The Doctor's Office

fyeahderrickjensen:

The real world does not resemble our compartmentalized version of it.  Where do I end and you begin?  Are you still in the air you just exhaled, the air I now take in, the air that carries with it the sweetness of your breath?  Do you end where your fingers touch my skin, or do you follow these sensations into my body?  Where do I end when I move inside of you, and where do you end when you move inside of me?  And when you leave are you still inside of me?  Am I still inside of you?  Where do you end and where do I begin?

A week ago my dog Amaru died.  He was fourteen.  He had been sick for more than a year, from Cushing’s, arthritis, and most of all age.  He had lost about 30 percent of his weight, and even more of his strength.  When he was younger he gladly chased bears, but those days were gone.  He was losing his sight and hearing.  And then, the night before he died, he began to throw up.  I stroked him, spoke with him, tried to reassure him, but I did not know how to take away his pain and nausea.

He finally fell asleep around midnight, and I fell asleep sometime later.  I awoke near dawn knowing something was wrong.  I had to find him.  He wasn’t near my bed, wasn’t in the house.  He was outside collapsed in shallow water at the edge of a pond.  He had only been there a short while (I could tell because the water had not wicked up his body), but still he was very cold.  I brought him in, warmed him up.  He got up once, hours later, to stagger outside to relieve himself, taking care of me by not soiling the house even as he was dying.  He couldn’t make it back inside.  I carried him in, laid back down.  He never got up again.

I held him as he died, as I’d held him all through the day, talking to him, rubbing him, not quite believing he was dying.  But he did.  His breathing grew forced, and then stopped altogether, although his heart still beat.  I pushed on his chest, and pushed again, and again, but he was dead.

I did not bury him that night  He wasn’t ready to go, and I wasn’t ready to let him go.  I let him sleep—or maybe he let me let him sleep—next to my bed one last time, near the head, where for so long I had reached down to pet him in the middle of the night.

The next day I buried him, where he will over time become more and more a part of the forest.

(…) I’m not saying that we are all one.  We aren’t.  I am me.  You are you.  Amaru was and is Amaru.  This frog is this frog and that tree is that tree.

But just as we are not one, we are not entirely separable.  We are not monads.  We are not impermeable.  Our boundaries are blurry, shifting, porous, and ultimately indefinable.  Mysterious.

When you put us—and by”us” I mean anyone, from me to you to Amaru to the fly that’s buzzing around my face to the frogs outside the window—into a conceptual box, you obviously miss all of this other’s complexity that does not fit into your box.  Worse, when you forget that the conceptual box is nothing more than a concept—a tool, a projection, a figment of your rational mind, and is not reality, and does not necessarily even come close to corresponding to reality, you have foreclosed all possibility of entering into any sort of meaningful relationship with this other.  Of course you have:  you no longer perceive this other; you perceive only your precious and projected box. You are at that point interacting only with yourself and your projected delusions.

Welcome to what passes for thinking in this culture of compartmentalization.  Welcome to the wonderful world of rationalized exploitation.

-Excerpt from Derrick Jensen’s “What We Leave Behind”