BY JOELLEN COLLINS
A framed quotation near my bathroom vanity has struck home with renewed force this week. The words by T.H. Watkins, a respected historian and environmentalist, appear on one of dozens of Christmas greetings printed and sent by a cousin every year of my adult life. I have kept them all.
The inscription reads: “In wild country, where it is possible to encounter and truly experience other kinds of intelligence, we can learn with a clarity unobtainable elsewhere that we are not alone on this cooling cinder. This world and its creatures were not presented to us; we were joined to them in the exquisite saraband of life. It was never meant to be a conquest, and it is more deeply complex than a responsibility. It is a sharing.”
Today, I had a haunting experience at the National Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City, where I am experiencing my own life dance with my expanded, “new” family and realizing how fortunate I am to have this fresh chance at positive human connections just when I have recently experienced too many losses.
On a far wall in a room depicting the paintings of and history about the buffalo hangs a huge old photograph of hundreds of buffalo skulls with a man posing atop the pyramid of death. It was gruesome, of course, but it also symbolized the often-mindless power of our country’s and humankind’s past and present sad history. Even though I am almost inured to the constant barrage of media depictions of violent events to the innocent, both human and animal, it was upsetting.
I like Watkins’ use of the word “sharing” in this context, a word I recall often using, as one who worked with students of all ages, suggesting that one of them “share” a certain analysis, or a sample of personal writing. It is also one of our hardest early lessons when we are told to share a toy with another toddler. Sharing involves opening up oneself to others, perhaps giving up a thing or idea or skill by not entirely owning that entity, learning to move in concert with others. I had not applied this concept to our interactions with earth’s non-human creatures, but now realize the implications. In short, as Watkins says, “It is more deeply complex than a responsibility.”
Thus, Watkins asks of us a more difficult challenge. We need to respect and include other creatures into the dance of our lives, remembering that we are irrevocably joined to them. Good participants in the lovely and formal 17th and 18th century “saraband” understood its patterns, rules and restrictions, and gloried in the dance. The earth’s non-human creatures also instinctively acknowledge the boundaries and conventions of their existence, moving gracefully within those parameters.
Joyous movement should be a gift for every species, a life touched by the beauty of fulfilled existence. Life IS a dance, hopefully not recalled through celebrations showing off slaughtered baby elephants or a mass of skulls to an audience who may not even understand our exquisite saraband.