While walking down the street the other day, I totally had a revelation; above I mentioned that the Earth doesn’t have a vagina anywhere that I’ve seen. I totally misspoke.
Actually, I’ve run into many of them, usually marked out by local Native tradition, crevasses, caves, certain valleys. I’ve also visited “male earths”, places that local indigenous folks see as penises, in a mythic sense: boulders, mountains, deserts.
So, apparently, my Earth relates in many ways too. 
OR you could see a mountain as a giant dreaming lizard, and a cave as the eye of a monstrous beast. Just saying.
I don’t understand. Could you tell me more what you mean?
[EDIT: I ask because I don’t fully understand the “OR”, if that helps any. ]
I didn’t mean “you” specifically, Willem, merely that a person or people can see those things a different way, and I wanted to emphasize that alternative.
You know, I already feel like my voice is totally DROWNED OUT in civ by people who, to me, seem totally obsessed and preoccupied by sex/sexual anatomy and prioritize it over things that I think are much more important and I HATE HATE HATE it when people expect me to participate in that culture.
I don’t understand it sometimes. I just do not. I feel like I have to be on guard all the time or I get ambushed out of nowhere. A couple of months ago I went to the farmer’s market and bought some baby spinach. It was so delicious. I love spinach and it was probably the best spinach I have ever tasted. I was seriously overjoyed with it. I decided not to wait to eat it, and I snacked on the leaves as I walked home. I am rarely in such a happy mood in the city so I walked slowly and decided to enjoy every moment of my spinach and my walk. Halfway home I heard a voice say “hi!” I turned around and saw that it came from the driver of a car that was inching down the street in rush hour traffic. I said in return, “hi!” wondering if maybe I knew him from somewhere. Customer at work maybe? (I’ve run into them in all sorts of places.) He said, “How’s it going?” and I said in all honesty, still caught up in my spinach and the beautiful weather, “Great! How about you?” He said, “good,” I said, “that’s good” and waved bye and walked on (by this time I was pretty sure I had not seen him before and I thought it was a little odd that he would just start up a conversation with a stranger, but I thought, that’s OK if he’s a little odd, I am myself, and I’ll never see him again). Well, I rounded the corner and after I had gotten about a block down the street his car came up and he and his friend propositioned me.
I don’t get it. How was I supposed to respond when he said hi? (“No”?) So what if I feel like having a brief exchange of friendly words? There was nothing suggestive about the way I was dressed either. Am I supposed to ignore everybody who says hello to me, just to avoid people like that? I let my guard down for four blocks and it’s like they can smell it. I think modern cities are HORRIBLE places to be in public.
Oh, another thing I don’t understand is that if I don’t want to express my sexuality around my co-workers, at work, in public (not in, say… the bedroom), then I must be some sort of Midwestern weirdo who needs liberation. (From what?! My chosen personal boundaries?!?)
I hate it when the mass media sexualizes objects, sexualizes everything. It contributes to the problem. How many times does the “you will never think of ‘X’ the same way again” joke repeat itself in the movie American Pie?
So maybe you can understand how valleys being vaginas and boulders being penises, according to indigenous tradition, put me in a reactionary state of mind. I am not interested in looking outside of my own body for something that is already there. Vaginas are not pies. Nor are they canyons. And if the Earth has a sex it is something completely different from XX or XY.
Ouch! What a creepy experience, Rebecca!
I totally agree that our culture’s got some pretty twisted ideas about sexuality, and that our social structures around it don’t really meet anyone’s needs very well. Thus, we sometimes haves creeps asking strangers for sex on the street, or otherwise making each other feel uncomfortable and/or unsafe.
Flying in the face of the abundance of non-life-affirming sexualization, I think recognizing aspects of ourselves in the bigger features of our world recognizes and honors the beauty of what we’ve got. A valley or canyon may not be a vagina, but you can’t deny the similarity of its function as a vessel, a holder, an open receiving place, just as vulva, vagina, womb function in a human woman. Where does water want to go in the landscape? To the lowest places, enclosed and enfolded by earth and rock, who welcome and hold it until the water moves on.
Similarly, certain landscape features make gestures outward and upward, a la the male human anatomy, not just in the sexual act but as an expression of its placement on the body, not hidden inside but reaching out. I used to live in Boulder, CO, where you can clearly see “the devi’ls thumb” in the skyline of the foothills of the Rockies, or picture Rooster Rock in the Columbia gorge here in Cascadia.
Thanks for telling the story of how you’ve come to feel the way you do about all this. What a ride, reading that!
As for those assholes in the car… Too bad you didn’t have a water balloon full of vinegar to toss at 'em, or some such. >:(
Taker scum!
Willem,
Do you mean places like these:
There is a rock in a cave in the Black Hills that looks exactly like a strip of bacon.
So now it is clear: the earth is one gigantic intersex pig, with a belly situated roughly around South Dakota.
So now it is clear: the earth is one gigantic intersex pig, with a belly situated roughly around South Dakota.
I always suspected…
Mmmm… Bacon.
the other day on NPR there was a story about some new studies basically supporting the Pleistocene Overkill hypothesis, at least as far as Tasmania/Australia goes, because of the overlap in time of arrival by humans and extinction of certain species, without the climate change that some would blame. I’ve always been suspicious of the PO hypothesis, but after the report, I started thinking about it, and I don’t think that it’s THAT unlikely. To me it seems it COULD be just like any other situation where a new top predator is introduced into a system. maybe it takes awhile for the top predator to figure out how to live balanced in the new system. maybe certain aspects of the system were just too fragile to handle ANY new predation.
Thoughts?
I think that humans, introduced into a new environment, have the potential to disrupt the ecosystem’s balance just like any other animal or plant, and they probably will do so until they learn a new “law of the land”. Something like the Pleistocene Overkill doesn’t “prove” that it’s human nature to dominate nature, any more than it’s proof that mongooses or buck-thorn have an intrinsic will to take over.
This makes sense, BluleHeron… Terrestrial ecosystems have generally evolved for dealing with a top predator. This top-down regulation needs a top predator to maintain balance. This perhaps is the case since humans spread all over the planet. However the giant Pleistocene mammals had a bottom-up regulation. Sheer size kept them from predation, so they balanced their own population without a top predator. When one showed up it was bad news.
Hi everyone! (I haven’t yet introduced myself to this BB - will do so right away!)
I just wanted to add that I think it can be helpful to think of a food “web” rather than a “chain”, where any “top predators” are themselves limited by other parts of the web. I’m thinking of the obvious example of the limiting factor of the abundance/scarcity of the predators’ prey species, but I’m sure there are many complex interactions in probably every case.
I agree that recognizing the effect of humans on the landscape as the same as that of other predator species, is a VERY different thing than asserting that humans have an innate drive to hyperexploit the world (and therefore wipe out species left and right). Equating these two things is totally illogical IMO, and besides, the actual evidence ONLY proves the former, and actually disproves the latter (due to the debunking of the N American Pleisticene (sp?) overkill hypothesis).