Evolution. Makes you think “progress,” doesn’t it. There’s that famous drawing of silhouettes that show “progressive” stages of human development: From a hunched over knuckle-walker through Neanderthal, to Cro-Magnon and modern human. Maybe that last silhouette should have a turned head, one looking back on those “more primitive” forms. As you know, there is a DNA connection between earlier and later primates, just as there are connections among modern primates, from Howler monkeys to chimpanzees to you.
Howler monkeys dwell in the rainforest trees high above the dark ground below. The forest canopy keeps the forest floor shady, preventing light from reaching the ground except in spotty locations. Darkness prevents lush growth below the treetops. Near streams and on hillsides oriented toward the sun, however, more light penetrates and plants become a tangle. Bathed in a little more sunlight, coppices and jungles grow to masses of leaves, stems, and woody stalks impenetrable without a machete. Great apes seem to prefer this lush environment.
Without the tree cover, by contrast, the glade is a bright place of grasses and flowers. Stand up. It’s your bipedal inheritance to look over the low vegetation to check that the environment is safe from creeping predators. You’ve emerged from the forest and coppice. Or have you?
Do you picture yourself as the Glade Runner? That bipedal sophisticated right-side-of-the-silhouette-drawing at the “final” stage of primate evolution, the one that came out of the trees and jungle to emerge into a sunlit life? Life in the glade?
Where are you? In the darkness of the forest floor? The tangled jungle of the coppice? The sunny glade of grasses and flowers? “Depends,” you say.
Yes, “it” does depend on what aspect and phase of life dominates your existence at the moment; you know that at any one time, you can simultaneously experience all three environments mentally and emotionally. You think, “Long ago my ancestors left the forest and coppice to roam the glade. Yet, they really never quite left them, did they? In some way, they carried both environments with them during the so-called progress of evolution.”
Walking through shadows cast on sidewalks by skyscrapers or dwelling and working in the canopy of towering buildings, our species finds itself in a new kind of forest, with dangers lurking in the darkness below. If we emerge to head toward the glade, we pass through the thicket of highways, strip malls, and seemingly endless suburbs, the coppices of the modern world. In farmlands, where we have denuded the landscape, we find the anthropogenic glades. But regardless of the environment in which we find ourselves, we all carry the potential for emotional forests, coppices, and glades.
Remember that old biological principle that befuddled you when you first heard it? The one that goes “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”? Does it not as an analogy capture our relationship with those stages of evolution from forest-dweller to glade runner? But, as all analogies fail, so, too, does this one. Yes, we are glade runners, but we often choose to dwell in dark emotional forests as frightened tree-dwellers or as coppice-dwellers hacking our way through one human problem after another, our emotional machetes becoming dull as we work our way toward the bright sunshine of the glade.
Look at any person’s life to see that recapitulation of the struggle to stay in the glade, where running free from darkness and obstruction makes us glad that regardless of our seeming penchant to return to the dark forest we can, at times, step or even run into the light.
Howler monkeys dwell in the rainforest trees high above the dark ground below. The forest canopy keeps the forest floor shady, preventing light from reaching the ground except in spotty locations. Darkness prevents lush growth below the treetops. Near streams and on hillsides oriented toward the sun, however, more light penetrates and plants become a tangle. Bathed in a little more sunlight, coppices and jungles grow to masses of leaves, stems, and woody stalks impenetrable without a machete. Great apes seem to prefer this lush environment.
Without the tree cover, by contrast, the glade is a bright place of grasses and flowers. Stand up. It’s your bipedal inheritance to look over the low vegetation to check that the environment is safe from creeping predators. You’ve emerged from the forest and coppice. Or have you?
Do you picture yourself as the Glade Runner? That bipedal sophisticated right-side-of-the-silhouette-drawing at the “final” stage of primate evolution, the one that came out of the trees and jungle to emerge into a sunlit life? Life in the glade?
Where are you? In the darkness of the forest floor? The tangled jungle of the coppice? The sunny glade of grasses and flowers? “Depends,” you say.
Yes, “it” does depend on what aspect and phase of life dominates your existence at the moment; you know that at any one time, you can simultaneously experience all three environments mentally and emotionally. You think, “Long ago my ancestors left the forest and coppice to roam the glade. Yet, they really never quite left them, did they? In some way, they carried both environments with them during the so-called progress of evolution.”
Walking through shadows cast on sidewalks by skyscrapers or dwelling and working in the canopy of towering buildings, our species finds itself in a new kind of forest, with dangers lurking in the darkness below. If we emerge to head toward the glade, we pass through the thicket of highways, strip malls, and seemingly endless suburbs, the coppices of the modern world. In farmlands, where we have denuded the landscape, we find the anthropogenic glades. But regardless of the environment in which we find ourselves, we all carry the potential for emotional forests, coppices, and glades.
Remember that old biological principle that befuddled you when you first heard it? The one that goes “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”? Does it not as an analogy capture our relationship with those stages of evolution from forest-dweller to glade runner? But, as all analogies fail, so, too, does this one. Yes, we are glade runners, but we often choose to dwell in dark emotional forests as frightened tree-dwellers or as coppice-dwellers hacking our way through one human problem after another, our emotional machetes becoming dull as we work our way toward the bright sunshine of the glade.
Look at any person’s life to see that recapitulation of the struggle to stay in the glade, where running free from darkness and obstruction makes us glad that regardless of our seeming penchant to return to the dark forest we can, at times, step or even run into the light.
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