Green Scene: How to Live on Planet Earth

Yesterday was one of those that come along all too rarely as the days grow shorter: sunny, warm, significant.

After a few days of gray clouds and passing rain and snow showers (depending on the altitude) that prompted me to fire up the woodstove for the first time this season, the morning dawned fresh and clean. At 7,000 feet, clear skies mean you feel the sun quite strongly, and so does every other living thing. Within a few hours, we had the front door and all the windows open again.

By noon we were on our way to a party in a little mountain village, actually an open house with artist friends of ours participating in a studio tour. (We used to live up there ourselves and could again someday.) For those of you who don’t know, “village” in the northern New Mexico context doesn’t generally refer to a cluster of houses around a main road or square as it might in New England, for example. Here it’s more apt to mean a thin scattering of residences along a valley, with older properties sharing strips of land that cross a central creek flowing down from the peaks, so that water and grazing are widely distributed. More likely than not, there’s a shared irrigation system, the old acequias, an Moorish invention brought over from Spain some 400 years ago. These villages, much fewer in number now than in the not-so-distant past, may have a post office with a flag, but that would be the only indication of a relationship to outside authority, unless they also have a church.

Nowhere else in America have I encountered places like this, and here we were again to meet up with our friends. The setting was idyllic: Indian horses in an adjacent pasture filled with blooming rabbitbrush and purple asters, a thick grove of cottonwoods along the creek, and the big blue sky overhead. One of the neighbors — Carlos, 70 years old — showed up because he’d run into our hosts at the post office the day before, and they’d him they were having a potluck open house. (He was born just up the road and walked down for the party.) The guests included a Dutchman in his 60s who’d recently devoted an entire year to backpacking through Mexico and Central America, a novelist up from Albuquerque, a retired movie director and his artist wife now living high up in the valley, and a few more neighbors. The food was vegetarian, and there wasn’t any alcohol. A bathtub sat out in the woods beside the creek. When we arrived, I found a cluster of men standing around the cold frames discussing goat-manure compost.

I talked to the director about the films he’d made and his new adventures on YouTube. Sitting in a rickety chair on a simple patio, he gave me great advice about my own video experiments. I knew the house they lived in now. His wife had hiked farther up the mountain trails than I had when we lived just half a mile away. I was exuberant in the face of all these stimuli and told him how I’d been 10 different kinds of “arteest” over the decades but felt like I was still stuck in first gear. “Me too,” he replied.

Carlos and I introduced ourselves. He told me about riding into Taos with his father on their horse-drawn wagon once a week when he was a boy in the 1940s. “There were horses and wagons backed up when we got to town,” he said, “and only four or five cars, tops.” No paved roads anywhere, of course.

The other conversations dealt with animal stories, neighbors exchanging tales of elk, snakes, coyotes, cougars, bears, and great horned owls that snatch up cats. More than anything else, that’s what I remembered about “the valley.” Once when we came home from a movie in Taos on a bitter winter night, a dozen elk came thundering past in front of the car, throwing up great clouds of powder snow in the headlight beams just 50 yards from our front door. Our host had already seen elk this month and heard them bugling.

With each mile back into town, I felt dirtier and more uncomfortable. Today, still high from the brief re-entry into that way of life, I understand completely why.

We don’t reform the system by pecking away at the edges, arguing over the meaning of “green,” or getting people to drive hybrids. Our whole developed way of life is what’s untenable. There are just too many of us on the Earth, far too few able to live each day in awe of Nature. That’s all that’s wrong. We overran the place, and sooner or later, things will right themselves, with or without us and our intervention.

Not that people in the valley don’t have internet access, drive cars, or visit supermarkets, but their local footprint on the planet is exceedingly small. When the distant world comes to its inevitable grief, elk will still bugle in the frosty air and bears will shuffle through abandoned orchards and groves of native plums, fattening up for hibernation. Any neighbors that are left will help each other keep warm through the winter and share what they can grow for sustenance. Life will be hard but possible, even joyful and enlightening. We may communicate telepathically, in dreams, and visit other worlds through shamans. The rivers will flow clean again and the oceans will regenerate, just as the human body naturally inclines toward healthy function and fulfillment when not battered by stress and isolation from the source of All That Is.

The vision is pounding in my soul this morning. There’s nothing else I care about. Politics and environmentalism are useless to me, the blogosphere essentially irrelevant. I feel like I’ve been liberated. All we have to do is live! Find yourselves a place to take a stand together with your neighbors — not defensively or chased by fear, but focused in the present, listening to the Earth. Almost none of us can do this, frankly, which is why we need to celebrate the ones who try and sing our song, so someone might remember.

Just two will do, in any case!

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