From the Big Hole to Bear Paw: Part 4
Red Wolf's Right Hand, Gibbon's Ghosts, and a Cow Bawling at Sunrise
I came to the son through the father, which is not how the gospels would have it. But life is full of winding roads and who am I to argue with how things finally happen? In this case I was studying the poems of William Stafford, a noted pacifist and gigantic mind who noted in an essay that a writer’s job is “to find out what the world is trying to be.”
This is a tricky business. The human world is bi-polar with psychotic features and can be difficult to assess with any kind of clarity. We create weapons powerful enough to destroy the earth but we also rescue elk that have fallen through the ice into a lake. We test cosmetics on lab animals and shave our heads in solidarity with cancer patients. We build statues to heroic figures and a few years later tear them down in fits of rage. It is hard to divine, from one moment to the next, what it is that humans are trying to become other than immortal. Maybe these human pursuits have nothing to do with the world at all.
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