The big red ape squats beneath a large tree, gazing across farmlands and smouldering hillsides. Out in the fields the smooth-skinned apes are shouting. They seem confused, bewildered and lost. A small bird flits from bush to bush to sip from rocky pools. The large orangutan scratches his backside and yawns.People come and go from his forest, destroying everything.
To the silent, woolly, orangutan human life appears anxious, disconnected, unsustained somehow, failing to touch what he knows without effort. Like us, the red apes and others, know fear and death. Unlike us, non-humans know to fold themselves more gracefully within the flow of life's changes and passings. They possess the capacity for a deep, simple, yielded life that is ours also -- if we want it.
A younger orangutan arrives, sitting quietly beside the old man. Their eyes brush, and soften. Broad hands rest momentarily across hairy shoulders.
What differentiates our passionate intentions to save and preserve wilderness from our more massive urges toward its ruin? Some of us fear losing healthy forests, oceans, and skies. Others fear not fully exploiting them. To the calm ape it must plain that his human cousins share together a bewildering and common fear, regardless of the differing motivations among them.
The orangutans sit close, shoulders touching, two red-orange backs at forest edge, and warm sun.
None of conservation, deep-ecology, or environmental preservation will save their kind while our other hand simultaneously deals in their destruction. The world of non-humans experiences the overall influence, and impact, of humans as a single, creeping, force.
The orangutans climb quietly into the forest and disappear among the leaves and shadows that will also disappear. The small bird flits again from rocky pool to nearby root buttress, tail twitching... A leaf flutters to ground.
Orangutan, gorilla, elephant, horse, spider, snail and lizard live a direct demonstration of life without constraint.
A pure humanity would likewise confirm all of life.
Until we remember how to ride within the waves of life no lasting stewardship, or conservation, will ever be gifted by us to the world we so depend upon.
Remaining lost we simply continue to drift in ancient human fear, confusion, and the sense of separation from life... until we re-discover how the orangutan breathes and sits... what he sees, what he feels and knows...
Stuart
