A Right-Sided Headache

What’s going on? I am having a right-sided headache radiating from the occiput for the last hour or so, down into my right shoulder. The sensation is of heat and congestion, and yes, I do feel bothered. Michael gave me a quick massage of the neck and shoulder before he left, and I think that may have loosened something into the system… What is it? Some tension that’s been held there, something I’ve seen and not let go of. Something I saw last night in the movie “Milking the Rhino”, about the conflicts in conservancy projects in Kenya and Namibia. What I found most difficult to swallow was that EVERYTHING in our world has become a commodity, including wildlife. Even wild animals must serve a legitimate purpose (according to us, of course) before we can allow them to live. In fact, forget conservation and all that goodwill stuff, it is a dog eat dog world and every man must be for himself or he’s toast. Do I want my baby to survive or the lion’s baby if it comes down to that? Do I want my baby to survive or the rest of the world, if it comes down to that? I cannot abide the shortsightedness of the everyman-for-himself party; I question whether all calamities and injustices and suffering are according to divine will; and my heart breaks for the animals we believe we must harm and kill and make to serve our agendas. It seems like a ball of tangled barbed wire bouncing around inside my mind, and I cannot make peace with it…

Take a step back, another voice said, and you’ll see a bit more. Yes, there is much fear and destruction, ignorance and hate, but there is also love and kindness, nurture and healing. All of this is going on at the same time, all over the world, all the time. It will continue to happen, as it has always done before, for millennias. When the ice age came countless species were wiped out, their deaths no less painful than by any other means. Entire habitats were destroyed, no less disastrous and threatening to the survivors than environments are today. For the most part, no humans were around to mourn these losses and devastations, and the animals didn’t really complain or bemoan their fate. But if you look a little deeper into human hearts, not the ones full of vengeance and greed, but the ones decrying warnings and blames on the oil spills and carcinogens and water shortage and global warming and urbanization, how many of them are bleeding for their own pain and fear and loss? Even you, who claim to love animals more than human beings, will you hand over your beloved cat to feed a starving lion? No, you couldn’t, because of the attachment you have with your cat is stronger than your love for all animals.

We, like all animals, are made with all of our instincts calibrated for survival and perpetuation of the species. So it’s not surprising or much of a stretch to admit that we are afraid of running out of resources for OURSELVES, not for the animals or any disappearing way of life, because they are a part of those resources that sustain our own survival. We, even those of us who call ourselves advocates for the Earth, are little different than the men in Namibia who wanted the lions killed because it was more important to them to keep their cattle alive, so conservancy be damned! Can anyone ask these men to give up their cattle for the sake of the ‘world conservation of wild animals’? who wants to be first? Here in the land of milk and honey and lotus blossoms, will any of us advocates and activists stop reproducing and adopt because the world is gravely over-populated already? No. But not because we are egocentric and shortsighted and utterly selfish as a race, as I would have liked to point the finger at ourselves. But because we, along with all the rest of creation, are all living and dying and creating and destroying and birthing and killing according to that divine purpose, however it may appear to our little eye, our lives as a blink in Time.

This is the new voice I hear coming out of myself now, this voice that calls me to accept, simply accept, what is. Allow the rancour, the rage, the sorrow, the pain as well as the joy, the comfort, the celebration to be felt and experienced. Then let it all go, all of it, the pain as well as the joy, the tears as well as the laughter. Don’t fight it or resist or get hung up on any of it. Let it all wash through you, as fully as it need be, then leave you clean and empty, just your own Self, in need of nothing.