by David Cook
posted April 18, 2005
 David Cook |
Unquestionably, these rituals almost always took place in the wilderness.
On Friday, Earth Day makes its annual orbit across American headlines, trailing in its wake all sorts of environmental New Year’s resolutions: Perhaps we consider recycling more. Perhaps a promise that our next car will be a hybrid. Perhaps we even buy organic, shop at Greenlife or join a co-op like Sequatchie Cove Farm.
Perhaps, on a deeper level, we realize the sadness and foolishness of even having to declare an Earth Day. Our society is so far removed from the earth itself that we feel the need to remind ourselves of this thing we call earth. We live in a culture where our daily tool of survival has been reduced to a debit card. With it, we can each day acquire adequate food and shelter and never once touch soil with either our hands or feet. Our driveways are paved, and they lead us straight to work, Walmart and home.
And to our own spiritual death and that of our teenagers.
A recent 60 Minutes report stated that out of all the alcohol consumed in America, as much as twenty percent is consumed by teenagers. And most of that is reckless drinking; participating in a keg stand, for example, is a competition among teenage boys to see who can drink the most while being held upside down _ feet in the air, head near the ground.
What would the elders, hunters and shamans of those native societies think of this?
Through the lens of integrity and maturity, compare that vision to the initiation rite of select native American groups, who would lead their young into the forests or deserts and, through trial and isolation, extract out of their hearts the courage and patience and restraint that is so missing, and so needed, in teenagers today.
Examples grow far more serious than keg stands. Consider the rate of teenage crime in America. The school shootings. The massive amounts of violence they are exposed to each day. According to Teen Help, more than 1400 teens will attempt suicide and more than 3500 teens will runaway in the next twenty-four hours.
Joseph Campbell, one of our last great American wise men, was asked what happens to a society when it loses its rituals and initiations. Look around us, he said.
“If you want to find what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times,’’ Campbell said. “The news of the day. Young people who don’t know how to behave in civilized society.’’
How are American boys initiated today? Is it at age 16, when they learn to drive, thus equipping them with a license and vehicle to leave their home rather than learn to function in it?
Is it through sex? Through locker-room talk half full of lies and half full of language that only serves to diminish women?
Or through keg stands?
We are equipping our boys to become handicapped men. And we must return them, and ourselves, to the wilderness and find what it means to stand again, each day, on Earth.
Earth Day is far more than compost piles and bicycle lanes. Earth Day is about realizing the inherent power found in all things wild _ in the mountains and rivers (how much waste do Chattanooga and nearby businesses dump in the Tennessee River and its streams?), with the wolves and black crows (both considered spiritual messengers to some American natives), alongside the sunset and the moonrise (how much Chattanooga development before enough becomes Enough?).
Earth Day needs to be transformed into an inner-core realization that we as Americans, as humans, must drop, like a burning coal, our cellphone cameras, our television shows like “Desperate Housewives’’ (isn’t this more of a threat to the institution of marriage than homosexuals tying the knot?), and our monster thickburgers, and instead replace them with nights in the woods, an afternoon by the creek, a morning in the mountains.
Consider the words of America’s environmental saints.
“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountain is going home; that wilderness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life,’’ said John Muir, lover of nature who later founded the Sierra Club (www.sierraclub.org)
“In wilderness is the preservation of the world,’’ said Henry David Thoreau, who resigned himself from the rat race, built his own cabin by a pond and spend his days there, learning how to live.
“Society speaks and all men listen,’’ said Muir. “Mountains speak and wise men listen.’’
Chattanooga, proclaimed as the Boulder of the South, is conspicuously silent on Earth Day. Where are our celebrations? What about free bus fares on Earth Day? What about neighborhood carpools? Or twenty new community gardens? Or, as they do in some western cities, a program that links local farmers with school cafeterias, where the food grown on the farms becomes lunch for Chattanooga school kids?
Perhaps Outdoor Chattanooga will act. Perhaps it will find a way to reconnect Chattanooga teens and adults with the living Creation around them. Perhaps, miracle of all miracles, we will leave behind our daily commutes, our nightly addiction to the garbage of lies called commercial television, and our farmer-less meals and accept the invitation nature offers us each day.
Perhaps we will learn how to give our children the gift of life in Creation.
Otherwise, we become like Antaeus, the mythical giant whose power came from being in constant contact with the earth. Hercules was able to defeat Antaeus by holding him high off the ground _ thus strangling him from the source of his life.
Otherwise, the words of the old Cree prophecy will come true:
“Only after the last tree has been cut down
“Only after the last river has been poisoned
“Only after the last fish has been caught
“Only then you will find out that money cannot be eaten.’’
Why do we live as if this was not true?
(David Cook is a former journalist for the Chattanooga Times-Free Press. He currently teaches American history at Girls Preparatory School and can be reached at dcook7@gmail.com)
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