Offerings at the Grave of Right and Wrong
Out beyond ideas of Right-doing and Wrong-doing, there is a field…I’ll meet you there. -Rumi
What if at long last, we arrived at an unexpected place, in time for a funeral. Seeing sad yet familiar faces, we decided to stay and listen, to pay our respect to the unknown one finding rest in the earth.
I will not say, do not weep, for not all tears are an evil. -J.R.R. Tolkien
And what if, overhearing whispers, the identity of the one inside the coffin came rushing into us. And then we hear the words of the weepers…
Right, I’ve never known one more True
Wrong, always faithful in your Falseness
Right, you’ve always told me just what to do
Wrong, you’ve always embraced my sadness
Right, more important than Love
Wrong, with shame you’ve driven me
Right, you kept me looking up above
Wrong, you’ve abused me with authority
Both of you have kindly fed me
with food I could not eat
Both of you have kindly blinded me
to things I needed to see
With this I say goodbye
And let this be the end
To me you’ve both been friends
but now I’ve left your lonely lands
What if Right and Wrong themselves had died? And we then entered a new world, one that had always existed all around us, but we’d never seen. A world of life, and observation. A world of patterns, and tendencies, of illusions, and tentative explanations. A world without certainty, or guarantees, or truths, or falsities. A world, most of all, of unending mysteries.
The same world that nurtured us into humanity, that shaped us into who we have become, where we emerged as humans caring for other humans, caring for the earth, because we danced to the rhythm of our own wildest natures.
The world of the Trackers.
November 11th, 2007 at 1:09 am
[…] Rewilding ethics looks like working to make the web of life tighter. Rather than have ungrounded changeable ideas of good and evil, it seems the origin point comes more from cause and reaction in the real world; do damage to the environment and do damage to your culture, strengthen the environment, strengthen your culture. Let’s get rid of the right and wrong, good and evil dichotomy and ask ourselves, will it kill us? Does it meet the needs of the environment? Will it meet the needs of the future generations? We need a healthy physical world to continue living. Indigenous ethics base themselves on the needs of the physical world, whereas civilization has removed itself so much so that it doesn’t even recognize a physical world. Rewilding buries right and wrong back in the land where it belongs. […]
July 13th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
[…] and oughts, rights and wrongs. I’ve written about this before, in terms of the Grave of Right and Wrong (and podcasted […]