BOVINE DREAMS OF THE VALLEY OF FLOWERS
A rough draft inspired by a series of true stories.
Recently hearing the “bellowing of 1000 cows” took me back a couple of decades to the haunting January vision of half a dozen cows, piled up in the back of a slaughterhouse, waiting to be dumped in a truck to be hauled away to some unknowable ultimate disposal site where whatever value remained in the wasted pile of carcasses could be extracted. This solidified mound of flesh and bone consisted of the assorted mothers frozen solid in a number of contorted positions, most of them had their glazed eyes wide open, twenty legs or more splayed out in various directions, udders were distorted and swollen with frozen milk, large dull pink tongues drooped out of their mouths with frozen saliva sickles hanging from them, and dirt and manure caked their black and white furs. It seemed like such a waste of such beautiful creatures to raise them, kill them, and then dump them in a random pile where they waited to rot. This memory, prompted me to try and understand how we are able to create this sacrilegious construct of a mound of dead culled cows. What follows is my findings.
Back in the days – before men became cowboys, the She-Aurochs grew great horns, and were never bested by senseless bulls. They inspired sacred remembrances of masterpieces painted on cave walls of the first human cathedrals. Back then there were no confinements, no barb-wires, no brandings, no taking away of the calves, no forced lactation, no castrations, no dehorning, no concentration camps, no milking machines – before the so called “sapient” humans imposed these nightmares on the fellow inhabitants of the places of being. The mountains bowed down to the great creatures, and the Valleys were not the name sakes of halls of slaughter, but the gardens of flowers, and grasses beyond imagination. Trees diverted the wind and provided sun shelters for the beasts to gather together, lay down, and chew the cud of the most delicious of herbs. This was the ruminant ungulates paradise.
Some of those who used to praise the great beasts, became infected with dis-ease. They grew tired of sacred rituals that kept them in balance with the All. Praising the beasts and the valleys turned to cursing, and thanking those who might have given their life to provide a feast for a tribe became the profane greed for a few. They began to abuse their unchecked power of imagination. Their resulting tool making abilities allowed them to make spears much longer than the horns of the great Aurochs, allowing them to slaughter the beasts almost indiscriminately. They soon learned that despite their appearances, the community centered Aurochs could be controlled, herded, and ultimately domesticated and transformed, to serve the wants of the dominators. Those who controlled the Aurochs controlled the power, and the power twisted the dis-eased into the psychopaths who started domesticating even their own offspring.
It didn’t take long and the old days were forgotten, erased from memory. The caves with the painted walls were abandoned, and killing, destruction and control became a way of life for most of the two-legged fools. There were a few who did the controlling, and the rest were mostly controlled. Domestication of the beasts, and fellow human beings, soon turned to attempts to domesticate all of creation. Constructions of: dams to flood the valleys, humanmade mountains built trivial copies of inspirational places, and death worshipping cults designed to block out life sustaining dreams poked and prodded the piles of the accumulating brain dead. Senseless slaughtering became a way of life for the sacrificial focused, and piles of shit began to fill the land.
The Aurochs became cattle, beasts of burden, sources of flesh and bone. Domestication dominated the land, and it all was proclaimed a Devine Destiny to spread genetically modified, un-diversified seeds across the denatured landscape. Creatures who used to inspire sacred ceremonies became produce, natural resources at best, born to be used, slaughtered, and shoved down the throats of the mostly meat eaters – all converted to fuel for the unending quest for progression to more of the same. Shouts of “where’s the beef” by un-wizened women to the heads of their households, couldn’t bring back the sacred feasts of the times before the consumption of the cowboys. Toxic filth covered the land-, water-, and air-scapes. Mountains of the inedible wasted creatures mocked the Source behind it all.
Digging out from all the shit seemed a folly, an unimaginable task to those who might on occasion forget their domesticated manners. Techno-logians prayed for more power and ignored pollution as a way to prevent the inevitable inundation of the shrinking planet with their waste – and whether it came from the bulls or the cows, shit was still shit. To the unthinking it appeared at least a half-assed attempt at making amends for millenniums worth of the side effects of domestication. The long-term effects of the dominating drove the dominated deeper into the waxing and waning insanity painted by blind visions of dissection and despair.
Shaking off the mind-numbing shackles of eons of domestication seems unlikely, but it is the only path likely to lead to the ability to pierce the ears of the kings of the cowboys, and mark them with bold colored ear tags, a sign that these heads of state have been dehorned and dethroned – no longer a threat to the valleys, meadows, creeks, crevices, and creatures. Such imaginary happenings just might be the possible dreams of all the undomesticated during the end times of the cowboy days. And reality will have its way with the shit and the filth, the piles of pollution, the trash, the fast food of the fallen cowboys, and death and life will become re-sacralized through the transformations of the insignificant, uncelebrated, rarely remembered tiniest of creatures – the microbes.
The cud chewers haven’t forgotten the powers of these great shit-shifters, who in the end have their way restoring the balance of power. With enough time and the proper conditions, what seemed like stockpiles of death, become compost, humus waiting for the heirloom seeds of the older days to fill the valleys with new blooms. It’s not clear yet, which of the descendants of the domesticated will be around for the show, but the show will go on, when the shit-show ends. And maybe the simple, patient, tenacious microorganisms who share the walls with the sacred drawings in the caves of the old Aurochs will share their dreams with those who remember from where it is we all came.
Hello Heather and thanks for the fine thoughts and keep the dreams alive?
Really enjoyed this!! In all this current muck and mire it somehow brings me peace to know the Earth and microbes will eventually dominate again. Thank you Tom!