A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [155]
The first is that if a person continues to pretend against all evidence that his foot is not broken, he may rebreak it, as I did high jumping. Had I allowed my foot to heal through the fall during my last year jumping, I could have jumped in the spring. I may even have fulfilled my potential as a jumper. I will never know. It might have been appropriate for my coach just that once to yell at me. Not at my foot, but at me for not listening to my foot.
The second difference is that there is a distinction to be made between shouting from frustration, and shouting because a house is being destroyed and no one is paying attention. Another way to say this is that given enough time—perhaps ten thousand years—even my father could probably heal, but what about the people whose souls he murders in the meantime? And what about the secondary damage caused by those whose own destructiveness had its genesis in the violence he did to them: my siblings, for example, when they pass on damage to their children. In contrast to the Buddhists on the panel who blew the question about compassion, my loyalty lies with the innocent, and I need to do whatever I can to stop the damage.
It's a fine line to walk, that of waiting for the arrival of understanding—for kairos—and the need for action. I am active now. In my twenties I was not. I believe my present level of energy is a result of having fallen deeply into my lethargy then. Had there been no time of sleep, there could not now be this time of awakening, but instead I would still be as I was before, turning most of my energy inward to maintain the imprisonment of my own emotions.
I need to now step away from much of what I've just been saying. To believe for a moment that what I was doing in Nevada and after constituted "lazing about," or "inaction," makes plain another form of silencing, once again of the unseen. Hidden here is the absurd presumption that to flip burgers or repair televisions is more important and difficult than to shake off the effects of a coercive upbringing and education, and insofar as possible to vomit out the internalized voices of a coercive and deeply violent culture. This is but one more way we value production over life.
We do what we reward, and we reward what we value. All fancy philosophy aside, we value asking someone if they would like fries with their burger more than we value a rich and healthy emotional and spiritual life and a vital community. Of course. The former does not threaten the foundations of our culture.
All choices involve the loss of unembraced opportunities. The time I spend trying to understand and stem the pervasive destructiveness of the culture cannot be spent shoveling fries, and were I to mix milkshakes I could not spend that time learning how to listen to coyotes, trees, aphids, dogs, the Dreamgiver, or my disease.
Just as Cleve Backster can name the moment when his consciousness forever changed, I can name the time when I began to be reborn. It was 1987. I had moved to north Idaho, because in driving around with my two dogs, it was the prettiest place I had seen. Presumably they agreed. I had by that time regained my weight and lost it again to Crohn's, then regained it and lost it again, and gained it once more: learning the lessons of the disease took time, and did not guarantee freedom from relapses. I had been in a dreadful car accident with my mother, hitting an overturned semi load of plywood at fifty-five. I walked away; she shattered her arm, broke her neck, and was made functionally blind by paralysis of the nerves controlling eye movement.
I was living in a small town called Spirit Lake. I was poor. I had not yet received a settlement from the trucker whose lack of refrigeration had killed the bees, and so was unable to buy new bees to start over. I was not very happy.
I did not have a telephone, and used to walk to the grocery store to use the pay phone outside. I remember an evening in early September, dark gray sky growing darker by the moment,