Love is a Menace

I put myself at risk out of love for the planet. A friend said about my blog, "You don't hold back." Isn't that the earmark of passion? In contrast, people who desecrate Mother Nature or, say, proudly hunt wolves are often passionate about their religions. Do their brains make a significant connection between Creator and creation? Can insecure egos drive the need to dominate?

Research participants who watched awe-inspiring images became increasingly intolerant of uncertainty. Yet life seems to demand things in good measure. Spirituality, biodiversity, doubt, and human responsibility can all co-exist. We need the will to be both puny and powerful. We need passion.

Yet the awe in love makes us crave certainty. We may destroy what we love, just to get certainty. The cost may not just be to this world. Our souls may grow in spurts each time we feel awe without defining it by what we think we know. Going in and out of our minds may be the engine that builds character. It may be logical to try to dominate nature. It may be insane to risk your life for love of the ecosystem.

My blog-reading friend may think he knows me, and think I'm not holding back. We imagine Mother Nature will hold back because God is ultimately pulling the strings. In the Hindu pantheon, Kali interests me. Humanity may lose all certainty and security when we feel awe of Climate Change!

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Coarse Miracles

I dated an electrical engineer from HP. On his daughter's birthday, he confided that she had become entangled with a drug-dealer boyfriend. Optimistically I suggested the perfect birthday present for her was a Ba Gua mirror, the Chinese symbol for protection.

We were at my house, where I happened to have a Ba Gua on hand. To add mystique to the second-hand gift, I said I was going to put a spell on it. I portentously led my skeptical date out onto the deck to create some drama. I raised the mirror to the sky and pronounced some sort of prayer for her: "Angels and all good energies of the universe, please come guide and guard this young woman." But mostly I was putting on a show for the guy's amusement. He was an engineer, right?

To my surprise, as I held the small mirror up toward the sun, I saw glowing orbs descend into the object. The engineer said something like, "Those balls of light must be angels."

Startled, I exclaimed, "You saw those too?" My jaw was open.

He denied, "No, I didn't see anything."

Contrast that to several years before, when I had a boyfriend in the Eckankar cult. He proposed marriage. My refusal inspired him to stomp off and, in his exit, lift up and smash to the ground a cinder block in my driveway. Later, I was cleaning my bedroom when a sudden image flooded my brain of that guy hitting me in the head with an ax. The vision was so distinct, I didn't hesitate to mention it the next time I saw him. "Yeah," he said, "I went home that day and split kindling... and I pretended the wood was you."

Thoughts do have substance. How much? Do they have as much substance as some of us believe?

The Dalai Lama or someone said, “The best meditation is critical thinking – followed by action.” If your daughter dates a drug dealer, forget the magic mirror: give her an intervention.

Common sense must balance magic and religion. I'm going to India soon, to see the women rangers of Gir. I'm prepared to have some swami come up and pronounce my mother's maiden name or something. Mystical events are a huge industry in India, if you take into account all the temples, ashrams and festivals. Meanwhile, Mother Teresa preached against abortion while children died of malnutrition before her eyes.

If you can't trust a woman with a choice, how can you trust a woman with orbs of light?

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You and your Bad Banana

Humanity's soul is in a tango with this Earth. Of the issue from that marriage, species extinctions are like botched, illegal back-room abortions performed on a global scale by the Big-Oil ilk of Dick Cheney. Humanity, please stop aborting species!

The last population of Asiatic lions is protected by the women rangers of the Gir Forest. For my trip to document them, I'm learning some Hindi. Their word for expand -- as in, to expand your mind -- is badhaana, so the mnemonic I'm using is Bad Banana.

Speaking of bad bananas, in the memoir I'm reading, Dreaming in Hindi, the author's ambitiously libertine friend is warned not to "expand the mind" of an Indian's fiancee.

I don't want to create any international incidents. But I'm going to a country where, beyond the Muslim influence, a Hindi woman is deemed less likely to reincarnate as a man than an animal is to reincarnate into a person. By the way, I tried to find a word for "woman libertine" and failed: all the synonyms suggest tramps rather than someone who is merely adventurous and sensually opportunistic. So Western culture isn't ready to go around pointing fingers at who is sexist. "Belonging to a tribal Muslim community that did not let its womenfolk seek work outside home," one of the Gir lion guards is as much an icon for women's-work home-bodies in our country as, say, Hillary Clinton.

Women like us can be Bad Bananas. We can expand one another more deeply into the web of life.

We can set the standard against which abominations against nature stand out like industrial pollution would in a wildlife preserve.



VC Bestor
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Fanged Wilds and Women Program is a 501c3 Tax-Exempt Organization