Ecological Intelligence Read Online Free Page B

naturally immoderate, self-concerned, and, given half a chance, pleasure seeking. We want it all and we want it now. Have your excesses, Apollo implied, but do not find yourself addicted or obsessed by them. In other words, we must learn how and when to say yes and no to our preoccupations and to our extremes.
    T o honor the gods…and the ancestors is to honor the multiple expressions of the Earth, of the Universe, of Creation. It is more than an acknowledgment of respect for the human forefathers and mothers. It is an honoring of the unique intelligence in everything—the trees, the land, the sea, the animals, as well as people. It is to know what it means when the bushmen hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari say that together all the creatures of the land say one thing—we are connected. It is to have a deep respect for life in all its forms and expressions and to know that even the land, when we are prepared to listen, knows how to say yes and no to us.
    To honor the gods is to think molecular. It is to appreciate the chemistry of survival at its simplest level, to be grateful for our genetically primed drives to seek or explore, to find food and water, to socialize, to protect, to provide, and to procreate. It is to be unashamed of our needs to compete, to confront, to play, and, when necessary, to run away. It is to take the experience of spirit and soul seriously. Listen to what D. H. Lawrence had to say about honoring the gods:
    That I am I.
    That my soul is a dark forest.
    That strange gods come forth
    From the forest into the clearing of
    My known self, and then go back.
    That I must have the courage to let
    Them come and go.
    That I will never let mankind put
anything over me, but that I will
try always to recognize and to
honor the gods in me and the gods
in other men and women.
    I t is going to take a peculiar intelligence and a peculiar language to understand the consequences of what it means to live the admonitions of the ziziphus and of Apollo, including the consequences of not living them. It is what this book is about. It is an invitation to say yes to an intelligence that can reshape the myths of humanity; that can reshape our language of dissonance in favor of one that is at home at the Human-Nature interface; that continually reminds us that there are sometimes more important, yet less familiar ways of thinking about ourselves and of our relationship to the world. It is a language which, in the words of Irish poet Seamus Heaney, “because of its profound representation of the process of discovering things in the world would be bound to be poetry.”
    The word poetry has its roots in the Latin and Greek words poeme and poema , meaning “to create or make.” It can be seen as the art of rhythmical composition, written or spoken, or as a way of exacting pleasure by beautiful, imaginative, or elevated thoughts. However, it is important that we do not confine poetry to that which is refined and sentimental. Poetry does not always exact pleasure or beauty in the way we expect it to, for it can be both bloody and bloodless. It sees the wild face of beauty too—the violent beauty of a wild-dog kill, for instance, or the stark sight of a grove of fallen trees pushed over by elephants. And we all have something of the poet in us. Absurd? Not at all, for we all know, even in a small way, what it means to say yes to the world and then no…and then yes again. It is our first language.
    T o be sensitive to the cadence of yes and no is to remember that between you and me, between you and an elephant, a heron, a river, or a tree, there is a space that has to be respected and that, at times, we ignore at our peril. Poetry is the only language I know capable of effectively describing that space, and as we shall see, it is part of the necessary task of asking permission to enter that space. Sometimes you are permitted to enter into it and sometimes you are not. Poetry is therefore more than a language. It is an attitude