May There Be a Gentle Way

The cat had not killed the mouse.

It lay on the bare stone, its body stretched forward. It did not run away. It made no sound.

Almost nothing moved.

Every few seconds it lifted its head for a moment. Its head, too, was stretched far forward, tense. Then it sank back onto the stone. That was how I knew it was still alive.

From then on, there were only seconds.

Nothing about its posture looked like rest to me. Its body lay exposed on the stone, stretched forward. It did not flee or seek cover. After a few seconds, that brief lifting of the head again. Whether it was pain, fear, shortness of breath, or something else, I could not know. To me it looked as though the body was still trying to escape something it could no longer escape.

I do not remember my thoughts in any clear sequence. Only how much there was, all at once, in those few seconds. Could it still recover? Could I save it? Did I have to do something?

If I was going to act, I had to be quick. Every second I took to decide was another second it had to remain in that state.

Its head lifted again.

Briefly.

Then it sank back.

I saw no other movement.

I could not wait until I was certain before acting. After a few seconds I no longer believed I could save its life. I believed only that I could influence how long this state would last.

I put a bag over it. I no longer know exactly why. Perhaps in that moment I needed something between it, me, and what was about to happen.

There was no time for more thought.

Then I struck once.

When I removed the bag again, the body had changed. The mouse was no longer stretched forward but lay on its side, slightly curled inward. Its head was no longer pulled rigidly forward. The tension had left its face. Air escaped. Its fur lay still.

Its head did not lift again.

What shook me so much was this visible difference. A moment before, the body stretched forward, the brief lifting of the head. Then this other posture. On its side, slightly curled inward. The face no longer under the same tension.

What I had perceived seconds earlier as the body’s struggle was over.

I had killed it.

Part of why it affected me so strongly is that I usually try to do exactly the opposite.

If there is a beetle in the house, I do not kill it. Even if it is tiny. I pick it up carefully and take it outside. And for me, “taking it outside” does not mean throwing it somewhere. I set it down outdoors, on the ground, in a place that seems suitable to me.

I may be wrong. I cannot know its world. But I become cautious. It is the same with butterflies. With small insects whose names I do not know. With birds. With mice. Especially when the cat has caught them.

Then it becomes difficult to say that nature will sort it out. Of course a cat hunts. Of course animals hunt other animals. Injury and death existed long before humans began to think about whether something was morally right or wrong.

But when a bird right in front of me is trying to get free from a cat’s teeth, I do not see a food chain.

I see this bird trying to get away.

And I try to save it.

Even when I am digging, it is like this. If a worm appears in the exposed earth, the spade moves a little to the side. A few centimetres, perhaps.

For the garden, those few centimetres mean almost nothing.

For the worm, they can mean everything.

For a long time, I did not think of this as ethics. It was simply something I did.

Something is alive.

So I am careful.

This is exactly where a larger question begins for me.

What changes when our perception no longer centres only on human beings?

Surprisingly little at first. I can keep digging. I can live, eat, use roads, make things, move around. The worm does not ask me to put down the spade.

But as soon as I see it, what I am doing is no longer the only thing there. An animal is living its own life. It moves through this earth independently of what I intend to do with my garden.

Perhaps even the earth itself appears a little different to me then. To me it is something I want to dig in. To the worm it is the place where it lives.

I still want to dig. But I can no longer pretend that what I intend is the only thing that matters in this place.

On a larger scale, that is precisely what is easy to lose sight of.

We need food, homes, work. People want to feed their families, earn money, build something. Companies want to grow, states want economic progress. None of that is difficult to understand.

That is also why I find it too easy to say that people destroy nature simply out of malice or greed. Of course greed exists. But often the reasons are more ordinary.

And yet at some point there is a forest, and we see timber. Land becomes building land. A river becomes a water reserve or a source of energy. Animals become food. An insect is called a pest when it conflicts with our interests, and useful when it does something for us.

Even when we talk about protection, we often speak about what nature does for us: forests store carbon, insects pollinate crops, wetlands protect settlements. All of that is true. But sometimes I wonder whether this does not bring us back to ourselves once again.

The beetle on my hand does not have to do anything for me. Often I do not even know what kind of beetle it is.

It is not there for me.

I put it outside.

Perhaps the centre shifts a little because of that. Not so that human beings suddenly become insignificant. And not so that a worm and a human being have the same significance in every situation.

I still want to dig.

But as soon as I see the worm, my plan no longer stands alone.

For me, there is no such thing as vermin. The word itself turns an animal first and foremost into something that bothers us.

Sometimes I think a great deal is already decided there: in what we see in the first place, before we act.

It is similar with a forest. If it is only a stock of timber, different decisions become possible than if I first see what lives there. Some things begin with the words themselves. They help determine what we are still able to see.

I am a vegetarian.

Not because I think that places me outside these relationships. My life, too, needs land, energy, materials and food. I live somewhere, use roads, consume things, and have impacts that I will probably never notice.

A life without consequences seems impossible to me. But that does not mean that differences become meaningless. If I can avoid one harm, it does not become irrelevant simply because I cannot avoid other harms.

It is the same small movement as with the worm: not leaving the earth untouched altogether, but moving the spade a few centimetres aside when I see it.

Why would I not do that?

That is also why I thought of Japan and Miyazaki.

I notice how quickly I romanticise Japan. As if this other, harmonious world I am looking for had once existed there. Of course that is not true. Forests were cleared there too, ore was mined, animals were killed, landscapes were changed.

Even so, I am interested in ideas in which a forest, a mountain, or a river does not appear merely as something separate from human beings.

What stays with me in Miyazaki’s films is that nature is never merely background. Nor is it simply good. Nor can the people in them be placed neatly on the right or wrong side.

In Princess Mononoke, Lady Eboshi interests me in particular. She gives outcasts a place. She provides work and protection. Her motives are not simply bad.

The forest is no less destroyed for all that.

I find that harder to bear than a story with clearly identifiable culprits.

A family has to be fed. A community wants to survive. People need space, wood, iron.

For me, the difficulty begins earlier: where human reasons are given all the weight as a matter of course and everything else eventually becomes mere material.

Nor does longing for an earlier state solve it. For a place untouched by us. For a time before our entanglement.

Perhaps such a place never existed.

And perhaps that is not really the world I long for either.

I do not want to live in a world in which people touch nothing. I dig the earth. I live in a house. I use roads. I eat. I keep a cat.

I am not standing in front of a pane of glass with nature unfolding behind it.

I am in it.

I long for something else.

For there to be a gentle way.

A way for me to be here and use things without viewing everything only from where I stand.

When it comes to the worm, it is not complicated. I see it, and the spade moves aside. With the beetle, a careful hand is sometimes enough. With the bird, I hope to get there in time.

They are small things. But they begin with my noticing: there is something else living here, independently of me.

You see something, become more careful, and something stays alive.

Then I think of the mouse again.

Of the head stretched forward. Of those few seconds. Of the body afterwards, on its side and slightly curled inward.

With the mouse, there was no longer a spade I could move a few centimetres to the side. No door I could open. No cat from which I could take an animal that was still uninjured.

The harm had already been done.

And I could no longer find anything I could do that would preserve everything I wanted to preserve.

This is what I get stuck on. Not that care would have been wrong. Not even necessarily that I had acted wrongly. But that this time there was nothing left I could do that still truly felt gentle.

And I had no time to think about it for long.

I had seconds.

How do you go on living when no amount of attention and care can prevent something from being lost?

The more closely I look, the more of what is already happening comes into view. What was background before suddenly stands before me in its own right.

With the mouse, at least, I could not hide behind the word nature.

It lay directly in front of me.

Perhaps this is also part of the problem with some broad terms. Area. Stock. Resource. Pest. Nature. They can gather things together until the individual within them can barely be seen.

Then many things become easier to say.

Cats hunt. Worms get injured when we dig. Roads get built. People want economic progress.

Each of these sentences may be true on some level. But something about them is no longer enough for me once I am standing directly in front of it.

I do not know whether attention makes the world better. It does not protect me from arriving too late. And it does not mean that I always understand what another living being needs.

Sometimes there is no longer any way to preserve everything.

I cannot come to terms with that: that even being careful is sometimes not enough.

That sometimes no gentle way remains.

But I do not want that to teach me to look less closely.

Perhaps one day there will again be a worm in the exposed earth.

I will not put down the spade.

But I will see it.

And the movement will change.

Only a few centimetres.

Even so.