Harmony Paragraph: IN-CLASS What is a belief about nature that you hold to be true and why?

Harmony

ÄCCOBDING to the teachings of my people, harmony is the most difficult thing to achieve in life. The Old Ones say that the pursuit of harmony is a lifelong endeavour. Because of the intense struggle along the .way, the journey is a spiritual one. There are not many who choose to make it, and it’s easy to see why.

To seek harmony is to seek truth, and truth seekers have always had a rough go of it in this world. Those who see life as something to be solved, put in order and contained are constantly bending truth to their own demands. But my peo­ ple knew there was one thing that would never change. They knew there was an energy that brought all things together and held them there in balance. A Great Spirit. A great mys­ tery. They honoured that mystery not by trying to explain it but simply by recognizing and celebrating it.

In the Aboriginal way of seeing the world, everything is alive. Everything exists in a never-ending state of relationship. If there is order to be found, it lies in the all-encompassing faith in this belief. • ■ When the dog and I discovered deer carcasses strewn alongside the timber road where we walked, I was deeply

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distressed. Hunters had shot the deer and left their bodies behind. One pair, humped together under a sheet of plastic, had been beheaded. Creatures had been visiting the carcasses: coyotes, ravens, eagles, magpies, probably bobcats.

Over the week that followed, Molly and I came across half a dozen dead deer all left in the same condition. Their legs had been cut off and thrown into the trees. Near the creek, a head had been tossed in the grass minus its antlers. Up the road one morning, near a carcass, we saw a juvenile cougar slink off through the trees. The squawking of ravens told me of other bodies nearby.

The first emotion I felt was anger, bitter and churning. This senseless display- exhibited disrespect at every level: for the animals, for the land, for the other people who used that road and for the planet itself. Empty coffee containers, beer, cans, cigarette packages and bloody rope were strewn every­ where. The behaviour of these hunters had been careless, thoughtless and crude. I stomped off down the hill to warn my neighbours about the proximity of the young cougar.

The next emotion I experienced was shame. It’s hard to be male when others of your gender mistake manliness for a can of Coors and a rifle. It’s tough to be male when people shrug off such disrespectful behaviour as simply “boys being boys.” It’s shameful being a man when, fór some men, wast­ ing and discarding has replaced sharing. What these men had done offended my sense of propriety, dignity and rightness in every way.

Strangely enough, I also felt lonely. I go to the land for the experience of reconnection. I stand there and I feel I belong in a way I don’t wholly comprehend. Once you have been ful­ filled in this way, you see everything around you as valuable, necessary and irreplaceable. When a life is severed, the loss of

3 6 One Story,. One Song

' ■ that life force affects everything else. I didn’t miss the deer; I missed the idea of them. I missed their spirit.

In the' end, I mostly felt sad. I thought of the multitude of woes that confront us all around, the world these days, the planet reeling from’the effects of our indifference. Displays 'like the one I encountered with the deer are at the root of it all. This is why the earth suffers—because the majority of us have forgotten the idea of harmony or never learned it in the first place. We’ve forgotten that our responsibility is to take

" i ■ care of our home, and we’ve allowed dishonour to replace respect. Every bit of trash strewn in pristine places is proof of that. It saddened me that people can’t recognize the larger

■ impact of their actions, or often the effect of their inaction, 8Ê . either.

We are all energy, cause and effect at the same time. Those y.. hunters found it too inconvenient to haul those deer out and

deal with them respectfully. They found it too inconvenient I;1 ■, to care. This apathy may be at the heart of the challenge we

face as a species today. It is sometimes terribly inconvenient to act in an honourable way. Só the earth suffers. Our home

• becomes sullied, and harmony is fractured at every turn. We are one spirit, one song, and our world will be harmo-

1 ” nious only when we make the time to care. For ourselves. For (8 k each other. For our home. You don’t need to be a Native per-

. son to understand that—just human.

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