Page 127 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

I come from that great wave of light-­‐skinned Europeans who journeyed to North America and began

the end of one way of living with this land and the beginning of another. Still, the ancient way of

human communion with animals was once lived by all of our ancestral kin, on every continent. In the

long history of the Earth, homo sapiens lived not very long ago within the open savannah, among other

animals, in the world of the hunter and the hunted—that is, the eater and the eaten. Humans, like all

the other animals on the planet, know in our deepest cells what it is to be prey. We have clawed our

way to the top of the food chain, but is it so awful, really, to give oneself over to someone else’s life? Is

it not true that what is eaten is taken into the body, and in that way continues to live? (If I am buried in

the ground in a plain wooden box, which is my wish, my body will be eaten by microscopic creatures

who will turn me into loam and rich soil. Isn’t this the essence of the Catholic sacrament of Holy

Communion, an act that was adopted by my Irish ancestors and part of my own family upbringing?

Does not the eaten become the eater—literally the stuff of which cell, skin and bone are made? Is

there any way to truly name the end of the chain?)

Somewhere deep in the bones of each human lay the remnants of our shared life with the great tribe

of earth animals. This epic relationship has been lived over many millennia of human evolution. It is too

deeply indigenous to humanity to be entirely wiped out. Squirrels long predate humans on the earth,

and are among the more ancient of any species. They have occupied the earth in their current form for

13 million years. Humans have been here in something close to our current form for 4 million years.

These generous and intelligent squirrels are much, much older than we are. They have known this

earth a very long time. Now the tail and tiny furred paws sit quietly on an altar in my study. I did not

eat her, as my human kin have done for millennia, though some part of me wishes I’d had the simple

knowledge of my ancestors to skin her, bless her, and take her all the way in.

I’m grown up now, but over the years I have also grown a little down. That girl who knew that there

was no separation between herself and the rest of nature still lives. It was she who sat in the forest

and felt the living ensouled beings around her. It was she who could touch for a moment the

currencies of the natural world: generosity (nature’s tendency to share, to give food and to offer

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