An Into the Wilderness blog: Story 54
Surviving Facts blog
The nights are already turning crisp in New Jersey. Last night, as I sat on my sister’s back porch watching the waning full moon, I grabbed blankets to wrap tightly around my shoulders and legs. I have just moved to my sister’s house while our home is on the market. I hadn’t thought to bring a sweater or coat.
We had arrived at my sister’s house, Clampitt-style, ten days earlier. Our SUV “wagon” was loaded with 2 cats, 3 dogs and many more plants. Our home had been freshly painted, cleaned and prepped for the market. I had packed more than sixty boxes of household items, including our coats, now stacked in plastic storage boxes floor to ceiling in our garage. Getting to any coats wasn’t going to be easy.
Our arrival day was sticky hot. Sweat dripped between our shoulders blades as we unloaded. The almost 90-degree heat with high humidity absorbs human energy. We had become sweaty lumps icing ourselves beneath ceiling fans.
But now, fall creeps tentatively across the landscape. Over my first week, I had noticed the trees in the wetlands behind the house turning from green to yellow. The squirrels were busier too, eating peanuts thrown into the yard. They shove 2 peanut shells into their spacious cheeks and then nibble the third on the spot. They bite off the top, unzipping the shells to access the meat. They crowd my sister’s deck, begging like dogs.
So do the deer. Female and male deer live separately, except in mating season. Now, the mamas bring their growing babies and huff for carrots and apples, poured into aluminum buckets with Purina Deer Chow and oats. The babies try to nurse, but the mamas kick them away with their back feet. With the chill coming at night, the babies need to learn how to survive winter. Mamas show them: Eat and then rest in the wilting wetlands ferns.
At my sister’s house, fall is a Snow-White vision. I am closer to nature than I’ve ever been before, a synchronicity of being-ness with needs and wants. The deer never ask for too much, though they may come more frequently, their eyes questioning the possibility. The squirrels plan for winter, burying extras in the yard.
Watching nature so closely reminds me that we are an ecosystem. We humans share the land with animals expecting much less than our rapacious needs. The animals eat and rest and move on. The cycle of nature guides their living.
I used to work long days and travel sometimes 150,000 miles a year. It felt so important at the time, as if over-working and racking up airline miles mattered. I see the charade now. The false economy of corporate executives creates meaning out of material items. The ego boosts because this seems important in this separate and self-absorbed world.
I always knew this was a pretend world, built from deft marketing and pretend needs. No one needs airline miles. No one needs to work 70 hours a week. The pretense is around importance. If we work so hard and travel so much, it must be important. Right?
Not really.
The economy built from this “need” is tenuous at best. But I am torn- even today- about the necessity of human interaction in a global corporate environment. Nothing replaces face-to-face interaction for relationship building, permission to challenge and growth mindset. Many cultures outside the U.S., especially Asian cultures, prize respect of authority over challenge. Without real relationships, employees in some cultures can become “yes” people with unspoken resentment growing in their minds.
The travel economy in a global world is necessary. Corporations have created the chase. Employees leave their families for days, sometimes weeks at a time. In companies with employee respect, they understand the sacrifice and provide travel accommodations to ease the journeys. Corporate cost cutting, however, has led to expense nitpicking, prioritizing bottom line over business success. This leads to employees needing to travel chasing the miles. This may seem a contradictory statement, but I’ve seen again and again excessive executive expenses while day-to-day support work is shaved off, a thousand shavings to nothing. When teams don’t coalesce and meet their goals, management complains. But they have created the situation.
The difference between nature’s needs and corporate environment couldn’t be more stark. Compare the imaginary Snow White befriending animals as equal beings compared to the inequality, false economy and out-of-touch expectations of today’s corporate executives. I am grateful to focus now on the needs of deer and squirrels rather than fighting for the needs to succeed at business. Animals are a lot easier to satisfy than the unrelenting hunger of corporate executive wealth. Will corporations ever learn? I’d love to know. I haven’t seen any evidence they can. If you’ve seen otherwise, let me know.
Meanwhile, I’ll study deer and squirrels economy with appreciation for nature’s understanding of needs.
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