Whenever I get too caught up in the trivial pursuits of being human, as if our political machinations are sucking up all the air in the room, I remember Pablo Neruda’s lead into a great poem, “I have grown tired of being a Man”, and Walt Whitman’s lovely lines:
I THINK I could turn and live with animals,
they are so placid and self-contain’d;
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;
Not one is dissatisfied—not one is demented with the mania of owning things;
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago;
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.”
-Brother Coyote
