Saving Small Places

"A new question in the environmentalist's canon," writes Barbara Kingsolver, "is this one: who will love the imperfect lands, the fragments of backyard desert paradise, the creek that runs between farms?" Here in San Diego it seems like the only spaces we have left are imperfect; possibly, after 16,000 years of human habitation on this little bit of the biosphere the only spaces we have are "imperfect". But when I think of the notion of saving wild spaces and the reality of the history of this region, the "perfect" wilderness seems rather silly. I, for one have no desire to return the canyon near my house to its Pliestocene purity--if that's what it was back then--with mastodons and megathariums in the mix.

Besides, I can only access the sacredness of wild spaces through the people who have been there already. Kingsolver does it by looking at the way her daughter remembers a creek in Kentucky and by welcoming a hermit crab to Tuscon in High Tide in Tucson; she looks at the way habitats work in our heads, and the way we all share the earth as best we can, even those of us who wind up in unexpected places. I have taken hermit crabs home to Mission Hills, miles from the ocean and sat, like Kingsolver, in "stunned reverence" as they adjusted to life inland, and as a kid I had lots of prisoners: Butterflies, bugs, snakes, horned lizards and ants plus the more formalized cats and dogs. So it seems only natural that in order to get the picture in the natural world, I should have to become another human being's prosoner for a bit, and invade some space where I don't belong. Perhaps the words shouldn't be "invade" and "prisoner" at all; maybe what's really going on is integration, a type of expression of the basic ecological principle, connectedness. The spiritual is, for me, a form of communication with people and other beings; I long ago, with my fifth acid trip, gave up on the idea of directly accessing God and realized I would have to settle for glimpses of godhead garnered through the eyes of people like that guy waiting for the bus, or the kid at the pier looking at dead fish.

Or sometimes in a good film. The play of life and death, and the workings of fate, are wonderfully addressed in Ryan, a short animation I saw last night at the La Jolla Contemporary Art Museum's short film party, alt.pictureshows. Even drug addiction can be spiritual, if taken to its logical conclusion, a oneness with god while you're bumming quaters on the street.