A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [154]
Had I encountered these comments in my twenties, they would have encouraged me by helping to blunt the voice inside: What's the matter? Lazy? Looking back, I can put a positive spin on my activities—or lack thereof—of those years by calling it a period of pupation, or saying I was undergoing a death and rebirth, or calling it my own forty days in the wilderness. But the truth is that for the next few years, living first in Nevada and later in Idaho, I didn't actually do much of anything. I felt guilty about this, but I couldn't find anything to do that interested me more than nothing. I certainly wasn't going to go back to physics, or to any other means of selling my hours. I called myself a writer, but didn't write much: what was I going to write? I didn't have anything to say, because I didn't know who I was. To discover that takes long, slow, uninterrupted time. Time enough to get bored, and then to move beyond boredom, which is really just another screen to deflect our attention away from the arduous yet delightful, joyous though painful process of allowing ourselves the stillness to remember what we feel and to begin assuming responsibility for our lives.
Nearly every day I walked the railroad tracks to the Humboldt River, then climbed down to the concrete footing of a bridge. There I sat in the sunlight and read, or more often just watched the river. I walked the banks, and in spring saw a mother bird feign a broken wing to distract me from her nest. I saw beetles crawling in and out of a beaver dead on the tracks, and I saw the beaver's teeth, orange as carrots. I saw plenty of trains.
Albert Einstein once observed that "the significant problems of the world cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness at which they were created." I think he's right. I believe Carl Jung was onto much the same thing when he wrote, "All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble. . . . They can never be solved, but only outgrown. This ‘outgrowing’ proved on further investigation to require a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest appeared on the patient's horizon, and through this broadening of his or her outlook the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms but faded when confronted with a new and stronger life urge."
The first statement points out to me why there must always be a death for there to be a meaningful transition—one that sticks. We do not easily give up our acquired ways of being, even when they're killing us. Although when I sat on the couch as a child, or lay in bed feeling my father's flesh against mine, it had been unspeakably crucial for me to control my emotions and body, I could not later quit manifesting that same control until it had very nearly killed me. That level of consciousness had to play itself out to the end, or rather to an end. Only when that mindset had, like a plant in a too-small pot, exhausted its own possibilities did I begin casting about for another way to be; only when I no longer had any real choice, far past the time when what little choice there was—death or change—had become all-too-painfully obvious, did I begin to reject the earlier mindset. This is why I don't think our culture will stop before the world has been impoverished beyond our most horrifying imaginations.
The second statement reveals to me why the period of hibernation takes so long. We do not stand in front of a tree, shouting, "Grow, damn you, grow!" and we recognize the futility of wishing a broken foot to heal in a day. But in myself and in so many of my friends I've encountered an unwillingness to acknowledge that even having sloughed off an old level of consciousness, it takes a long time to grow a new one.
It could be argued that my own railing against the culture exhibits the same blindness to process as that of a person yelling at a broken foot: the culture