"I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment,while I was hoeing in a village garden,
and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn."
Henry David Thoreau
Sorting through decade old notebooks and scraps of paper scattered in my office, like a post-parade confetti shower - my filing system - I repeatedly stumble over notes reflecting on that narrow footbridge that spans the difference and similarity between elephants and humans. It is a space, a chasm, we have no pedestrian word for - and I wonder if that lack of a word, a common utterance, defines the barrier. Scribbled on more than one page I reread that I mulled the impact of no word. And my conclusion then, as now, implicates our fear of sharedness. Acceptance of sharedness requires responsibility for actions on scales large and small, personal and global.
As I have mention in other places, my experience with the orphaned elephants and their keepers changed my photography, perspective and ultimately my life. The further my orbit from those days, weeks and months in Kenya, and the more I explore returning to further the journey, the more understanding relationships play in my fundamental thinking of what roads that journey must travel.
A relationship with one's own life, the world immediately tangential, is one I have returned to over and over the past several months. In someways it feels most like Frost's road "the one less traveled by".
In a keynote I gave recently I talked about my rethinking and expanding of the concept of "Think Globally, Act Locally". I am convinced we need to take a further step to fully embrace sharedness - that is to "Live Personally". Look no further than my own self-world, impact it solely, and with kindness, and the ringlets will radiate out, locally and globally.
Some attribute the original phrase "Think Globally, Act Locally" to Scots town planner and social activist Patrick Geddes. The exact phrase never appeared in Geddes' 1915 book "Cities in Evolution," but the philosophy was clearly evident. The portion of his thinking that resonates for me is that balanced living occurs, "... in active sympathy with the essential and characteristic life of the place concerned." I don't think governments, or communities can have "active sympathy", that is a personal attribute of a living creature, Me, I must bring active sympathy to the world, and that can only be done by living personally.
Living with elephants and keepers the short time I was afforded opened an amazing window into active sympathy by two creatures living personally - the result was a sharedness that over time began to heal the most tragic of wounds.
