Crows and the Cheapened World
- Sensei Sevan Ross
Initially the cheapened world made itself known
to me in the form of crows. I was working for a large bank in one
of the taller buildings in Rochester, New York, and was leaving work late one winter night when I noticed all the crows in a small park, all
roosted in the trees there, cawing once in awhile in short bursts and looking down on me as I hurried on my way. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, like out of Hitchcock.
A murder of crows. This is actually the proper name for such a gathering, and here this
murder of crows roosted, ready for the winter night, the inheritors of a new world.
It took time for me to realize the meaning of
the crows. It took a few summers of noticing that there were more
black birds of all kinds, and fewer songbirds of all kinds almost everywhere I went. I saw magazine articles announcing the cheapened world, documenting how
many species disappear each year, how weed trees are everywhere pushing out dedicated forests, how it’s all my fault because I drive a car
and use plastic bags. On a social level I was told that the
nation-state was everywhere breaking down, succumbing to the pressures of tribalism. Humankind would return to the clan in the end. The clan would be trying to start fire under the universal box elder
tree, under the watchful eye of the crows. And the ice pack would
melt, the bio-weapons would be used by terrorists, and those of us who were left would find ourselves in “Waterworld” or
“Mad Max.”
The crows were the first overt sign of the
cheapened world, but also the first voice of its transformation for me. I
began to notice each morning that they were gone from the park where they roosted. I could hear them and see them pass overhead as they wound their way out
of the city and into the countryside each morning. To where?
Where did the crows go all day in the winter? Obviously to eat. Corn fields, road kill, taking rodents and other small creatures. But gone from the city Outward bound. Opportunistic.
The magazines and TV always referred to the
unwanted and invasive species this way: “opportunistic.” It was a dirty word, for dirty creatures. They were weed species that would invade the areas where “desirable”
species lived, and they would take over, pushing out the desirable species.
Purple Loose-strife among the Cat-tails. Beetles among the
anthill. African Killer Bees. Crabgrass and Chicory.
And the Chinese bootleggers of CD’s and Nike
shoes? Opportunistic. All the Indian software engineers invading the U.S.? Opportunistic. Here in Chicago, all these Mexican landscapers and bricklayers? The same.
And to feed their families and hope for any true, non-cheapened, equal opportunity, they will do whatever it takes. They will do with less to assure the continuance of their family line. To the Chinese bootlegger, bootlegging is the assurance of his
daughter’s wedding. To the well healed, white, U.S. record
executive the bootlegger is a weed to be sprayed.
Chicory is that lavender-flowered spindly weed
that appears late in July along most roads and highways in the north. It
grows up healthy there between cracks in the pavement. No water. No food.
Baked by the now U.V. intensified sun. Healthy and smiling
right there in the hot, dry asphalt. Is it opportunistic, or is it
willing to work harder with less? Is it not showing us how to go
straight ahead with the work at hand, without worrying about conditions, without having the “right tools?”
And the crows. Are they not simply “surfing” the civilization? “You humans give us garbage, we will find food in it.” They do not arise in the morning bemoaning the fact that there is less
arable land. Crows do not read articles about the cheapened world,
the fall of the nation-state, Zebra muscles in the Great Lakes. They
don’t read. They feed and fly and gather and watch us carefully,
and not out of fear or judgment, but out of respect. We make change
happen.
The bootlegger does the same, and is almost
certainly not concerned with the fall of the nation-state, let alone the invasion of the Asia Long-horned Beetle. He is, like the crow and the chicory, teaching us something valuable: Change with the world, for you cannot muscle it to wherever you may
think you want it, and it will not stop for you nor conform to any of your demands.
I teach Buddhism. At our Zen Center here in Chicago we meditate and calm the mind in order
to see what really is, to get in touch with the true nature of things -- of ourselves. One of the difficult adjustments people need to made
in Zen practice is the adjustment from trying to “fix” the world to trying work on their own minds. When we reach out to fix the world, there is always a set of assumptions
that lies behind and informs that action. One of the major
assumptions is that we are somehow endowed with the right vision of things, that our mind is clear. But through years of meditation practice we come to discover that there
is a considerable amount of ego in this assumption. It turns out
that under all our altruism there is still a little person wanting to be noticed, thanked, lauded.
And besides, this little person never has all
the facts, can never quite fill the shoes of others around a given debate or discussion.
And so we set to work to whittle down this ego,
to allow assumptions to rest and actions dictate. We can, with
training, come to be less sure of ourselves. We can better enter
the land of not knowing the answers.
This in no way means that we become passive, but
rather that we are not so attached to our point of view. Even
without Zen meditation we can enter the world of not knowing, if we only allow ourselves to be “wrong.” I f we can come to be less attached to our view of ourselves (and
therefore everything and everyone), we can come to not care so deeply about winning and losing. We can even come to not be frightened by the cheapened world, because we
can allow ourselves to not really know if it is indeed cheapened or not.
This is not an argument for the beauty and right
to exist of Box Elders and Black Willows. It is the entire letting
go of the need to fall into one camp or another. It is the
embracing of the anguish of the record executive whose hard work is being stolen by the Chinese bootlegger, and condemnation of that theft,
while at the same time feeling the natural flexing of new economic muscle, the joy of improving his own and his family’s standard of
living, that must be felt by the bootlegger. It is the
non-judgmental action taken to stop environmental degradation, while at the same time recognizing that the vast majority of the people
involved in industry are filling needs and feeding families.
We can argue all day about the degrees of
pollution, political power, economics, and personal greed we are really examining in any given situation, but we can also be sure that we
are driven by assumptions spawned by the ego, and that these are hard to spot, identify, and root out. The cheapened word is still the world we have, and there is no going
back to a time before pollution, economic equality, political fairness, to a world with more songbirds and fewer crows. We have the power to bring about the birth of a greater world from the
cheapened world, but it must carry this present world’s genes. Our
world is its mother, and we must not reject her, but embrace her, in all her aspects -- those we approve of and those we do not -- if we are
to be of any help. To do this we must be less sure of ourselves,
less likely to judge and condemn.
For we really do not know anything. From the heart of the cheapened world itself we may get some loving
gift. Cities in Eastern Europe as long ago as the Dark Ages have
had huge flocks of crows and ravens. Often they kept the rat
population in check. One never knows.