Remember this: Everything is star dust.
It was reported over the previous two nights there would be a rampant meteor shower like no other. Last night I gazed out the window but no luck. Tonight on my way out the door I saw one of the last meteors to soar across the heaven above my house. I told my son that I had seen a shooting star. I should have made a wish. Maybe I can say a silent one now.
It was reported over the previous two nights there would be a rampant meteor shower like no other. Last night I gazed out the window but no luck. Tonight on my way out the door I saw one of the last meteors to soar across the heaven above my house. I told my son that I had seen a shooting star. I should have made a wish. Maybe I can say a silent one now.
Usually during the summer the one space anomaly I see
nightly is the Milky Way. It hangs in massive size like a great eye watching
the inner world. It has been woven into many a cosmological myth. Its glowing
light looks like the fabric of the universe is tearing in two to let our
Earthly plane leak out. There you stand unmoved but gawking at it for quite a
while but the idea that many people do not see this celestial dance is even
more worrisome.
I was either reading or watching a show on black holes. The
information I was receiving was the concept that the Milky Way was a galaxy
with a series of compressed black holes with a competing space in-between where
the stars visually display its ‘squishedness’. These compressions formed that
nice line of stars that we see in the Eastern sky at certain times of the year.
I wasn’t reaching for becoming a Milky Way expert but I am sure there are other
more accurate accounts of this. I will leave that to you for I am not doing a
scientific commentary.
The one fact that struck me was as a viewer from Earth with
our human eyes, we are gazing upon that glowing streak of stars from inside the
galaxy of the Milky Way. We are not passing by it as outside viewers. As a part
of a cosmos, if this fact cannot strike awe and wonder in your heart then you
are a person detached from the reality of the universe and its effect on you. We move throughout our daily lives taking for
granted all the wonders around us. On some accounts we are tearing them apart
for more useful or gainful employ.
What can the Milky Way illustrate to us in the realm of
hunting?
I thought how a huntress and the game she chases are like
the Milky Way. The black holes represent civilization, populations, space
competition, industry, development and government. The galaxy of the Milky Way
contains all those things that are viable creatures moving through some great
mysterious composition: one chess piece at a time. The huntress and the game
she oversees partake of a life of compression. With this life of compression
there is always an amount of instability. The hunter feels this as well.
The space for wildlife and the huntress is not expanding
exponentially. The space the huntress has to work with is ever shortening. The
space the wildlife has to live and thrive on is becoming less. Both are
compressed to allocated landscapes and are required to maintain a certain level
of existence under the close scrutiny of government and populations living in
developed areas. These developed areas discourage wildlife habitation. Developed
areas also discourage the person that hunts by only allowing the endeavor of
hunting to be performed in areas where wildlife have been pushed or contained. Yes,
I stated the word ‘contained’.
Recently I have seen this with gardening. There are places
that do not want people to garden in the front yard because it is not pleasing
to the eye even if you are growing food to feed yourself. It’s more important
how things are perceived on the outside of a property but someone else is
making your decisions for you and enforcing them by way of the ‘law’.
To interject another story from the local news about coyotes
becoming a nuisance in town the article dwells more on the new regulation being
passed in town that require the weeds in a patron’s yard be no more than X
amount of inches high. The penalty is a $250 fine. This lead me to believe it
was more important to contain the weeds instead of the coyotes. Priorities
crooked?
Boundaries and legalities harass us all. No one can really
just walk anywhere unless it is down a street uptown. Even there the glowing
signs of walk-don’t walk glare at us in a menacing fashion. If you go out to
the country to walk around it better be on public land or you’ll have a
landowner pointing a gun at you or confronting you for trespassing on his
property lost or not.
I recently saw a conversation about a huntress walking in a
public area but became agitated by strangers because they felt she and her
hounds should be subdued for their natural inclinations. This is the kind of
compression I am talking about. I see women
who hunt having to defend their natural inclinations to reach back into old
times and walk with the mother but instead are pressured by outside forces to
go against their nature. This is not about empowerment. It’s about being your
most authentic and natural self-down to your marrow bone. Being me, I would tell you to raise up and
fight that like a bit someone is trying to slide into your mouth then break you
out before the saddle goes on. That is just me though; wild as Hogey’s Hant.
It’s the idea of invasion of space and the ability to feel
free and act accordingly. I would think it is especially oppressing when you
are given the legal go ahead to do what you desire without repercussion but
some people constantly feel they are an army of one with no real authority to
act or even say anything. Sometimes I want to ask people like that who elected
you the captain of my pirate ship. Out would come the plank, gun with one
bullet and park that boat by the nearest oceanic sandbar for them to fend for
themselves the best way they could.
The thing about invasion of relocated space is you can drive
them right out or move along. Depends on whether or not you are the sole owner
of that space or just visiting.
If you thought of it in those terms there are always fences
around where you hunt even if you don’t see them physically.
The huntress or hunter is no freer than the wildlife roaming
on fifty acres of land where before it was 35,000 acres or more. Both are in a
contained invisible boundary.
Even though this boundary can give the huntress and wild
game some room to breathe the amount of distance given the area the drama plays
out foreshortens the experience to an ever briefer moment. What would happen if
finally the compression leads to a complete eradication of hunting? Or wildlife
existence in a given landscape? How would the huntress cope if she were no
longer able to act out a natural born inherent desire to act as a predator
would?
Human habitation is growing in the perpendicular direction.
People live horizontally above the ground in manmade structures that eventually
are abandoned for different reasons. These structures are not removed to
rebuild habitat. People also live vertically in an upward fashion in high rise
buildings or apartments. People are even digging into the ground to make homes.
The more the population of man grows the more it has to be accommodated for.
If the known universe is expanding while at the same time
certain parts are living under a considerable compressed existence then
eventually something will have to give. That compressed space will become
thinner to the point of rupture or decimation. The glowing light from that
galaxy's center spreads something out in the universe in retaliation that will change and cause it
to expand itself inflicting a form of compression on its surroundings.
If it is true, for every action there is an opposite and
equal reaction, the hope still remains. Whether or not the role of wildlife and
the huntress is one of compressed inevitability or there exists a chance the
drama of the huntress slowly pushes back and expands to further the distance of
her cosmological existence is something to meditate on.
Written by: W Harley Bloodworth
Written by: W Harley Bloodworth
