Catherine Greenfield-- Stay, Foul Beastie!-- In refernce to The Practice of the Wild

"We can accept each other as barefoot equals sleeping on the same ground. We can give up hoping to be eternal and quit fighting dirt. We can chase off mosquitoes and fence out varmints without hating them." -p.26, The Practice of the Wild --Snyder

In my culture, it is not completely unheard of to accept my cat as my equal, or my dog, or my horse, or my pet duck or even fish. But a mosquito as my equal? How the rubber-souled hordes laugh at such a concept! A rat? A cockroach? Ha! Those are the sorts of creatures we banish with our poisons and neck-snapping, skin-melting, fur-burning traps. It is against these tiny tyrants, whose mere existence may very well threaten our entire lives (what with the way we attack them, soldiers at arms, with our dust buster machine guns and miracle foam bombs), that we fight with such exhuberence. We vaccuum up these tiny-footed "pests" with the same machenes we use to suck away the decomposed bits of nature, the brown phleghm of the wild, that we track in on our running shoes and flip-flops. We seperate outselves as far as possible from everthing that sustains itself with the blood and flesh of the still-living (as if we, orselves, do not): mosquitoes, horseflies, worms, mold. We run in fear from anything with more than a man-made prerequisite number of legs. Although we are all a part of this giant, rotating rock, coated liberally in the various stages of life and death, we cannot stop ourselves from feeling removed. As we hurtle through endless space, we feel apart, somehow. Do we forget how much a part we are, because we feel we are above those who tread in the dust? Do we not remember that that selfsame dust comes from our slowly decomposing arms and legs, which shed, like snakes, our own living exterior every second of every day? Do we not remember that, in ways both figurative and literal, the dirt is as much made of decomposed human flesh as it is the creatures we despise? Or would we, in our haughty attempt at ignorance, simply rather not remember?