The parable of the box

Sitting on the salmon box

The parable of the box by Derrick Jensen....

" The box is full of salmon, and a man sits atop of this box. Long ago man hired armed gaurds to keep any one from eating his fish. The many people who sit next to the empty river starve to death. But they do not die of starvation. They die of beleif. Everyone beleivesthat the man atop the box owns the fish. The soldiers beleive it, and they will kill to protect the illusion. The others beleive it enough and they are willing to starve. But the truth is that there is a box, there is an emptied river, there is a man sitting atop the box, there are guns, and there are starveing people."

Low synergy cultures or "aggressive cultures reward actions that empahisise personal gain, even when and especialy when that gain harms others in the community."
"Nonagressive cultures eliminate the polarity between selfishness and alturism by makeing the two identical: In a "good" culture, the man atop the box from the parable above would have been scorned, despised, exiled, or other wise prevented from damageing the community. To behave in such a selfish and destructive manner would be considered insane. Even had he concieved such a perposturous idea as hording all of the fish, he would have been absolutely disallowed because the box was held at the exspense of the majority, as weell as at the exspense of future generations. For him to be a rich and influential member of a "good" ( high synergy culture) culture, he would have had to give away as many or all of the fish. the act of giving would have made him rich in esteem. But he never would have been allowed to strip the river. There would have ben no fear with the regard to the "gift" of fish, for social arrangements would have made him securein his knowledge that if his next fishing trip failed his more succsessful neighbors would feed him just as this time he had fed them." Derrick Jensen A Langauage Older than Words...

This has stuck me so many times as to be the natural ethic that can emerge from a people that view the world as alive, as full of persons instead of objects.

For those of us that have choosen or felt the call to be animist people or for those fo us that have felt the call to take eon the role of shaman, we know that so much work needs to be done! We can no longer allow or encourage people to sit upon the box. Whether the box is filled by food, knowledge, or any other human or other than human need, we can no longer support this unsustainable system.
Bioregional Animism aserts that we are our bioregion, we are an expression of our bioregion mind, body and spirit, an exstension of our bioregion, like the fingers of a hand. The wisdom and knowledge we gain through this awarness any thing we have cannot be owned or viewed as our own but instead it is viewed as another liveing exstention of the
bioregion itself, of the earth, sky and of the entire cosmos. We can no longer keep anything in the box and still call our selves animists or shamans or earth loving people.

All must be free.

The Eagle and Salmon viewed here are local members of my bioregion. The photo was taken on the Squamish river, by who I have no idea but I thank them, and I thank Eagle and Salmon for simply being...