Psych-Out

from “Morning Poem” by Mary Oliver

There is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted…

For tens of thousands of years, we humans chased gazelles.  We wove baskets.  We sharpened sticks, chiseled stones, buried our dead with our bare hands.  We ate grasses, seeds, berries and nuts.  And, if our chase was successful, we tore into the succulent flank of that speared gazelle.  We harnessed fire for warmth and protection, and eventually learned to coax it from the earth using sticks, stone and dried grass.   The sight of fire mesmerizes us, still – ancestral memory encoded mysteriously in our DNA.

Intimately, we knew wind, rain, ice, and unbearable heat.  We huddled together under canopies of stars – the wisest among us could see patterns and shapes in the specks of myriad lights to help us navigate where we were and where we were going.  We migrated hundreds of miles by foot, the trip taking weeks, if not years, chasing elk, or sunshine, or rain clouds, or our sixth sense that water was somewhere across that barren plain.  Pools, lakes, rivers and streams were our lifeblood.  Even now the sound of water draws us in – irresistibly.

One zen mondo goes:

‘Do you hear the rushing of the river?’
‘Yes, Master.’
‘That is the way.’

Listen to the sound of rushing water

For hundreds of thousands of years we lived in small bands of foragers, gatherers, and hunters amidst wide-opened savannas.  Survival depended upon cunning, group living, and an intimate knowing about the natural world. Steven Pinker wrote, “Life for foragers (including our ancestors) is a camping trip that never ends, but without the space blankets, Swiss Army knives, and freeze-dried pasta al pesto.”  (Pinker, How the Mind Works p.188)  We weren’t the fastest or the strongest.  We had no claws, wings, nor gills.  Instead, we lived in packs of a hundred or so, walked upright, anticipated the future in days, weeks and months, and evolved a miraculous set of hands with their opposable thumbs.

It’s been estimated that our earliest ancestors first sharpened sticks 6 million years ago, first carved stone tools 2-3 million years ago.  We tamed fire 1.8 million years ago.  We adorned our clothes with red ochre 250,000 years ago, painted cave walls 40,000 years ago, and began to domesticate plants and animals a mere 12-15,000 years ago.

Cave painting, Lascaux, France - 15,000 years ago

Our modern age with its artificial light, trains, jetliners, fast food restaurants, tools, plastic containers, guns, bombs, computers, cities of millions — where space per person is measured in feet as opposed to thousands of miles — is less than 1 percent of 1 percent of our time on earth. Its advantages and conveniences are unparalleled in human history. We don’t die of diseases that would have cut short our lives by decades.  We aren’t eaten by predators, or die too soon from the ravages of some unfortunate fall. We can cross the planet in the time it takes to eat three meals, and not have to take one step outside into the snow, rain, or unbearable heat.

Yet, rates of depression tend to be lowest in hunter-gatherer or purely agricultural societies, higher in industrial societies, and highest in societies  in transition.  We are both industrial AND in transition.  (Transition to what, we don’t yet know.)  Our life speed and modern worries are somehow incompatible with the millions of years under which our sensibilities evolved.  Our age has been dubbed the Age of Anxiety for a reason.

The Industrial Society, by Manuel Balea.  (See all his work at Manuel Balea at www.photo.net)

Andrew Solomon wrote in Noonday Demon, “In the wild, animals tend to have momentary awful situations and then to resolve it by surviving or dying.  Except for persistent hunger, there is no chronic stress.  Wild animals do not take on jobs that they regret;  do not force themselves to interact calmly, year after year, with those they dislike;  do not have child custody battles.”  (Solomon,  p.407)

Think of these pleasures from our pleistocene past and their capacity to draw our troubles away, if even for an instant:

A walk in the woods,
Coming upon a vista, or wide opened clearing,
Sitting by a river,
Climbing a tree,
The smell of grass after a summer rain,
Looking up into a starry night,
Staring into a fire,
Napping beneath a tree,
Spotting the track of an animal,
Cupping mud, clay, or fresh soil in the palm of our hands,
Potting, weaving, widdling a stick,
Cracking a nut,
Throwing a rock and watching it sail through the air,
Burying our toes in the sand,
The sight of a wild animal crossing our path,
Suddenly breaking out into a run…

There is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted…