From Awe to Hierarchy?

Shoveling snow for six hours one day and three and a half the next. And Yes. I counted. Every shovelful. Counted and thought about a friend who used to bemoan his fate by fake-complaining about his ‘aching begonias’ while he pranced around on lumber piles and sucked on cigarettes when we were still so cool. And we were almost twenty and I could hoist eighty pound bundles of roof shingles and skedaddle up a ladder while I was flirting and sparring simultaneously with the guys on the job. It’s way more fun to remember how strong I was then than it is to mentally stay here in current time because now, today, this very minute, my real ‘begonias’ are aching. And it stinks. The hours and the shovelfuls and the sore muscles and damn it, the aging of it all, certainly set the stage for feeling small, insignificant (dare I say weak, needy, and unbelievably weepy) and all probably because I’d been behaving like some mad cave woman as the snow fairly leapt off my shovel and landed perfectly on an enormous towering ice bank. Unfortunately, it’s some hours later now and I’ve devolved into that groveling woman who’s not twenty anymore.

It does, however, give rise to a philosophical rant that leads me right to the same flaws in our world I was exploring from the peak of my physical prowess almost thirty-five years ago. What is it about our species that makes us want to be on top? And from this exultant place, instead of wanting to share it, why do we place others way down at the bottom? I mean, if you think about it, it’s pretty whacked that any of us would have the idea that we somehow belong over and above everyone and everything else.

Just walk in the woods or shovel snow for multiple hours and the relative size of us is enough to inspire. And I somehow doubt that when prehistoric mammals -- our ancestors -- experienced awe, they had any intention of locking their descendants into a destructive relational construct (i.e.: set of beliefs) simply by lifting their heads. It’s just too hard to believe that the uncomplicated act of looking up, arching the neck, tipping the scalp, feeling a ponytail brush a shoulder blade (perhaps during an early morning foray with a young one who just couldn’t ‘hold it’ until dawn) could take our species from the knee-buckling, breath-taking gasp at a perfect moon in a still black sky (perhaps enhanced by the cold’s condensation of an exhale) to a hierarchy that informs everything we’ve become.

At some point, somebody (come on. It had to have been a white male.) probably thought that because they had the biggest club, they were that much closer to the moon. As far as I can see, all other humans, animals, and even the planet we live on, have been relegated to somewhere down below. Why couldn’t we have all just stayed where our feet are?

Hierarchy, as a core structure for our social world (our parenting, our written form, our educational systems, our government, etc.) precludes equality. By implication, when one thing is seen as above another, the lower in the construct is seen as less. What if people could foster, nurture and rejoice in alternate shapes and forms?

When my big brother was about five he had a fascination with a rock. He loved to throw it straight up in the air and watch it turn and tumble as it fell. He did this over and over, even when a certain percentage of the time, the rock hit him square on his face.

Does admiring something above our heads have to lead to a desire for power? What might our lives be like if simple awe, was just simply, awe?