#Don't Take God's Children for Wild Geese

[andrzejklimowski]

Faut pas prendre les enfants du bon Dieu pour des canards sauvages / Don't Take God's Children for Wild Geese! (1968) dir. Michel Audiard

Hungarian poster

[strongermonster]

dealing with children right now is like a shitpost fever dream.

we walked them down to a big park today to do a little nature walk, maybe spend some time on the playground, a nice easy day out.

well we passed the one section of the park that has a skate park in it, and for some reason some teens had dragged a random toilet to the very edge of the (tiny) halfpipe, and were taking turns skating and doing weird tricks to try and make it fall without actually touching it? or maybe do the most stuff without making it fall? idk, i was not privy to the rules of Toilet Skate Trust Fall or whatever the fuck. seemed fun though.

anyways, all the little kids see a toilet out in the wild and immediately start screeching skibidi over and over like a hivemind, and line up along the chain-link fence like something out of a zombie movie, and will not be pried away from watching this if their lives depended on it.

the older handlers with me are doing the ">:/ my god, teens these days! ruffians! hooligans! i am calling the city forthwith to report these dastardly commode criminals!"

there's nothing else for me to do + i don't care about ratting these teens out, so i stand and watch too. they finally manage to dislodge the toilet, but it falls backwards the wrong way off the edge/out of our view, so i say "damn, they sent that stinker to the eeby deeby" which was a HIT with these kids, so they spent the rest of the time wandering around the park going "skibidi eeby deeby!"

when we got back, the older ladies were all up in arms about how strange and incomprehensible the whole thing was and how unruly the kids were, so i was trying to describe/explain it bc it really was just mostly funny, but the whole thing is so ??? and i would have to explain the memes, and it wasn't worth the effort, so i left them to moan about ~the state of the children these days!!~

anyways 10/10 day, we got to see geese chase after some food delivery guy on a bike

[ratphilosophy]

Reading this with the CJtheX book club.

Chunk one includes the below writings, and here are my partially digested thoughts on each essay in this chunk.

Skywoman falling

"they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like?"

I don't blame her for approaching the creation narrative in Genesis with this take, but it doesn't sound at all like Eve was banished just for tasting the fruit. The biblical scholars from whom I have learned have always maintained that this was the only fruit she couldn't have, and that she was tricked into it, and that not trusting God and his word was the sin. But Eve had been placed in the garden not just to be banished, but originally to be a gardener herself.

And then when she was later an exile, it didn't seem like it wasn't still gardening that she was supposed to do - it was just now a more unpleasant gardening.

This all reminds me of the Make Gifts for People advice that John Green gave in his one video a while ago.

I saw a video that then pushed me to a Ted talk about how we all can learn from indigenous people, but the speaker also said that being indigenous was not the thing that the descendants of colonizers should aim for. And I was confused by that, but accepted it as a consequence for the sins of those who came before me and whose actions I now benefit from, at a cost to others' ancestors.

For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children's future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it.

So when Kimmerer says this, I'm sort of lost. As a descendent of colonizers (or at least of white people who were favored after the Initial Colonizing),I don't really know what I'm supposed to do.

The council of pecans

Love the idea of mast fruiting. Interesting science there. I don't have much more thought on that particular essay though.

The gift of strawberries

For the plant to be sacred, it cannot be sold.

The connection between a gift and something sacred is category expanding for me. Will have to dig into why.

Hm. Ok. I recently received some birthday money in a card. I hate cards, and don't know how to handle them, because they are usually a decent paper and are sometimes quite pretty,but they have generic poems in them and I don't really want to keep a box of generic poem papers around just because they were once gifts. So when the money came and the cards came (and I had a shit birthday, but that wasn't important) I just grabbed the cash and recycled the cards, as has become my typical response to unwanted paper. And that felt shitty, but I didn't really know why. And I wanted to respond to my gift givers, but I didn't (and still don't) know how. This validated that conviction I had that it was shitty, and has me resolved to go call my grandparents.

The idea of a gift economy sounds like heaven. It feels like the early church's impromptu socialism, and like when I get to give lots of candy to kids on Halloween. It makes me sad that we don't practice it.

The Lewis Hyde quote about gift economies, where he notes that it is more in harmony with how nature itself behaves, it snagged my attention for a bit.

I struggle to understand how geese are offering their lives as a gift to us when they are shot down and hunted. It totally makes sense that she calls it a theft of the life of a chicken in a factory farmed cage, but is it not theft of life to kill and eat a wild goose? (Not a vegan out of lack of energy, but I totally understand how those with the executive function to be vegans would come to that conclusion. I can console myself that at least I don't eat a ton of meat myself, but it's not like that absolves me by any stretch.)

Much philosophy out there makes me think of what kind of World we have. This book has me thinking about what kind of World we should have cultivated, and has me more convicted than anything else, more aware of the need for justice and restoration. In light of this, it's hard to feel satisfied by any worldview that doesn't bring what we've done to our world back into line.

The commodity economy has been here on Turtle Island for four hundred years, eating up the white strawberries and everything else. But people have grown weary of the sour taste in their mouths.

An offering

The coffee feels like a tithe

The concept of ceremony bringing our attention to a part of reality is part of what has me still attending the Anglican church, even now, as I'm not certain whether I really believe in Christianity or if I just received it from our culture and assimilated to try to fit in. I could have forgone church entirely, but I was too frightened to totally do that, and anyway there's something about the ritual that feels Real in a way that the goddamn non-denominational church's worship didn't.

What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself?

Asters and Goldenrod

I feel a parallel, in my autism and how I felt as a teen, to her experience of having her love of plants and desire for botanical knowledge get crushed because she didn't know the right words to communicate what she knew deeply. Something about that story and her emotion calls me back to wanting to study psychology because I care about people (when really I was lonely and wanted to understand them so I could not be lonely anymore. Also, special interest) and being told that wasn't a viable career option. Ugh.

Science as a way of knowing is too narrow for the task... I should have been told that my questions were bigger than science could touch.

I feel like this essay speaks to my thirst for understanding and concrete foundational truths about religion and worldview. Science is too narrow for it, but also I needed a time of testing what science (or I suppose, skeptical philosophy) is capable of doing for us in the area of worldview, and it has also been a great new environment in which to be absorbed.

I received some Goldenrod in my garden last year just by random chance. This has me wanting to put asters in as well, replacing the invasive honeysuckle bush that threatens to overgrow every few months.

Learning the grammar of animacy

The idea of scientists naming things has always brought my mind back to the Eden narrative, where Adam is assigned the task of naming the animals. Naming and gardening were the two things we were asked to do. It makes sense that science and art would be so captivating to us.

What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed.

The boarding schools thing has me, a very left human, feeling like we need less government so they can never do something like that again. (But I know that's an emotional reaction - not really a solid national plan.)

I envy her ability to teach herself a language so important to her.

Fuckin love that Yawe means "to be" and sounds like Yahweh - "I am".

[superkalafragilisticiexpectitall]

A Wonderful story: THE MAN CALLED JESUS

There was once a man who didn't believe in God, and he didn't hesitate to let others know how he felt about religion and religious holidays, like Christmas. His wife, however, did believe, and she raised their children to also have faith in God and Jesus, despite his disparaging comments.

One snowy Christmas Eve, his wife was taking their children to a Christmas Eve service in the farm community in which they lived. She asked him to come, but he refused. "That story is nonsense!" he said. "Why would God lower Himself to come to Earth as a man? That's ridiculous!" So she and the children left, and he stayed home.

A while later, the winds grew stronger and the snow turned into a blizzard. As the man looked out the window, all he saw was a blinding snowstorm. He sat down to relax before the fire for the evening. Then he heard a loud thump. Something had hit the window. Then another thump. He looked out, but couldn't see more than a few feet.

When the snow let up a little, he ventured outside to see what could have been beating on his window. In the field near his house he saw a flock of wild geese. Apparently they had been flying south for the winter when they got caught in the snowstorm and could not go on. They were lost and stranded on his farm, with no food or shelter. They just flapped their wings and flew around the field in low circles, blindly and aimlessly. A couple of them had flown into his window, it seemed.

The man felt sorry for the geese and wanted to help them. The barn would be a great place for them to stay, he thought. It is warm and safe; surely they could spend the night and wait out the storm. So he walked over to the barn and opened the doors wide, then watched and waited, hoping they would notice the open barn and go inside. But the geese just fluttered around aimlessly and did not seem to notice the barn or realize what it could mean for them.

The man tried to get their attention, but that just seemed to scare them and they moved further away. He went into the house and came back out with some bread, broke it up, and made a breadcrumbs trail leading to the barn. They still didn't catch on. Now he was getting frustrated. He got behind them and tried to shoo them toward the barn, but they only got more scared and scattered in every direction except toward the barn. Nothing he did could get them to go into the barn where they would be warm and safe.

"Why don't they follow me?!" he exclaimed. "Can't they see this is the only place where they can survive the storm?" He thought for a moment and realized that they just wouldn't follow a human. "If only I were a goose, then I could save them," he said out loud. Then he had an idea. He went into barn, got one of his own geese, and carried it in his arms as he circled around behind the flock of wild geese. He then released it. His goose flew through the flock and straight into the barn -- and one by one the other geese followed it to safety.

He stood silently for a moment as the words he had spoken a few minutes earlier replayed in his mind: "If only I were a goose, then I could save them!" Then he thought about what he had said to his wife earlier. "Why would God want to be like us? That's ridiculous!" Suddenly it all made sense. That is what God had done. We were like the geese -- blind, lost, perishing. God had His Son become like us so He could show us the way and save us. That was the meaning of Christmas, he realized. As the winds and blinding snow died down, his soul became quiet and pondered this wonderful thought. Suddenly he understood what Christmas was all about, why Christ had come. Years of doubt and disbelief vanished like the passing storm. He fell to his knees in the snow, and prayed his first prayer:

"Thank You Jesus for coming in human form to show me the way out of the storm!"

Author unknown