Touch the earth, love
the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit
in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are
given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and
the dawn seen over the ocean from the beach.
When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human
spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were a kind of cosmic
outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animal nor the
birthright of a true humanity.
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.
Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in
civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees
thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize
them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so
far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall
not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move
finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or
never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren,
they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the
net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the
earth.