Nature-based flash fiction or short stories running between 100 and 1300 words are also welcome.  Excerpts from longer stories or novels up to 1300 words are encouraged–though pieces may run longer if they can be broken into multiple parts.

Please read WIZ’s submissions guide before sending your work.  Then electronically submit your work either to wilderness@motleyvision.org or to pk.wizadmin@gmail.com.

Publications

I’ve received publication announcements for two of Wilderness Interface Zone’s frequent contributors.

First, Karen Kelsay’s new book of poetry, Dove on a Church Bench, was released in April.  You can find it on Amazon by clicking here.  Congratulations, Karen, and best wishes for success with your book of verse.

Here’s a sample poem from Dove on a Church Bench:

Violet

by Karen Kelsay

Husband, I want to ripen into
a woman like your mother,
one who wiggles an arm
into the nook of a son’s elbow,
feet twisting obscure angles
across frosty streets, refusing a cane.
Whose only hope from tipping
over in the lane with a dizzy spell,
is not a bottle of pills, but a bag
of boiled sweets.
A stiff-upper-lip kind of lady,
who jeers at heart attacks
and broken hips, and raises hell
when trapped in a ward with old people.
One who still makes tea each
morning over the burner, even though
she catches her sleeves on fire.
A woman with no riches, but a few
baubles of costume jewelry
and collection of miniature brass
animals, given her one Mother’s Day,
that glint in the sun like a row
of diamonds.

Second, Steven L. Peck’s novel The Scholar of Moab has been accepted for publication at Torrey House Press.  Torrey House Press’ website describes The Scholar of Moab as “a dark-comedy perambulating murder, affairs, and cowboy mysteries in the shadow of the La Sal Mountains.”  I get sand in my teeth just reading the description.  Scholar of Moab’s tentative release date is October 2011.  To see more about Steve’s novel and about Torrey House Press, click here (scroll down).  Look for an excerpt from Scholar of Moab to appear at WIZ in the near future.

Creative projects

Sean Watson produced a mini-film titled Birth based on his poem “Provo” published as an entry in this year’s 2011 Spring Poetry Runoff Contest here at WIZ.  Sean describes the film as  “…piece designed to be written by the viewer’s experiences.”  To see Sean’s film Birth, click here.

Contests and publishing opportunities

Torrey House Press extended its deadline for its creative nonfiction contest from May 31 to September 30.  For this contest, Torrey House is looking for writers “with a passion for the environment, issues, people, history, and cultures of the Colorado Plateau and the West.”  Explore their site for more information on the creative nonfiction contest as well as for other contests and publishing opportunities they offer by clicking here.

And … I received a call for submission from Moab Poets and Writers soliciting work for their first annual literary journal Desert Voices, “a literary voice for our desert home and those who feel a connection to it.”  This new journal seeks original writing on “any subject matter, all genres, poetry and prose,” though my experience with this group suggests they’re especially interested in work about the Colorado Plateau.  Desert Voices seeks short pieces, poems not exceeding 40 lines and prose pieces up to 1200 words.  For more information, visit their website here. Deadline: July 11.

Few things would thrill me more than to learn that Wilderness Interface Zone readers and writers found homes for their writing at either of these places.

Also, any contributor or follower of WIZ having announcements they’d like aired here, please send your blurb to pk.wizadmin@gmail.com.

House bashed in grays, homespun
surrounding yellows and pinks
on a Kansas prairie appears lonely tonight.
The theater, the lives once lived alive
inside are gone now,
buried in the back dark trail
behind the old outhouse.
Old wood chipper in the back, rustic, worn, no gas to thunder.
Old coal bin open to wind but no one to shovel the coal in.
Pumpkin patches, corn mazes, hayrides all gone.
Deserted ghostly children swing abandoned in prairie wind.
All the unheated rooms no longer have children
to fret about, cheerleaders long gone,
the banal house chills
once again for winter-
while three lone skinny crows perched out of sight
on barren branched trees silhouetted
in pink wait with hunger strikes as winter
snow start to settle in against moonlight skies.
Kansas becomes a quiet place
when the first snow falls.
The dance of the crows.
The lonely wind.
The creaking of doors, no oil in the joints.

______________________________________________________________

For more information about Michael and more of his poetry on WIZ, click here, here, and here.

I read Never Cry Wolf for two reasons.  First, wolves have begun appearing in northern Utah and the rancher v. wolf conflict is heating up.  In fact, as the success of the reintroduction of wolves to the U.S. spills into states surrounding Yellowstone, human competition with wolves and with other humans supportive of wolves’ return has intensified sharply, with people scrambling to find language either to justify resisting the animals’ arrival or to lay out the welcome mat and defend the animals’ rights to territory. In Utah, questions of whether or not to accept wolves as neighbors and, if so, how to go about it, are as charged as any disturbance of the social status quo.  In the lower 48 states, the legal status of wolves has seesawed back and forth between endangered and not endangered then to threatened then back again to endangered, depending on the state.  Some parties object to their getting even that much consideration.  I wanted material to help me think about wolves in Utah. Never Cry Wolf provided a good place to start.

The other reason I chose this book: My husband suffered a stroke in July, had brain surgery in August, and needed help with recovery from both.  Fallout from stroke and surgery includes difficulties with processing and forming language.  I know from experience that reading aloud to another helps wire the listening brain for strength of attention and comprehension that then trickles down into a body’s uttered speech.   I have so much faith in reading aloud that I expect it to help reconfigure my husband’s resituating mind.  Mowat’s book reads aloud nicely and offers a simple but satisfying variety of tones, images, and thoughts.  It’s a competent narrative that applies an interesting vocabulary, and my husband appreciates a sharp and effectual word stock.  Plus, he admires wolves.

One of this book’s best qualities is that, while Mowat engages in social criticism, debunking both official and folk narrative takes on wolves, he shows readers his own foibles as cases in point.  For instance, he muses upon the absurdities of the bureaucracy that dispatched him to prove the villainy of wolves but comes to realize that he has brought to the study his own set of misconceptions, not only about wolves but also about himself. After spending hours of fruitless observation one day waiting for his research subjects to show themselves, Mowat discovers that the wolves had in fact taken up position behind him and had been watching him for he knew not how long.  He is unnerved, but dissects his uneasiness honestly:

My thoughts that evening were confused.  True, my prayer had been answered, and the wolves had certainly co-operated by reappearing; but on the other hand I was becoming prey to a small but nagging doubt as to just who was watching whom.  I felt that I, because of my specific superiority as a member of Homo sapiens, together with my intensive technical training, was entitled to pride of place.  The sneaking suspicion that this pride had been denied and that, in point of fact, I was the one who was under observation, had an unsettling effect upon my ego.

Determined to regain his rightful position as a member of the more highly evolved species, Mowat returns to the wolf esker to assert dominance.  Instead, in a scene that approaches slapstick, he suffers further self-humiliation.  Musing upon his anger over the incident, he comes to this realization:

This much was obvious, yet I was still strangely reluctant to let the myth [that wolves are conscienceless killers] go down the drain.  Part of this reluctance was no doubt due to the thought that, by discarding the accepted concepts of wolf nature, I would be committing scientific treason; part of it to the knowledge that recognition of the truth would deprive my mission of its fine aura of danger and high adventure; and not the least part of that reluctance was probably due to my unwillingness to accept the fact that I had been made to look like a blithering idiot—not by my fellow man, but by mere brute beasts.

I consider this degree of honesty necessary to any environmental narrative intended to offer real prospects for human relationships with the natural world and with other humans.  Mowat’s story describes people’s deplorable behavior toward another species, but how he goes about it excels by far the mere vilification of a competing group’s beliefs or behavior that some writers engage in to fortify their positions and that they confuse with cogent social criticism.  In fact, in examining his own motives and faults conscientiously, Mowat avoids the “classic gambit” he outlines toward the end of the book:

Whenever and wherever men have engaged in the mindless slaughter of animals (including other men), they have often attempted to justify their acts by attributing the most vicious or revolting qualities to those they would destroy; and the less reason there is for the slaughter, the greater the campaign for vilification.

I’ve seen the gambit deployed in less bloody campaigns.  While irascible nature writers don’t advocate the slaughter of folks whose points of view they disdain, it isn’t unusual for a nature writer to display a rivaling group in the least complimentary light possible, portraying the competing ethos as being culturally, spiritually, and intellectually inferior to their own.  Sometimes, this gambit employs heated rhetoric that renders opponents down into thoughtless brutes, their ways of life undeserving of consideration beyond scorn.  Mowat describes frankly how arctic hunters and trappers had storied the wolves, misrepresenting lupine behavior and laying to wolves’ account atrocities against nature and human interests, thereby shoring up their crusade against the animals.  Humans use this strategy in many contexts, not just in prejudicial wars against other species.  As a writer faced constantly with the problem of examining my own motives whenever I take up any narrative position, I find Mowat’s example golden.

True: as Mowat demonstrates, humans pose far more danger to the wolves than wolves pose to humans—at least in the arctic where both men and wolves have space to co-exist.  In fact, whether it happens through accident or intention, people pose greater threat to their own kind than might any resident wolves.  Mowat makes his points about human moral failures candidly, telling in plain language of such barbarities (attributed to wolves) as trophy-hunters savaging a trapped herd of caribou.  He also shows the results of other acts of bad judgment, such the deaths of a hunter and bush pilot recklessly skimming the ground while trying to shoot a wolf.  Yet always to his credit, Mowat swings the telescope around on himself, sometimes focusing it more sharply on his own psyche than he does on fellow human beings.  Even after the joy of discovery he experienced during his study of arctic wolves, the greater understanding of their culture he achieved and the brotherhood he came to feel for them, an incident toward the end of his study gives him reason to believe that, to his great shock and dismay, he has more in common with the trappers and hunters whose brutality he has limned than with the wolves he has come to admire:

I sat down on a stone and shakily lit a cigarette, becoming aware as I did so that I was no longer frightened.  Instead an irrational rage possessed me.  If I had had my rifle I believe I might have reacted in brute fury and killed both wolves.
…Mine had been the fury of resentment born of fear: resentment against the beasts who had engendered naked terror in me and who, by so doing, had intolerably affronted my human ego.
I was appalled at the realization of how easily I had forgotten, and how readily I had denied, all that the summer sojourn with the wolves had taught me about them … and about myself.

Like Peter after the third crow of the cock, Mowat awakens to his psychological betrayal with painful keenness. And he confesses to us his failure.  Such moments of point blank self-examination raise his narrative approach above the too-often praised and rewarded us-versus-them melodrama that some nature writers favor  and that is celebrated in the writing of genre pioneers like Edward Abbey.

The final judgment Mowat lowers upon himself and his fellow man is a depressing one, its truth perhaps jaundiced by the speaker’s absolute belief in his disgrace:

Somewhere to the eastward a wolf howled; lightly, questioningly.  I knew the voice, for I had heard it many times before.  It was George, sounding the wasteland for an echo from the missing members of his family.  But for me it was a voice which spoke of the lost world which once was ours before we chose the alien role; a world which I had glimpsed and almost entered … only to be excluded, at the end, by my own self.

Many people, finding themselves in similar situations, could not have resisted blindly punishing the creatures that had brought them face to face with the nakedness of their fears.  In Mowat’s attention to his own behavior and in his analysis of it, he not only avoids deeper betrayal of the wolves but also he takes full responsibility for his reaction to them rather than lays the fault for his rage and loathing to the wolves.  Such a stunning example of self-examination gives readers a clean chance to accept greater accountability for their own use of the natural resource we call language and for their attitudes toward Other, whether they encounter it in wild or human domains.  Lesser language that indulged in mere vilification of either wolves or the people who respond to them as Mowat realized he might have done would certainly have limited opportunities for reader self-reflection.  Had Never Cry Wolf depended upon outrage and blaming of the Other to carry its message, it would have further enabled continued unawareness of and deeper entrenchment in fear and antipathy toward both wolves and men–that is to say, it would have been an environmentally unsound work.

Never Cry Wolf proved just the thing for our needs, providing me with new thoughts regarding the wolf reintroduction.  At times, the whole family listened in, thoughtfully, when the story provided food for thought.  But also Mowat’s sense for the absurd sparked sorely needed family laughter during the unsettling circumstances surrounding the stroke and surgery. I’ll remember this book as having helped us reorient ourselves when we were in a distressing place.  I recommend Never Cry Wolf to readers of this blog—if they haven’t read it already.

About my bracketing the “N” in the post title—that’s not me making an editorial comment.  The library sticker on the book’s cover is placed so that it covers the “N” in the title, thus changing Never Cry Wolf to “ever Cry Wolf.”  That funny coincidence provoked further household levity.  Twain would have appreciated the joke, too.

The patterns on some turtle shells immitate sunlight spattering on vegetation or leafy pool bottoms.  The carapace of the spotted turtle, Clymmys guttata, mirrors the night sky.  The underlying shell color is deep space black, with yellow or yellow-white spots speckling the scutes, or shields of the carapace.  Some have only a few dots but many spotted turtles bear on their backs dozens of petite stars.  As children, we noticed that the smaller the turtle, the less the stars, which seemed only fair.

The water was shallow; I caught the turtle easily.  Lifting him up for closer inspection I found that all was not well.  He wore the usual stellar armor, black with a few unique constellations and star clusters.  But he lacked a front foot, one of his back legs stubbed off into a stump, and his tail doubled over on itself, the flesh between being fused.

Did this turtle lose his feet to a predator or an accident, or was he born without them?  If born without, did something go wrong with the egg or his genetics?  Was his condition indicative of contamination in his mother and/or father’s habitat?  Since female spotted turtles don’t nest until they reach their mid-teens and may not produce eggs every year, this turtle’s condition suggested something about the local spotted turtle ecology.  But what?  As a child, I imagined stories explaining his state: bare escapes, leaving a limb in the gaping mouth of a monster, or some transgression that had as punishment the humiliating fusion of his tail.

Otherwise, he seemed in good condition—no disease in the skin pockets where shoulders and neck came together or in skin flaps at the back legs.  Still, hindered as he was, I wondered how he managed to survive.  I called him a “he” because of the brown five o’clock shadow darkening his beak.  Females’ mouths are lighter in color, their tails shorter.  Of course, the length of this turtle’s misshapen tail could not be used to judge his gender.

In spite of the flush of pity I felt for this less-than-perfect being, I took him home to join my other specimens, kept in a “turtle pit,” a naval-surplus tank my father picked up at Norfolk Naval Base.  Nearly a dozen other spotted turtles occupied the tank temporarily.  A junior amateur herpetologist, I figured I could observe the new fellow for a few days, feed him if he’d accept it, and then release him with the others.

But when I went out the next morning to check on the turtles, “Stumpy” was missing.  He was the only one AWOL; all other turtles were present and accounted for.  I looked for a displaced basking rock that might have shifted too close to the wall during a turtle scuffle; there was none.  Well then, how did he get out and where did he go? I searched around the pit, thinking, he couldn’t have gotten very far away. But he was clean gone.  How a stump-footed turtle escaped an enclosure whole turtles couldn’t was a complete mystery.  I shook my head appreciatively. One lucky turtle.

A few days later I returned to the railroad tracks, located about two hundred and fifty to three hundred yards from our house.  The distance in between was made up of dense weeds, a drainage ditch with only a couple of plank bridges crossing it, and woods, thick enough to somewhat muffle the roar of passing freight and passenger trains.  As I passed the shallow pond, movement caught the corner of my eye.  My attention swung around.  A turtle dove for cover.  I waded in and caught it, only to find it was Stumpy.

He had made his way back to the puddle after my carrying him hundreds of feet in a direction I could safely assume he’d never traveled.  Furthermore, to return home he had negotiated serious obstacles, including the steep-sided drainage ditch.  Some turtles might have ended their journeys there and taken up at least temporary residence in the ditch water or worked their ways up- or downstream, but not Stumpy.  He braved the weedy jungle between our house and the forest, crossed the ditch, navigated the woods, and arrived back at his puddle.

Since I had always hand-transported other turtles to their location of capture to release them, I had never observed if they possessed a sense of direction, a “homing instinct” that guided them across unfamiliar territory.  Wondering if Stumpy’s presence at the pond was a fluke, I returned him to the pit.  Compared to other turtles he was only medium-sized.  I couldn’t see how he could possibly escape if bigger animals couldn’t.  Even standing against the wall on his good back leg with his arms outstretched he was too short to reach the rim.

But the next morning it was the same story—Stumpy had escaped in the night.  He took no companions with him—all other specimens of Clymmys guttata remained behind.

What was it about that Stumpy?  Was he a turtle Houdini?  A turtle Godel? Did he stack up his companions, like Dr. Seuss’s Yertle the Turtle, only to different purpose, clambering over them to freedom?

Did he teleport himself by means of that star chart spread open on his back?

I headed for the little pond by the railroad tracks.  Not there.  Returning home, I looked for him along the way, glimpsing neither scute nor star.  I decided to give him more time.  Some days out from his escape, I returned to the puddle and voila!  There he was: Stumpy come home.

This time I left him alone.  By magic or ingenuity he had earned his solitude.  Twice.

Conning the con is not Turtle’s preferred manner of being-in-the-world.  Usually, Turtle acts in this role only to help less imaginative creatures protect precious resources—water or food, for example—or to correct social imbalances, or perhaps to mete out comeuppance, which is also a way of restoring order to the world locally and at large.  Someone must show the clever ones that they don’t, as they suppose, run everything.  Someone has to teach the Anansis, Jackals, and Coyotes that there’s more going on than even they, the wry ones, can imagine and restore them to their proper places when they become too destructive or powerful.

In one African tale, all the animals in a village labor to dig a water hole to relieve a severe water crisis.  But at night, Jackal, who didn’t lift a finger to help, sneaks in from the desert to drink at the well. Then he muddies the water so no one else can use it.  The other animals complain but don’t know what to do to.  It is Turtle who solves the problem.  Smearing a sticky substance on his shell he submerges in the pool, and when Jackal sneaks in to steal and foul the water, up comes turtle from below and bumps against him.  Poor Jackal!  He sticks to Turtle’s carapace like a fly to sap.  Turtle parades the stuck Jackal before the others who laugh and jeer at him, then he delivers him to Lion’s den.

In a Yoruba tale from Nigeria, Anansi the Spider twists rules of etiquette to avoid sharing his yams with travel-weary Turtle, who arrives just at dinnertime.  As Turtle opens his mouth to bite into a yam, Anansi says, “In my land, we wash our hands before we eat.”  By invoking this and other rules of good manners, Anansi keeps Turtle from the yams until the spider has himself more or less eaten all.  Turtle knows he’s been slighted but understands that two can play this game.  Likewise drawing upon rules of hospitality he invites Anansi to dine at his house.  Anansi does not imagine that anyone is as clever as he is; also, he’s greedy.  Anxious to eat well at someone else’s table, he arrives at the river’s edge where Turtle lives and there faces a dilemma.  Turtle’s house lies on the bottom.  To get to the food, Anansi must sink through the water.  Anansi tries to sink himself but nothing works.  Finally he fills his coat pockets with rocks.  He sinks down and arrives at Turtle’s table where the feast has been laid.  Wide-eyed with gluttony, Anansi reaches for his first bite.  But Turtle says, “In my land, we remove our coats before we eat.”  Anansi removes his coat and floats up out of reach of the food, losing not only his meal but also a perfectly good coat.

In a Cherokee tale, Turtle and Coyote race to see who will win Turtle’s dinner.  Turtle may be slow, but he’s no fool.  He knows Coyote intends to cheat him so he turns back before the race is over and secures the meal for himself.  Thus Turtle cons the con artist.  Another good Cherokee story presents Turtle as a master of illusion.  Turtle outsmarts Rabbit in a race over five hills by locating one of his turtle relatives on each of the hills, fooling Rabbit into thinking he is seeing something he isn’t.
Some might wonder at such a stolid, slow-moving creature achieving revered trickster status, but as a former hunter of turtles I share this reverence for Turtle’s ability to gain the upper hand.  Because once upon a time, Turtle tricked me.

Always it’s the same: the woods are leaf-fatted, midsummer.  Low-growing Mayapple and ginseng creep among roots of massive white oaks whose limbs form their own green-clouded groves.  Ferns half my height unroll from fiddleheads.  Fiddleheads, with their scrolled fronds, put me in mind of unborn things—pale, web-footed, half-creatures in dark, damp places, curling over upon themselves. All around lies the litter of conversion, of life changing over to death, changing to seedbed, to mushroom clusters, to a pink shock of Lady’s-slipper orchid against decadent leaves.

My familiarity with this place is so deep that, even though I’m asleep, I know I’ve entered a region of my personal Dreamtime. Many peoples have Dreamtimes, though perhaps not so many as used to.  For Aboriginal Australians, Dreamtime is an ancestral era when totemic creatures walked the land, chanting the world into existence. Dreamtime is also a state of being.  The Australian landscape thrums with vibrations, jiva or guruwari, seed vitality, the resonant blastosphere of the present containing the past and the future; the land Dreams. Relation arcs between highly charged places—sacred places—and individual consciousness, and this, too, is the Dreaming.  For the Aborigines, Dreaming is believing.

My Dreamtime is like that, a place-time in my soul that keeps current origin images from my childhood in rural Piedmont Virginia. Where I live now, in the bone-bared west, there are no places like our old weeds and woods.

I hurry down a path, the only strip of earth not overrun with green growing.  I feel a child’s desire—anxious, anticipatory.  I come to a sluggish stream.  Sometimes it’s a small pond, sometimes a large puddle.  I wade in and peer into the water, which may be clear as a windowpane or muddy as a storm, and there are the turtles.

Perhaps the sight of them arouses the reptilian part of my brain, because I know them.  Their bone backs curved like river cobbles, dappled like the bottoms of sun-flecked pools. Their stout, scaly legs, tipped with fine claws—legs of plodding, ancient design.  Their retractable necks.

Without thinking, I catch them.  I don’t know why.  In the dreams, I don’t question my motives.  It’s not obsession or any form of predation.  Simply, the turtles are there and I catch them: spotted turtles, eastern painted turtles, and the occasional indefinite specimen, something that’s just elemental turtle.

Part of it might be a need to touch the carapaces.  To get the gist of a turtle you really have to feel the curve of the shell against the palm of your hand, filling your hand; you have to get its heft, like a stone, only alive and kicking.  Then there are multifarious shell colors and patterns. It’s as if each animal has chosen a kaleidoscopic variation on this or that motif: star clusters in deep space; flower petals mixed with loam and old leaf; algal strands and shadows.  Whorled like topographical maps, turtles’ shells seem to bear record of where they have been and how long they stayed.

Living in arid Utah as I do now I need to revisit these creatures swimming the headwaters of my earliest consciousness.  So the Dreamtime takes me to them.  When I catch the Dream Turtles and look upon their shells, I feel something beyond satisfaction.  It’s as if to touch and to gaze upon a turtle shell is to receive a Rosetta stone that keys other matter for meaning.  One thing: turtles present the domes of their backs skyward, as if waiting for the world to settle there.  So it was that some cultures believed life began or was remade on the shells of turtles.

A Hindu myth of the world’s cycle tells how water overcomes the world every millennium, destroying all but the most basic silts and elements of life.  At such times, Vishnu enters into a new incarnation, one fitting for this water world—Chukwa, the turtle.  In a no doubt suitably ornate vessel that recalls in mystical detail the backs of modern turtles, he gathers a mixture of elements necessary to re-spawn the world.  When this period of reborning is over Chukwa fixes to the spot, supporting Ma-pudma the elephant, or four elephants, who in turn bear up the reborn Earth.

An Iroquois creation story tells also how the turtle, a water creature, made possible the creation of land.  As in the Hindu tale, the world’s surface is fluid.  But according to this Dawn of Earth story, the animal inhabitants fail to build good ground until they lay their mud and sticks on Turtle’s back.  Turtle magnifies their efforts by growing and becoming North America: Turtle Island.

In a Chinese myth, a turtle is the world.

Some might think such origin tales lacking in finesse, childish, unscientific, rather uneconomical in the creation scheme of things.  But I get it.  Part of my brain engages and applies the truth in these old, old stories.  Obviously, turtles have sustained a very long relationship with the earth—older than our own, by most traditional accounts and by all scientific ones.

The “Wow-ee!” response of the scientists involved would make for an interesting study, as well as the “maybe it’s the first example of invertebrate tool use but maybe it isn’t” facet of the story.

Everything is smarter than we think and has the prospect of becoming smarter, including us, if we could just get over thinking we’re smarter than we actually are.

Here’s another octopus story.

Took Otto’s wardens long enough to figure out what was going on.

Here’s a story about barn swallows you might have seen.

My experience with octopi is unfortunately limited (thanks to a high school guidance counselor), but I’ve watched swallows for hours—barn, cliff, and violet green.  They exhibit flying skills that shout mental sharpness and high engagement with their surroundings.  Their language, too, is lovely—soaring phrases and jazzy riffs that light up whatever spaces they breeze through.  Beside white-throated swifts (and, of course, park pigeons) swallows are one of the species of birds that show the greatest tolerance for people’s presence.  Many times they’ve let me in among them while they’ve dipped and whirled very close in.  For me, watching them fly is like watching a group of mathematicians scrawl out geometrical problems at high speed on a three-dimensional blueboard.  Very satisfying for this mind to try to follow.

The debate over animal intelligence is progressing very slowly.  The holdup?  Well, that would have to be … us.  We’re hung-up on wanting to be the smartest creatures on the planet, to play the lead roles on this living, growing, prowling, blossoming, metamorphosing stage.

I’ve had enough experience with animals to suspect strongly that the “I’m smarter than other species and even smarter than others of my kind” mindset is not unique to people.  I lived with a Siberian husky that definitely thought herself smarter than other dogs (she was) and smarter than I was (yes, at times), and she absolutely believed herself physically superior, to the point of challenging me to follow her in intimidating feats of derring-do.  I’m uncertain how her rangy, forty-pound body supported such an ego.

And the coyote is not cast in folk stories’ trickster roles by happenstance.

But human beings exert more influence upon the world than dogs or coyotes, from our tool-grasping gift for altering the physical environment to our cosmoplastic abilities—our narrative prowess—and the effects they bring to bear upon all life.  That we struggle with the question of whether or not animals exhibit intelligence might speak more to shortfalls in our awareness than it does to the question of what’s actually happening around us.  That is, our wonderment over animals’ intelligence and feeling might posit some narrative failure on our part, which means it’s a failure of relationship, narrative being one of the primary approaches we take for exploring and developing connexion.

Furthermore, the slowness of our thinking about other species is not something isolated to our relationship with the nonhuman world.  The levels of imperceptiveness and bad behavior people demonstrate toward nature is but an extension of the bad behavior we exhibit toward each other. Thus any progress we make in our behavior toward nature ought to be paralleled in improvements in how we treat each other, and the other way around.

If we can figure out how better to pay attention—if we can tune our minds for deeper engagement—then learning from nature at a higher rate of speed than we do and applying with grace what we learn to humanity’s condition could work out very well for us. For some people, I know it does work that way, as well as the other way around—nature learns from its contact with us. This is not to say that we’re no different from other species; obviously we are. Perhaps we’re the farthermost extension of an entire system’s quest for greater consciousness; perhaps we’re seeking broader dimensions to creativity–maybe even godhood. We have our narratives to explain who we are and what we’re about, but those can and should change. Jesus initiated a powerful narrative shift, new language–and thus a new way–for being in the world and for being-with-others (including animals) when he broke up the unyielding eye-for-an-eye storylines of the Mosaic Law.

Perhaps we think we can get away more cleanly with careless relationships with the natural world, which we appear to believe has no law or awareness, than we can with mankind, which has an extensive and evolving set of laws governing its behavior along with somewhat heightened consciousness where the well-being of our own kind is concerned. But the abuse, exploitation, destruction, apathy, annoyance, clumsiness, insensibility and so on we display towards nature is not behavior we exhibit only toward nature. If we’re doing it “out there,” it’s happening inside governments, businesses, communities, and homes in one form or another. We may not be aware what things that we’re doing to each other are destructive, clumsy, etc. We might say, “This is the only way to handle this. Nobody knows a better way, so there must not be one.” We might say, “This is how it has always been done.”  We have reams and reams of “look no further” language arranged in unmoving narratives.  Meanwhile, Otto is shooting out the irritating lights above his aquarium with a highly accurate water pistol.

Why?

Because they’re there and he’s there, and because his circumstances changed him to the point where he figured how to change his circumstances.

Is this not one chamber of the heart of the creative mind?

The moon stretched out her oyster hand
and on the struts she lifted land.
In mercury streams the valleys bled:
the mountain shook its hoary head.
She set the rain in silver sheets
upon the ocean’s stormy streets.

The sun shook out his golden beard
and with its heat the land was seared.
The gold-gray ash, ’neath greening rain,
bristled up in heads of grain.
The trees grew up at his approach,
and closed their gowns with emerald brooch.

The moon unbound her swelling womb
and scattered the world with ruby bloom.
She shrouded its eyes with birds in flight
and veiled its face with silky night.
Then balanced the sphere on a silver scale
and lined the seas with fishes’ mail.

Then the sun and the moon
set the world in a swoon
and clothed it in meadow and wood.

And with bashful glance
began to dance

. . . and called it good.

___________________________________________________________

Danny Nelson’s “Creation” appears in Plain and Precious Parts of the Fob Bible (http://b10mediaworx.com/peculiarpages/fobbible/pppfobbible.htm#creation) and in the complete Fob Bible (http://b10mediaworx.com/b10mwx/peculiar-pages/the-fob-bible/). Nelson studies literature at the University of Washington where he has developed an interest in the many ways of spelling phoenix.

It was Satan who spoke first, after his grimaces and rubbing had finished. “You are very beautiful,” he said.

The snake stirred, blinking. “How can you know what beauty is?” she asked. Her voice was low, and modulated. “Only the gods know that.”

Satan shrugged. “I don’t know how I know, snake. I only know that I know—and you are very beautiful.”

“Are you a god, then?” Her voice was cool and musical, like a brook, and she regarded Satan with cool eyes.

He laughed, leaning back into his wings and grabbing his knees. “Do I look like a god to you?”

“You look like half a bat,” said the snake as she eased down from the tree. “The other half might be monkey, might be man. You have more hair than the other two-legs in this part of the tree-place.”

“Not a god though. That’s a relief,” said Satan. He leaned forward slightly and studied her as she moved from under the shadows of the trees. “You are beautiful—look at you in the sunlight. You’re like a living bruise.”

“What part of creation is a bruise?” asked the snake.

“A very beautiful part.” Satan’s mouth twitched into a smile.

“Only the gods know beauty,” repeated the snake. “When this tree-place was created, the gods called it Beauty, but no creature may know what that means. Beauty is a mystery of the gods.”

“It’s a mystery, I will grant you that,” said Satan. “To be honest, I’m trying to figure it out myself. It’s one of the reasons I dropped down here—I thought it might give me some ideas.”

The snake regarded Satan with deep interest. “Do you know beauty? Can you see it?”

Satan’s smile was long and white. “Everywhere, no-legs. This is a beautiful garden.”

“I see you are playing a game with words, then, because this tree-place is Beauty—and therefore beautiful.” The snake twisted herself back upon her mighty loops to rise to Satan’s seated height. “And I am part of Beauty, and therefore beautiful—this is what you mean?”

Satan laughed. “I did not expect you to coil me in my own words. But here, I’ve given you a compliment and I expect it repaid—do you think I’m beautiful?”

The snake shook her head. “I don’t know beauty. It is a mystery of the gods. I do know you are made well—as the gods made you—and therefore you must be beautiful.”

“A true compliment. Yet I can’t imagine that anything—least of all myself could be more beautiful than you are,” said Satan.

The snake blinked. “This is a new thing you have said.” She thought for a moment. “How can something be more beautiful than something else? Both things are made by the gods.”

Satan shrugged. “Personal preference, I suppose. I’m sure the gods think everything is as beautiful as everything else. I just find you more beautiful than—say, that rock over there.” Satan pointed to a rock jutting from the muddy earth, crumbling and charred-looking as a burned stick. “It looks as if it tumbled from Heaven, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t feel more beautiful than the rock,” said the snake.

“That is because you are a woman,” said Satan, “and—innocent or not—some things breed true.”

The snake blinked at him.

“Don’t worry,” said Satan. “It’s just a joke. And not a very good one, either.”

_______________________________________________________________
“Blood-Red Fruit” can be read in its entirely as part of Plain and Precious Parts of the Fob Bible (http://b10mediaworx.com/peculiarpages/fobbible/pppfobbible.htm#blood) or through the complete Fob Bible (http://b10mediaworx.com/b10mwx/peculiar-pages/the-fob-bible/). The story was written by Danny Nelson and Eric W Jepson.