A few days ago, I mentioned worrying about a coyote—not coyotes in general, but individual coyotes and the huge risk we represent to them. Actually, this was both a thought (coyotes in general thrive in spite of us) and a feeling (oof! I hope this coyote doesn’t become so familiar with people that it ends up shot, “sacrificed” to human safety and comfort).

This was Sound Circle’s annual Solstice concert, a celebration of the natural rhythms of the seasons and, by extension, of nature. In any other venue, the title “Requiem for Roadkill” would be sort of a joke, maybe a tongue-in-cheek commentary on local folks’ sensitivity to animal rights. But as I settled into the music and the deeper meaning of the title (the intent of the title piece was genuinely to serve as a requiem for animals killed and left on the road), I was reminded of my coyote. And of a dog that once jumped in front of my car. And of a dead squirrel I dodged on the street yesterday. And, not at all paradoxically, of Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist teacher with whom I once did a weeklong retreat.

So how do we wrap our minds around this idea? We who were mostly raised in a Western mode of thinking that draws lines off separation: she is not he; we are not they; I am not you; your country is not my country; song is not cosmic echoes; grain is not prayer. Now I'm thinking of John Lennon singing, “Imagine there’s no country/ It isn’t hard to do …” What if the problem in our “getting it” about connection is that we can’t imagine it? Literally. We cannot imagine anything other than separation.
Enter Sound Circle. “The only war that matters is the war on the imagination. All other wars are subsumed in it.” So says “Rant,” another piece on the program.* This poem/song/performance had me totally engrossed. Imagine this: what if the only impediment to our “getting it” about being connected is the failure of imagination, the war we fight against our own imagination. What if this failure to imagine is what allows us to engage in wars, see coyotes as pests, destroy the environment in the name of profit, deny teen girls access to emergency contraception. I don’t mean only that we fail to imagine solutions. I mean we fail to imagine anything other than separation. We fail to imagine that we somehow are the coyote, the squirrel, the other nation, the pregnant teen, the hum of the universe. The problem is that we’re not heeding John Lennon. We’re not even imagining there’s no country, easy though it may be.

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