Economic Future (what to do with your change)

This is Native American armor from the Pacific Northwest made of Chinese coins (presumably traded). I have a feeling that this utilitarianization of currency is the fine future of the global economy.

(images from the New York Natural History Museum)

Surfing Crow

There was crow flying with a stick over the dunes. He held a piece of drift-wood with his left foot and cruised on the off-shore wind, dropping out of sight low behind the dunes, and then rising way up into the air. He flew from left to right, and right to left, but did not travel down the beach, nor did he land. What was up with this little bird-fellow and his stick?

Noël and I set about speculating. “It must be making a nest,” I said with ludicrous confidence. But he never put the stick down, nor did he make his way any-which-way, he simply danced in the air with the stick. “Maybe his leg is caught on it somehow?” Noël asked aloud. Instead of saying “nope, that's not it” the crow just grabbed the stick in his beak and then switched feet, holding it with his right foot instead. “How strange,” I thought, “he must be deranged, he’s lost his little bird brain.” Then he grabbed the stick with both feet, and cried out in apparent triumph, surfing with the driftwood above the sandy hills. And this thought struck my narrow mind: he is playing.

My first impulse is to think of animals (and by extension the wild) as practical, with all of their actions having “purposes.” Having ruled out the practical, we believed the crow to be in need, imagining him caught in some plastic soda-ring and drift-wood garbage trap… revealing my arrogance and guilt: seeing nature as fragile, and man (and myself) as careless and destructive. After ruling out a man-made danger I pronounced the crow insane for simply not adhering to the austere image that I had projected onto his ways.

Now however, I believe this crow was really marveling at his own crowness, as we sometimes delight in our humanness, or relative animalness. He was delighting in his grasping talons, his dexterous toes, his strong and able beak, and his magnificent wings. So too he seemed to give thanks and friendship to the wind, as they played together, crying out for joy as he surfed the stick with both legs; laughing like a child (or younger crow), surprised by each gust of wind, and his own marvelous game.

Have I seen this event clearly now? Certainly not, I am working with assumptions again, but to some extent I have seen my own thoughts more clearly, revealed a pattern of small-thinking that had essentially gone unchecked. Who am I to limit a crow, or conversely to proclaim its nature more complex? It is not my place to do so, but believing the wild to be at play is to see it with a wider view. Certainly it is a wider view than to consider the non-human world to be without play. Play is, after all, liberation… presence and movement without destination, action without wanting anything outside of the action itself… something a surfing crow can know without contemplation (I am assuming).

And there’s the final lesson from the Surfing Lama Crow, we don’t need to figure it all out, accepting the mystery is both humbling and illuminating. As Keats said: “The point of diving in the lake is not to immediately swim to the other shore, but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of the water.” So it may be said that the point of a game is not to immediately complete it; nor is it most beneficial to deconstruct and examine the mysterious actions of a crow, perhaps better just to feel amazed… so now, I’ll shut up.

(image notes: a nice looking painting that I did not make but found somehow on the internet)

Yugen Movie V & VI (anti-viral videos)