The Long-Legged Bobcat

Becker, 1999

I invite you to take a moment to notice your breathing. Inhale, feeling the air inflate your lungs. Notice that brief moment when you've reached the end of your inhalation. Then exhale, feeling the air leave your body. Notice that brief moment when you've reached the end of your exhalation. Do it again and again, feeling the world enter you, then feeling yourself enter the world.

Breath is our foundational connection to the rest of the world, but there is also our digestive process that takes in nutrition, then eliminates it. The world enters us through our ears, through our noses, fingertips, and skin. We return ourselves to the world through our voices, glands, and movement. We are so permeable to the world, and it to us, that it starts to become impossible to think of ourselves as anything other than an integrated part of a larger whole.

The sound of mocking birds outside my open window, enters me. In the process of taking their songs in, I alter them, if only because the human ability to hear is incapable of appreciating the fullness of the music. My dog, with her superior hearing, likely comes closer to that full appreciation, although it hardly matters because the moment those sounds become a part of me, I transform them into bodily sensations, emotions, thoughts, and memories according to my own capacity. And then, perhaps right away, perhaps on my death bed, but probably somewhere in between, I return what I've made of that birdsong to the world through behavior, which in turn, is transformed, but never destroyed, just as our breath is never destroyed.

Division is an illusion, one created by the myth of the individual which is grounded in Western ideas of science, reason, machines, and progress. I'm not saying that this isn't a valid perspective, but rather pointing out that is indeed a myth, one that inevitably pits us as outside of, or even opposed to, everything beyond what we perceive of as our bodies, our tribe, our culture. It is a perspective that leads to a glorification of competition and that views cooperation, even within the tribe, as weakness. By their very nature, perspectives cannot be wrong, but they are likewise, by their very nature, incomplete.

The other day, I heard a billionaire who was born into a family with emerald mines say that he is opposed the "the woke mind virus" because it threatens "meritocracy." From my perspective as a man who didn't start life with an emerald mine, I can see the silly (if it weren't so dangerous) hypocrisy. I want to say to him that I agree about meritocracy. Let's take away all the emerald mines from all the babies who were accidentally born with them and leave them to fend according to their merits rather than relying on the golden crutch of inheritance, be it of wealth, skin color, gender, or social class, which is, essentially, from my perspective, what the so-called woke mind virus is actually all about. 

From my perspective, I can see how this billionaire and I might agree, although I imagine that this billionaire will never be capable of seeing it that way because, it seems, he is so deeply invested in the myth of the individual, and the obvious logical fallacy that asserts, "I have it, so I must have merited it."

Of course, he might say to me, "You talk about perspective, but you haven't considered mine." But just as I really can't imagine what my dog hears in the mocking bird's song, I am, I guess, incapable of comprehending his point of view on the matter. Because to me, when I do the mental experiment of being a billionaire, I cannot imagine a scenario in which I don't give most of it away, enriching others, just as I strive to give away my power in order to empower others or my courage in order to encourage others. This is what breathing has taught me.

The older I've grown, the more I find myself craving connection and cooperation and that, from my perspective, means allowing myself to be increasingly permeable to the world; to notice there are no genuine divisions. I find myself becoming a seeker of new perspectives, breathing them in, allowing them to become a part of me, then exhaling them, transformed by their time within me, even as they have transformed me. I feel as if, with each breath, I become larger, and that causes me to want to enlarge others, however they fit their own permeable selves into this wholeness of which everything is included.

It makes me sad, that so many people my age seem to go in the other direction, becoming more absolute in their perspectives, less permeable. It's like they're holding their breath and just, I don't know, waiting for the end? It feels like fear. 

Life's too short for that kind of imaginary fear. I'll take genuine fear any day.

There is a bobcat that has been stalking our neighborhood lately. People are talking about it. I've not seen it, but several of my neighbors who have say that it has extraordinarily long legs. It's body, apparently, is the size of a normal bobcat, but it stands much higher than average. One neighbor held his palm a good three feet off the ground while describing it. Some of the neighbors want it killed or at least relocated. Maybe it is a threat to our pets or even ourselves, but so far it's only been known to dine on the local rabbit population, which, frankly, is a bit out of control.

The long-legged bobcat has been on my mind. It's a nocturnal creature, so whenever I'm out after dark, I'm looking for it. I want to see it with my own eyes. Some of my neighbors have told me to be afraid of it. Some have stopped taking their dogs out for walks after dark. But I want to breathe the same air it's breathing. I want to see those long legs and meet those shining eyes. I wonder if I could smell it. I wonder if it would hear my heart beat as I experience the authentic fear that comes from being directly confronted by this kind of ultimate permeability. A neighbor cautioned, "It could kill you." And all I could think was, But what a way to go! Eaten by a bobcat; a long-legged one at that. When people tell the story of me, the part of the individual me that, like an exhalation, will remain, dispersed, but eternal, that long-legged bobcat would be the aspect of the story that would keep the individual me, and the collective us, alive.

Breath in, breath out. Our permeability to the world is both the cause of and the meaning of life. When we allow ourselves to be permeable, when we don't fight it, that is when we are most like young children, I think, those humans who freely empower, and encourage and who are empowered, and encouraged in return. Sorry, billionaire, enrichment doesn't matter here. It's as natural as breathing in and breathing out. And when the day comes that we are finally face-to-face with that long-legged bobcat, we will know we are alive. Perhaps the long-legged bobcat will turn tail and run, frightened by our pounding heart, interpreting it, from its perspective, as a threat. Or maybe the long-legged bobcat will devour us, making our bodies one. But most likely, it will breath us in without violence as we breath it in without malice, and in that moment of mutual permeability we will both be transformed and enlarged, which is what, I think, we are here to do.

******

 

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