A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [153]
The sleep extended to everyone in the castle, and round the castle grew a hedge of thorns so high as to hide even the flag on the roof (in the cocoon, the caterpillar must give up its former identity so that when the time is right it may assume another). For the next hundred years many princes tried to awaken this sleeping beauty with a kiss. But they never succeeded, because before they could get to her the hedge's thorns grabbed and killed them. Finally, at the end of the allotted time, another prince, really not so very different from the ones who came before, made the same attempt. But because the time had come for Briar Rose to rewaken, the thorns turned to flowers, which parted of their own accord—once again, the sexual symbolism is so obvious as to almost make me blush—and let him in. He kissed her, and you know the rest.
Rollo May calls this moment when Briar Rose grew ready kairos, or the time of destiny. It is that moment when her pupating is done, and she is ready to emerge an adult. It is the moment when her purpose begins to be fulfilled (and let's hope her purpose in life is far more than to be a simple helpmate to her handsome prince). She is at last receptive to stimuli to which, in the time before, she was insensate. Because of internal changes she is ready for external change, ready to be reawakened with something so simple as a kiss.
The notion of kairos is important not only to sleeping princesses in fairy tales and to their suitors, successful or dead. It applies to anyone who undergoes any death and who must then await the necessary rebirth, and I believe it applies just as surely to cultures, which too must die to a way of living so that when the time is right they may reawaken mature, ripe, and ready to enter into fully mutual, adult relationships.
Every creature on the planet must be hoping, at the very least selfishly, that our cultures time of awakening comes soon. Perhaps someday the salmon and the rest of us will hurl ourselves against the dams expecting to feel the impermeability that has met us all along—the obstinate resistance that murdered Jesus, Spartacus, Tupac Amaru, and Thomas Münzer—and we will find at long last and instead the wild river that lay hidden there all the time.
I don't believe it would have been possible for me to undergo a meaningful death and rebirth had I been working a wage job. There would not have been time. No one expects a caterpillar to spin a cocoon, pop in for ten minutes, then emerge a butterfly, and at least my mother understood it would take me months or years to recover even physically from my episode of Crohn's disease, yet not many of us are willing or able to make the time necessary to begin asking the right questions about who we are, what we love, what we fear, and what we're doing to each other, much less answering these questions, and much much less living them.
I don't always know what the right questions are; I only know that they reside in my body, and that in order to discover them— or better, remember—I need to be still. In that sense the disease did me an immense favor; had I at any time been tempted by poverty, rampant deficit spending, and social pressure to get a job, my body would have killed me.
At the time, through my twenties, I did not know what was right, only what was wrong, and I didn't know what I wanted, only what I didn't want. I didn't know how to live, only how not to live. I knew a job wasn't what I wanted or needed.
We did not evolve working for others forty hours or more per week. We evolved, and one need only look at nonhumans or at remaining indigenous peoples to see this is so, spending a great deal of time doing not much of anything (or once again in the lingo of bee research, "loafing"). As the Dane Frederick Andersen Boiling said of the Khoikhoi of South Africa, "They find it strange that we, the Christians, work, and they say, that we are all mortal, that we gain nothing from our toil, but at the end are thrown underground, so that all we have done is in vain." Another colonist noted of these same people