Mastery

For thousands of years the other creatures that share our earth have walked its paths in a quest for survival. Battling sickness and Nature and predators and hunger was enough to engage their lives. But when man came along, this wasn’t enough. They settled down and started figuring things out, how to use things to cure sickness, how to grow food instead of search for it. And this was good. Then came modern times…


See, sometimes the human race worries me. All around there are all these new breakthroughs. Something has been invented to do this! Now they’re working on this! What I fear is that we care too much about controlling, about having mastery over things around us. We want to be able to control the wind, the seas, the snow, to our will. We’re interested in discovering how to do everything so we can work less.

But…Nature’s job is to keep the world balanced. Her job is to keep everything right. When a population grows too large, sickness plagues it, or it breaks, and it moves on to a better place. When one selection of creatures is wreaking havoc on others, the others form defense, attack, and things are regulated. But the human race is growing too fast and adapting so quickly that these things cannot help. And our only aim is our comfort, our enjoyment. We fail to see that without the work, we cannot appreciate it. Without the struggle, we cannot see the value in the fruits.

I fear for us. I can envision a time when everything will be controlled. We will raise mountains and drain seas at our will, and the rain will fall when we want it to. Lives will be elongated and there will be too many people, but we’ll build towers as high as the mountain to live in and grow food in our homes, and the blight of this “civilization” will cover the entire earth.

You might imagine the good about this. Rain when the crops need it, suppressed when they don’t so plans aren’t ruined. But the beauty of the rain and the forests and the wind is that…it’s free. It comes and goes as it wishes, and grows and changes to further beauty, to enhance the gentle earth. It brings wonder and awe. If we could control things, what would they be but another toy to play with, another machine, another thing we had to deal with every day and thought no more of?

So again, in another way, we need to move slower. Think of the consequences of our actions not just on us, but on the world. This tired world that has endured so much, that shelters us, that gives us life. It’s more beautiful than we can imagine, holed up in our tiny places who have never seen the hidden wonders that exist. But with our arrogance we would change and destroy it, shaping it to what we think is right, when in reality it is in its own right more stunning than we could even envision. We need to see this truth and think on it, for without thought we are moving into the collapse, the last stand of something that is great and beautiful and vaster than we think, we with our planes and cars and spaceships. Appreciate more what we have, for the more we think we gain, the more we lose, and the more we hunger. It’s a downward spiral…unless you can change it.