Seek The Substantial

I took a long break here. A bit over two years ago I took a job that I wanted and hoped that my life would be easier, and it was for a year, and then it wasn’t. I was given more responsibilities and asked to do so much more that I was and have been constantly stressed. More stressed than I’ve ever been. Anxiety out the wahoo (whatever that is). I’m still stressed and incredibly anxious and I find my time to be so incredibly short. The stress with the anxiety has definitely led to unhappiness at times and I feel like I sort of have to pull myself out of it. I am saved by family vacations and brief moments of time where I am not stressed about my job.

Maybe the second hardest part is putting it all out there. I’ve kept this bottled up for so long and maybe the key to getting out of it is to put it out there in the world. I’ve avoided writing for 6 or 7 months and honestly, that’s probably when the stress and anxiety started.

I’ll try to be back, I paid for another year for this blog, and I figure that maybe being here will help me climb out of the funk that I’ve been in.

While traveling I read Harrison Scott Key’s How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told and it was fantastic. It is heart-breaking and funny and difficult to read sometimes. you wonder how a person can put all of this out there, but Key does and it’s incredible. Key is the kind of writer that writes like I think and it’s almost second nature to read his words. Key wrote a Christmas story for Longreads and if you want to know what it’s like before buying his books (which I recommend buying his books) then here’s a bit:

Isolation works a number on you. I almost wanted criminals to stop by. In the long stretch of dark between sundown and the arrival of my brother, I took to dragging a chair out in the middle of the lot, beyond the glow of the tent, under the great black ceiling of stars, staring up into the cold. I felt like Abraham when God told him to leave home and go find another one and that his family would grow as many as the stars above. I felt like Jacob, his grandson, who sleeps on the ground at night and demands a blessing and God puts him in a scissor hold and gives him a hip injury that lasts all his days. It always seemed odd to me that God would appear to Jacob and all Jacob wanted to do was wrestle. But after a week out on the moonscape, I understood. If God had shown up, I’d have wanted to wrestle, too.

My favorite YouTube thing was this, the destruction of a river by Beau Miles, although he calls it Rafting the most polluted river in Australia.

The New Atlantis has a piece, a very long piece, about whether or not elephants have souls. As Christians we are taught that only humans have souls. Fitsum asked me the other day about our dogs what happens to them when they die. Are they just dead or is there a place in heaven for them. I wasn’t sure how to answer that. I knew how I should have answered it, but I can tell him what I’ve been taught or we could talk about how we felt. My dogs obviously have personalities. They have something about them that’s sentient, but then there are parts that are not. Maybe more than anything, this article took me an hour to read and it is smartly written, one of the smartest things I’ve read. From the article, not about elephants, but about horses and this is how I feel when I look in my dogs’ eyes:

For real sentient beings, though, the truth is more complex. They are not us, but to look into their eyes is to know that someone is in there. Imposing our own specific thoughts and feelings on that someone is in one sense too imaginative, in presuming he could receive the world in the way we do, and in another not imaginative enough, in not opening our minds to the full possibilities of his difference. The philosopher and theologian Martin Buber called this “the immense otherness of the Other,” reflecting on his relationship with a family horse as a child. As he stroked the mane, “it was as though the element of vitality itself bordered on my skin” — “something that was not I,” he notes, but was “elementally” in relation to him. There was an existential connection between them in their improbable blessing of breathing, beating life. And not only life, but the particularity of sentient individuals, as the horse “very gently raised his massive head, ears flicking, then snorted quietly, as a conspirator gives a signal meant to be recognizable only by his fellow conspirator: and I was approved.”

Of course, there is no way to know what the horse was really thinking here. But as to what Buber was thinking — notice how he moves from their shared primal vitality, realized by touch, to their distinct seats of awareness, and the possibility of coming together in faux conspiracy. Consider how any empathetic connection forms. You begin with some point of commonality with your own life, something as elaborate as a similar identity or experience or as simple as a feeling everybody knows firsthand, such as pain or affection. From what is same, however basic, you can begin to bridge the difference to what is other, and learn something new through someone else’s eyes.

This leap will always involve some element of imagination, as we cannot know exactly what someone may be feeling on the other side. Thus our empathy and irrepressible imagination are not merely impediments to clear understanding, but may instead offer new avenues toward it.

All these behaviors are oriented directly toward fulfilling basic animal wants and needs, and all are similar to the kind of instinctual modification of self and surroundings — hoarding, nesting, sneaking, grooming — that any animal does to survive in the world. The sophisticated actions that animals carry out thanks to the instructions of “instinct” are really quite amazing, and difficult to comprehend for we who rely so much more on conscious reasoning; how much does the animal “know,” and how can it do what it’s doing if it doesn’t? In any case, these complex elephant behaviors would seem to show a great degree of intelligence, an awareness of cause and effect, and some grasp of the multiple possibilities inherent in the properties of their surroundings — that is, what Jonas calls the power of imagination, a grander power than the cold (though equally applicable) contemporary phrase “high cognitive capacity.”

Finally, about elephants:

On one count, elephants fail the tool test, for they do not make artifacts they then reuse (and obviously have not developed the kind of technology that has completely unleveled the odds in our efforts to hunt or trap or train them or encroach upon their habitat). However, they do use objects as intermediaries between them and their environment, such as sticks to scratch between their toes and remove bugs from other areas, or twisted clumps of grass like Q-tips to clean inside their ears or whisks to swat at flies. As J. H. Williams recounts in Elephant Bill (1950), work elephants in Asia collared with bells have been known to plug up the bells with mud so that they can go and steal bananas in the middle of the night unnoticed — a purposeful modification of someone else’s tool. Elephants dig holes for water, cover them with plugs of bark and grass, and return later to their secret stash. Elephants learn by trial and error what sorts of materials do and do not shock them in their efforts to break through electric fences — and in at least one recorded instance (described in Lawrence Anthony’s The Elephant Whisperer [2009]), followed the buzzing of the fence all the way around to its origin, the generator, which, having been stomped to smithereens, allowed them to untwine the fence and go their merry way.

The other part that I didn’t know, was that elephants will commemorate their fallen:

But here he is joined by the elephants, the only other known creatures that — whatever it may mean to them — purposively commemorate their dead, in a way Joyce Poole calls “eerie and deeply moving”: “It is their silence that is most unsettling. The only sound is the slow blowing of air out of their trunks as they investigate their dead companion. It’s as if even the birds have stopped singing.” Using their trunks and sensitive hind feet, the ones they use for waking up their babies, “they touch the body ever so gently, circling, hovering above, touching again, as if by doing so they are obtaining information that we, with our more limited senses, can never understand. Their movements are in slow motion, and then, in silence, they may cover the dead with leaves and branches.”

After burying the body in brush and dirt, family members may stay silently with it for over a day; or if a body is found unattended by elephants not related to it, they may pause and stand by for some time. They do this with any dead elephant, recently deceased or long departed with only the skeleton remaining.