Providence (18 page)

         
As I pointed out
in
Ishmael,
we Takers are a desperately lost and needy people. It was this neediness, I think, that first made us yearn to be loved by God (an idea completely foreign to the animist mentality) and that made us dream of eternities of bliss after lifetimes of emptiness. If anything, our sense of neediness has grown even more overwhelming in recent decades. In addition to needing to be loved by God and to save our souls, we nowadays need to deepen our spiritual awareness, to raise our consciousness, to wield supernatural powers, to bend spoons with our minds, to grow our brains, to enhance our performance, to draw on the right side, to believe in the value of our creativity, to become more cosmic, to learn to fly, to investigate past lives, to have out-of-body
experiences, to achieve lucid dreaming, to learn healing massage, to amplify our archetypes, to make our fantasies concrete, to explore our myths, to get rid of toxic introjects, to find our personal sacred site, to heal our inner child, to improve our experiential focusing, to be rebirthed, to take part in intrapsychic activities, to have a primal, to engage in cognitive restructuring, to indulge in cosmic play, to tune in to the godhead, to spend time on the astral plane, to have an intuition workout, to enhance our ch’i, to contact our spirit guide, to tap into the hypnagogic state, to increase our thanatological awareness, to have a soul reading, to visit a sacred energy vortex—and this hardly scratches the surface. Don’t think I’m making fun of these things just because I put them into a list; to the people who engage in them, these are all as real and important as achieving nirvana or saving one’s soul.

The neediness of the Takers is so immense that many people imagine that this neediness is
itself
the problem that is threatening the world. I’ve actually had heated arguments with people who insist that one or another or some combination of the above is all that is needed to save the world or that saving the world can only be accomplished by one or another or some combination of the above or that one or another or some combination of the above is an absolutely essential prerequisite to saving the world.

The sun is at the horizon. It’s time for us to finish.

If nothing else, I hope you’ll carry this idea away with
you: Attend to your needs, but don’t confuse attending to your needs with saving the world.

There was a time when I thought I could say to people: “Forget yourselves for a while, because the world is in dire need of your attention. For a while stop looking for ways to enhance your inner life and start looking instead for ways to ensure that—twenty years from now, fifty years from now—our children and grandchildren will have a decent world to grow up in.” I’ll still say it, but now I say it knowing that this is too much to ask of most people.

It doesn’t matter, I’ll ask it of a few.

I hope the things I’ve given you here will enrich you as a person, but I hope you see that I haven’t given them to you solely for your personal enrichment.

Following the deer into the forest was an immensely enriching experience for me, but I wasn’t called to it so that I could be enriched. The beetle didn’t say, “What you need is there.” What the beetle said was: “You’re needed there.”

You, too, are needed there. I mean you who broke into my house in the middle of the night to talk to me. But I also mean you who hear these words. I mean you who will someday read these words. On this I don’t hesitate to ask you to believe.

Believe me, you’re needed there.

———

The secret they wanted to impart to me was not a secret until we made it one. It was known to the first of our kind to tread the face of the earth. It was known to every generation thereafter and never doubted, until we began to doubt it, some ten thousand years ago.

We’re not strangers in a strange land here. This is the secret I learned. We’re not aliens, not outsiders. We were born in the sea, three billion years ago. The deer and the beetle are our kin.

We’re not invaders from space. No one gave us this planet to take care of or to use as we please. We grew out of the community of life the same way shellfish did, the same way mosquitos did.

The world doesn’t belong to us, we belong to it. Always have, always will.

We belong to the world. We belong to the community of life on this planet—it doesn’t belong to us. We got confused about that, now it’s time to set the record straight.

We belong to the world, and this is why we’re needed. No species can set itself apart from all the rest or make itself the ruler of all the rest. That won’t work. All must belong.

That’s what we’ve got to work on. We’ve got to find our way back into the community. We’ve got to stop living like outlaws. When we begin to do that—when we begin to acknowledge that the world needs us and that we belong to it, not it to us—I think our feelings of desperate
loneliness and neediness will begin to evaporate, all by themselves.

I think maybe needy people are just people who don’t feel needed.

Well, I say to you: Feel needed.

Feel needed, because you are.

     
K
INDLER AND
R
EKINDLER
     

of universes, the fire burns forever. It is the flame of life that courses through all generations from first to last, that burns without consuming, that is itself consumed and renewed inexhaustibly, life after life, generation after generation, species after species, galaxy after galaxy, universe after universe, each sharing in the blaze for its season and going down to death while the fire burns on undiminished. The fire is life itself, the life of this universe, of this galaxy, of this planet, of this place and every place: the place by the rock and the place under the hill and the place by the river and the place in the forest, no two alike anywhere. And the life of every place is god, who is the fire: the life of the pond, god; the life of the tundra, god; the life of the sea, god; the life of the land, god; the life of the earth, god; the life of the universe, god: in every place unique, as the life of every place is unique, and in every place the same, as the fire that burns is everywhere

      
THE FIRE OF LIFE.