The Sacred Web of Lifeby Nancy Partlow "The first thing I saw when I awoke in the hospital was a flower, and I cried. Believe it or not, I had never really seen a flower until I came back from death. One big thing I learned when I died was that we are all part of one big, living universe. If we think we can hurt another person or another living thing without hurting ourselves, we are sadly mistaken. I look at a forest or a flower or a bird now, and say 'That is me, part of me.' We are connected with all things and if we send love along those lines, then we are happy." -- Account of a near-death experiencer, from The Light Beyond, by Raymond A. Moody, Jr., M.D. The "For Sale" sign has been removed from the "vacant" land across the street, and I think I know what that means. The sign had suddenly appeared on my birthday and it ruined my whole day. Spring used to be a time I looked forward to with joy. Now every year I dread the end of the rainy season. I know that with the first intimations of spring come also the bulldozers to rip down the trees and to continue to sever our increasingly tenuous links to any life forms in the community but our own. These thirteen acres are highly wooded, of course. A whole ecosystem of burgeoning, amazing life flourished there, but I can almost guarantee you that the developer of this land does not see it, but sees in his mind's eye only what his (and not God's) handiwork can create. Tumwater's land clearing ordinance may save a few of the oldest conifers -- five percent if we're lucky. But the rest will come crashing down just as they did in the development down the road. There, two tall evergreens out of several hundred or so were "saved," only to die later because of damage incurred to their root systems during construction. I don't think the owners or that mobile home park are even aware of the irony of the name they chose for it: Eagle's Landing. Ignorance of the natural world in this culture is profound. How many of us can name even three species of songbird native to our area? Three butterflies? Three wildflowers? These are just a few of the plants and animals with whom we share this world every day, yet we do not know them or even seem to care to. For all the advances in knowledge about nature and our connections to it that science has made, we still choose to organize our lives in ways that exclude all contact with it. In this community, for example, the Growth Management-mandated practice of infilling housing within urban growth boundaries is somehow supposed to help save the environment. Yet the reality of cramming more and more people into cities to preserve the "rural" character of the surrounding countryside is having the long-term effect of reducing our towns to human ghettoes and the rest of the nature to a concept somewhere "out there." Can't there be a happy medium -- a living with nature within our cities and our own backyards? I don't want to live in a human ghetto. Already the populations of the myriad species of birds and animals I was familiar with as a child here in Thurston County are declining. Songbirds. Amphibians. I see a lot more crows, starlings and gulls than I used to. Such opportunistic bird species thrive on our garbage and on the eggs, young and nesting sties of other birds whose songs lift our hearts and make our lives a little sweeter. These songbirds' only defense against predation is to next in deep forest. As we obliterate and fragment their habitats more and more, their voices fall silent one by one. Imagine a world without birdsong. Imagine a child growing up in such a world. As nature writer Sara Stein says in Noah's Garden, "How does one miss what one has never known? What longing then, would drive one to repair the damage?" We are connected to all life on this planet on so many levels -- most of which we are not even aware. Many of them are spiritual, mystical -- levels of understanding for which this culture has little patience or seemingly, little desire to comprehend. Yet many other cultures have or have had this understanding before being overwhelmed by the forces favoring totally human-dominated landscapes. Moreover, even within this society's prevailing culture there are those with this understanding. Some people who have had near-death experiences for example, have come back with firsthand knowledge of the importance of the invisible but powerful bonds that connect all life, and the detriment to ourselves we incur by tampering with them. Yet even if one were reluctant to subscribe to what some refer to as "gooey Gaia" theories, wouldn't it be prudent to consider, for our own self-interest mind you, the consequences of our actions to ourselves if these theories are true? As for myself, there is little doubt of their veracity. The only place I need look is the pain in my heart whenever I hear the groaning crack of another tree fall and reflect on the countless forms of life that perish along with it. I can see and feel the threads of connection in the web of life, upon which we all rely for sustenance, being snipped one by one, and our place within that web becoming more and more untenable. The integrity of a web relies upon the integrity of each connecting link within it. Who will be there to support us if we forsake all our fellow travelers on this planet? If we continue to destroy them, if we continue through all our ignorant actions to say, "This is our world, you are not welcome here!" who will be there to sustain us when the last thread in the web, our own, is severed? Nancy Partlow is a lifetime resident of Thurston County.
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