a deer family
visits the small village’s
old cemetery
--Priscilla Lignori
These days I can't help thinking that the antidote to most human ills and human sorrows is what archaeologists and physical anthropologists call Deep Time. Personally, I prefer to think of it as Green Time.
Green Time is bigger than an individual human life, bigger than human history, bigger even than humanity itself. It reaches hundreds of thousands of years back to embrace the first stirrings of Homo sapiens, then millions of years before that, probing to the evolutionary roots from which it sprang.
Green Time was already old then, and as impeccable in its verdicts as it is today. The world we see around us even now--when the human presence on the planet is the most conspicuous aspect of many landscapes--is underwritten by Green Time, governed by Green Time, and ultimately makes sense only in terms of Green Time. Sadly, we don't see this. The human mind has difficulty managing durations of more than 100 years.
The deer in this haiku have no such problem. Their "visit" to the cemetery is a tradition many centuries old. Perhaps they have been coming here for millennia. Perhaps longer.
Behind my house here in Woodstock, there is a ridge that marks the very beginning of the Catskills. Follow it and it takes you to the top of Overlook Mountain, so called because it is the first peak in the range. Since we moved here 13 years ago, I have seen every kind of animal traveling that ridge--coyote, fox, deer, bobcat, even a mountain lion. A local tracker told me it was a natural "animal highway." How long had it been there, I asked him. His answer was, "How far back can you go?"
Today, environmental activists worldwide bemoan the failure of their governments and industries to foresee the consequences of rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere. But this is not a failure of government or industry. It is a human failure, and it has everything to do with a loss of memory.
A species that doesn't remember where it came from, understandably doesn't know where it is going. A people who mark their beginnings by the rise of cities and empires, and the keeping of written histories to celebrate them, are necessarily the victims of some form of evolutionary amnesia.
It is upsetting to see how slow we are to respond to the environmental catastrophe ahead. But it is understandable. To know where we are going and how to get there, we must first know where we have been. That is the significance of Green Meditation. Green Meditation is the practice of Deep Time.
