We’re All Neighbors Here
Peaceful notes from my privileged planet patch
When I’m out on my morning strolls, I usually have a mug of coffee in one hand and a joint in the other. Since many of my neighbors are canines and go for their walks around the same time, my day brightens with each of their tail wags, drooly smiles, and eager pauses for a lovey.
This morning, I stopped to watch three squirrels spiral up and down a tree, then chase each other around the yard. I soon noticed a woman and her floofy poodle-cross companion nearby and laughed out loud at the pooch’s bouffant. But then I realized they were patiently waiting for me and my weed smoke to move along. So I smiled, nodded, and whispered to the squirrels I’d see them later.
The woman, dog, and I were meandering the same block, though, so they were eventually forced to pass. Luckily, this time I was nearer to the street and staring off into the distance between puffs, so the pair glided past unperturbed by unwanted smoke, and we all got to exchange an extra set of quiet daybreak smiles.
I love enjoying this stuff. As I’ve navigated the ups, downs, swirls, and sideways interactions involved in community living, it’s only recently that I’ve found my balance of how and if to greet someone and their animal companion.
Luckily, there aren’t actual rules to it beyond trusting myself and the grid.
I first encountered the grid a long time ago during a psilocybin mushroom trip. I was taking a walk around the block by myself and saw a faint, glowing, bluish-whitish grid in a patch of grass a little ways off the path. I knew if I sat in it, I would have a bigger trip, so I did.
The grid shot out to the rest of everything as soon as I sat. It followed the contours of the ground, plants, shrubs, trees, houses, and sky, delineating everything but not outside or inside anything.
A great Oak tree towered over me from a few yards away. It was shimmering and full of life and awareness. I asked, “Why do I have so many panic attacks all the time?”
The tree shook with laughter and answered, “You can go through life scared or not. It doesn’t matter.”
I’m starting to understand the hands-off, non-advice approach better after 20+ years. Still, it was the living grid and laughing tree’s essences that truly branded the experience into me for good.
I love Earth’s sensory-positive atmosphere. Here we are, careening through spacetime in this exotic sphere. The same matter that’s scattered from the nearest light year to light year zero makes incredible stuff in our prime, primordial goo-growing conditions.
For me, it makes it harder to believe that only humans have consciousness, feelings, faith, or ingenuity of importance. It is far easier to believe that individual and shared essences exist in and across people, plants, animals, manufactured merchandise, minerals, gases, outer space, et al.
Nods to similar understandings of existence delight, like those from the mother/daughter googly-eyed rocks in the film Everything Everywhere All At Once, abundant “inanimant object” anime characters, and children’s books across every culture and mindset, where interactions with stuff like furniture, plantlife, and animals are normal and forthright.
The depictions guide our imaginations to seek wisdom beyond the human fray. They help us envision the epic journey from being part of a mighty, craggy mountain face to a fine, polished grain of sea sand, and the time spent in between as a desert boulder.
It’s all life; it all wants to feel recognized from the intensely dense pinnacle from whence we all came, the pinnacle that continues to unfurl across billions and billions of light years and spacetime epochs in order to stage and experience everything we or anything else will ever know or believe.
No matter what that stirs in our hearts and souls, neighborhood pooch eyes analyzing us and our approaches offer up everything we need to know about empathy, responsibility, and how to tread shared spaces.
So, when appropriate, I greet the dogs and people. I am gentle if I must step on tree roots. I meet rocks and metals with curiosity. And I do my best to trust the grid and share the laughing tree’s peaceful, bemused detachment to how the rest might unfold.