don’t think I’m unusual in that I treat things the best that I think are valuable and that I’m fiercely possessive of and/or believe I simply don’t have the right to desecrate. The possessiveness makes me protective, but I don’t think that it’s quite the same thing as viewing it as a commodity because I can also have a strong sense that my dogs, human family, friends, etc. are mine and I don’t objectify them. Somehow true commodities aren’t even as much “mine” because my heart doesn’t “own” them.
I think that maybe my idea of something being valuable and personal is the same thing as Aldo Leopold’s idea of community, but I’m not sure. Either way, the Earth as a whole seems too big for my heart to fully grasp. Various smaller causes fit, though.
How do you experience yourself as being in community with the non-human world?…
I worship The Goddess; and I see the Sacred within, around, and through everything in Creation. I believe in the actual existence of The Fae – as Guardians of Mother Earth, and all the Elements. I believe that when we – as humans – join our Sacred Sparks in the most elemental of unions, with the purity of our passions; we meld the two of us with the most Divine of the Sacred Flame … healing hurts, that run deeper than any could imagine.
Blessings! from a shamanic healer who uses sexual empathy to bring these powers to light.
Dwayne
I live in a place where you have to consider relationships to non-human life everyday. A family of deer regularly eat in my backyard (forget the flower garden), bears take strolls down my street, a group of turkey go for their daily route around the neighborhood and you can hear a certain owl at night, going from tree to tree, hooting each time. Likewise, the occasional spider has to be relocated (in my basement during cold weather.) I have a very acrimonious relationship with yellow jackets though. We just don’t get along. We also have to respect the trees, especially in wintertime when a few have to fall. Much of the relationships depend mostly on paying attention.