A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [68]
Is it any wonder, I asked my friend, that we do not observe them coming to us in the dark, that they do not feed us, care for us, and lead us home? Is it any wonder they run frightened from us?
It should be clear by now, I said, after all these years, all these extinctions, all these lost opportunities for redemption and community, that somewhere along the line, to switch from Latinate to Anglo-Saxon roots, we fucked up. And today? We're still fucking up. We still believe we stand alone atop the world. But it has to stop. At some point we will finally have to look around and see if anyone is still able, and willing, to lead us home.
She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. I wondered if I had said too much.
I majored in economics at graduate school. The main lesson I learned was about the primacy of process, that when I act from indirect intentions, roadblocks arise, requiring force of will to maintain my course in direct proportion to that course's distance from my heart.
Here's what I mean: I went to graduate school not because I particularly cared about economics, but so I could continue high jumping. When I'd graduated from college, I'd felt as though a part of me had died too soon. I'd only jumped for two and a half years, and with just another year I thought I could qualify for, and maybe even win, the Division II national championship.
But even that possibility didn't motivate me as much as the unfettered joy of the sport. I loved the utter loss of self-consciousness as I stood up, the glide of the approach, the softness of takeoff—more an inevitability, a falling upward, than a thrust—the eerie, erotic smoothness of clearing the bar. The sport was a perfect fit for me. This doesn't mean I didn't work at it, for I did, but there is a difference between work for the sake of love, which provides its own motivation, and work for the sake of another end.
There's a Chinese term that encapsulates my high-jumping experience: wu-wei, which means not doing, not in the sense of doing nothing, but of not forcing. Not only were my best jumps unforced, but the flow of high jumping—from accidental discovery by the handball teacher, to his patient nurturance, to winning our conference championship—contrasted painfully with the larger, and largely forced, process of schooling.
The Roman philosopher Seneca wrote of a similar process of assistance or resistance: "The fates guide those who will; those who won't they drag." If earlier the fates had guided me into jumping, they now began to drag me away. Soon after signing up for classes, I discovered that the School of Mines had switched athletic associations, and the new association did not allow graduate students to compete. On hearing this I considered dropping out, but because I'd already jumped high enough to qualify for many regional and national meets, I kept attending school with the thought of jumping independently.
The fates didn't allow this, either. A few weeks later I injured my jump foot. Neither the trainers nor school doctors could find anything wrong, so I dealt with the injury the way I dealt with all pain, by walling it off. The positive form of the self's disappearance in jumping returned to its shadow as I forcefully separated myself from my body signals. I hopped to my mark on one foot, turned off the pain, ran the approach, jumped, allowed the pain back in, and hopped out of the pit. I kept hoping that if only I could deafen myself sufficiently to the pain, I could will myself over the bar, and was surprised at how poorly this worked. I kept jumping, and, as I later found out, kept rebreaking my foot—for X rays later revealed it to be broken—with every jump I forced myself to do.
Nor did classes work out. I majored in economics because it was the easiest thing offered at the School of Mines, and because I'd enjoyed the half-dozen or so classes I'd already taken. I could