I don't get his attitude either.
Think about it this way. It was written that all flesh is grass. Can we imagine this piece of earth as flesh?
A man can picture a woman. Picture a woman who is beautiful, not with the chimerical perfection of the physical models, but who is healthy, joyous, confident and fertile, who has matured physically, sexually, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Imagine that within the mystery and complexity of her, there is understanding and trust between you, that you can see her in candor, unadorned by nothing more than what she is. Imagine that all of your life and activity is bound up in fidelity to this woman, and that fidelity?s works are its reward. Some of you might have such a relationship with such a woman, most of you will have to strain your imaginations.
Imagine her raped. Confidence and joy pass away.
Imagine her now, by force a prostitute. Her sexuality divorced from fertility, intimacy, or fidelity, she gives token for token in a diseased shadow of sacred acts. Imagine she herself is diseased in body and spirit.
Imagine her wasted away. Bony and ragged, haggard and filthy and sick. Unable now even to satisfy the most depraved and desperate of her customers.
Now imagine her naked, not in the purity of trust, but in death. Lying face up and decomposing, all her features vanishing under the swarm and scurry of the beetles and maggots until only the bones are left. And even when the bones start to break apart and fall away, the swarm grows and grows, feasting on air...
I have seen her in the ground and grass of my home, and have seen that the rapists, pimps, buyers and maggots are men. What is to become then of my love for her? And how can I reconcile the thing that has been done with my love for they who did it?
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Trying to write about cave conservation has been a small part of my attempts to understand and write about the places I live in and care about. Anyone honest who has taken any sort of serious look at the problems of land use will admit to a certain degree of helplessness and will have experienced sorrow. I have seen her in the ground and grass of my home, but I am powerless to act in the face of enormous forces that have escaped voluntary containment by humankind, much less individual humans. Being powerless to protect something you love can understandably lead to overprotectiveness wherever there is a hint of hope. If, in using virgin caves as an analog for the virgin land, I have been so, I cannot apologize.
One of the several problems in trying to communicate on this topic is that the majority are unaware or unconvinced or even unwilling to consider the possibility that a great loss has occurred and is doing still. This applies to most readers of this site, who have never seen virgin land, most of whom have never seen a virgin cave, and who live in an age of unprecedented adultery.
Another problem is that we have become so downright lazy mentally that any unfamiliar or compound thought is labelled philosophy. I would rather be called a troll than a philosopher. I'm a simple person asking simple questions. If the
answers are hard, admit it, I do, but don't excuse yourself from thought by dismissing the questions as half-baked intellectualism.
Mostly it is simply too late, and the results of discussing conservation here were inevitable, though I didn't know that when I started. I write because it helps me to think, to clarify my feelings and opinions. Often it is not until I write about a topic that I know exactly what my beliefs are. This site is not my motivation for writing about caves, to which fact the roughly five thousand unpublished pages in my cabinet are witness. But if I feel that something I've written could be shared here to the mutual benefit of the reader and myself (for I am often corrected or led into new and interesting thoughts, and I have received enough private correspondence to believe that I've been more than an annoyance to a few), I will continue to post it here.