Home on the Range

Recently, I wrote of 'my home range' as if I were a buzzard. And of how whittled down our home ranges as individual human beings have become, in some cases non-existant, due to the way we allow our bodies to be carried and conveyed and sealed behind screens, speed, and pre-concieved notions. Our home range is pitifully limited as a species in this day and age of false technologies and robotic bodies. The shrinking of this range leads to a metaphysical shrinking of the human to the point where he becomes man. The human is the creature plus environment, the man simply a man who has little knowledge of his environment other than as some thing to be 'used', 'exploited' or even 'enjoyed'. Whereas the former feels the land as part of his larger Self, the latter does not. The former has a vested interest in the land for it is his body; the latter feels that the land is his to do with what he likes not knowing that sooner or later the veins of the land will bring whatever contaminations into his own veins.

With the former, there is insight, call it spiritual or deeply ecological, and in the latter there is simply a 'looking at', a sort of glaikit look that understands very little of what he is seeing. Indeed, the word 'glaikit' is particularly apt here since it derives from an old Scots word meaning 'to look at idly' or 'to be bedazzled'. In his book, The Absence of the Sacred, the American Jerry Mander, writes of how the human has been dazzled by progress and all this novelty just as a fish is dazzled by the silvery mask of the harpooner's face. The only difference being that our bedazzlement is more than a few seconds long.... Or is it? Is not the period we are in simply a few seconds in the grand scheme of things? Will people, if they survive their own small selves, one day look back and wonder what on earth possessed us to outsource our being so much to toil, things and machines? Probably.

At any rate, tuning back in to your home range can get rid of a lot of metaphysical heft, and encourage a maturity that reaps frugality and fruitfulness, and a living lightly on this your home planet.

I wondered after looking at the range of some seagulls which had been carried out in Holland what my own range would look like if I strapped an electronic tag to my ankle. Well, I reckon it would look something like this: