[Part 2 of a four-part series, How to Enchant Daily Life. Go here for Part 1.]
To escape Papa Culture’s fishbowl game, let’s look at how he enforces the rules.
Think of the game he calls time zones. In this space over here, I’m “in a different time” than you are over there.
“Look at you, kooky kid! You’re an hour ahead of me!”
If the kooky kid in Central Time reads this as I write, are they doing it an hour before I write it?
The Colorado-Wyoming Game
How about the state-borders game? National and state lines are as made up as time zones. This side of the border is Colorado; that side is Wyoming.
If by “Wyoming” and “Colorado,” we mean border boxes that mark as “Wyomingite” or “Coloradoan” the people, the cultures, what’s manufactured there, what’s grown there, and a zillion other phenomena within those borders, then, yes—Here is Colorado. There is Wyoming.
But if we mean, “Is this soil and rock I stand on Wyoming? Colorado? The tree bark I rub my hand against? The mountains that dominate the horizon?”
No. Of course not.
We didn’t make the rocks and foliage in Colorado or Wyoming. We play a game in which terrain, trees, and all on Papa’s gameboard are what he says they are. We play along to conduct business, earn a living, get married, and “own” property. The rules vary by our location on a landmass Papa calls the Continent of North America.
For Some, It’s Not A Game
A bear doesn’t care where Colorado or Wyoming is, nor does she note her coordinates in those plaything jurisdictions—unless a border obstruction stops her and her cubs from getting to a stash of honey over there in Wyoming.
On the Colorado side are mountains. In Wyoming are more peaks. Both sides continue the same mountain range that’s persisted for centuries.
Our border abstractions can’t fathom fungal neural networks, tree root systems, migratory patterns of birds and animals, and the way the land and rivers undulate with altitude and gravity.
This pine tree I lean against straddles the Colorado-Wyoming border. The tree doesn’t know Papa drew a line through her, making her half Wyomingite and half Coloradoan.
We Aren’t Trees
Forgo borders and we swiftly see that, though they’re abstractions, they dictate how we play Papa’s game. Sadly, too, his rules impact the pine tree and the bear.
For his game bares bulldozer teeth
in the minds—and hands—of one particular species.
More on the damage done, in Part 3: Flip the Gameboard.
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