The pasture is wet in the hours before dawn as I walk to the top of the hill. One of the roosters calls out and is answered from a distant farm. The sheep, in a field below, bleat once, then are silent. A buck snorts in the nearby woods, like an old man coughing, startling me. The vast sky above signals its usual message of my insignificance.
And I ponder. There is a term that gets bandied about, used with such religious frequency, muttered and chanted by the fervent penitents by which it is invoked. A term with a new usage that, diverging in meaning from the old, becomes in the telling something quite invisible to my rural eye, a new, private standard by which we are judged.
Diversity. The word has such power, such industry, that they now train people to search it out. It even has the whiff of dogma, becoming that which must be believed. It’s a word whose meaning has been narrowed to fit these times of scarcity and extinction — like dodo, whose original meaning was clubbed out of existence — yet it is not apparent to me that these new etymologists look in the right quarters to find or define this elusive state of being.
These poor creatures, my fellow species, deprived of the natural world, have become confused about their place in it. They have set false gods on altars, fashioned in their image, then, roaming the palace of their making, have imagined themselves the only inhabitants. They are the backward fetishists of our times, and they have misplaced their understanding and knowledge of the world with a microscopic focus on themselves. Like the blind man examining an elephant, they postulate a universe of parts from the whole, not realizing that they missed, quite literally, the larger picture.
The religion of Humanity: It focuses on celebrating just one species of many, its followers gathering to sing hymns of the inclusivity of one, preaching of their purchasing options from a global deli. Their message is as pale as that of the Klansman instructing his children in hate. Because, regardless of the tone of the sermon, they share the same outlook as the hate-monger — the celebration of us to the exclusion of the rest of this planet.
I turn and walk from the hill, past the grapevines, through the orchard, and around the gardens, where the wild rabbits condescend to share the produce with us, looking in on the lambs before returning to the house.
