The Worst Slaughter is Dishonor

This image is courtesy of the talented photographer/storyteller/troubadour
Jordan Bower, whose account of his walk from Canada to Mexico I have been

reading with great interest. His account of his journey is at
http://www.walkingtomexico.com/
and his website is at jordanbower.com
Also check out his Facebook group at 

https://www.facebook.com/lovewallah

I stumbled across the Walking to Mexico site in the way I often stumble into serendipitous things, I no longer remember how. Anyway, I thought it was a wonderful story in words and pictures. I am not much of a people person myself but it is clear Jordan is very much one and loves to find people and their stories. In the way stories often do, they reveal people in all their peculiarity and eccentricity, and yet with love and connection. I am still working my way through his account of his trip, I recommend following his journey yourself.

I guess this is part of my nature, when I saw his pictures of people I smiled a moment and moved on. Even when there was a bit of sadness mixed with the stories, I nodded and moved on. When I saw this picture, the one above, something else happened. A feeling like being punched in the gut. Grief.

I like everyone else use wood. I would like to use as little of it by way of felling trees as I can, but I use dead trees every day. It is a peculiarity of my situation that I am compelled to feed on those I do genuinely love, and to benefit from their deaths. I love trees, more than I love perhaps anything. They are not scenery to me, they are beings, and my friends. There are some trees that I can walk up to and immediately there is the feeling, bam, you like me. Like some animals, some dogs or cats, you know right away they like you. I like them too. I talk to trees, call me crazy. Some others are a little aloof, austere, solemn, they are all different. There was this live oak tree that I got this feeling from yesterday as I was walking, just an immediate "Hi how are you!!" feeling. I know that this immediately gets me labeled a fruitcake by most people, which I no longer take as a badge of honor as I once did. It makes me sad, not that they think less of me, but that they think less of them. They think less of my friends. I am nothing, disrespect me all you like, but when you disrespect a tree you disrespect life itself. 

Anyway, this picture to me was like getting hit in the stomach, and not because I don't think that we need wood sometimes, but because all this death was not honored in any way. A genocide is not sad merely because of the death, death is a part of life. It is because the life is not honored, that there is no respect for the fact that a life was ended for our needs or more often our mere desires. Dehumanization is an essential part of any human genocide, and depersonalization or de-sanctification is an essential part of the genocide we commit against nature every day. These trees were not merely killed. Their lives and deaths were not honored. Like human beings of Jewish descent turned into soap or lampshades by the Nazis, it's the same thing, and it is inherently unholy. Respect is more important even than awe or wonder in any proper religion, and there was no respect here. Neither those who killed nor those who will use nor those who will profit most by this killing gave any respect, or considered the lives they took holy. 

Perhaps in some way I can redress this wrong thanks to Jordan's picture: I acknowledge your lives, my brothers. You were holy to me, though I never met you.

I hate this word, shaman, but people always imagine that a shaman is someone who has all these kewl powers and lives an interesting if slightly spooky life far apart from normalcy. They never think, that if there are any powers they are not his but come from his relationship with his friends, and his relationship with these friends can be a source of immense grief when they are hurt in any way. Which they are. They are being hurt all the time. Worse, the suffering isn't even acknowledged by those who cause it. There was a scandal in the art world awhile back when a painting of the Virgin Mary was decorated with dung, and many Christians were very insulted. Well, people shit on my holy things every god damn day.

To be a shaman, if that name has any meaning, means to feel the grief of the world and the suffering of every thing that lives. Those are my kin, stacked there, and their sacrifice was not honored by those who committed it. Our magic, which is very real, is not Harry Potter. It is made of love and tears.

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, 

I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.  

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge,

 and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, 

I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to

hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing....

...love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; 
where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge,
it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 
but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.
When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 
For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.
Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

-1 Corinthians 13