…PARTICIPANT…
Stage 37 / Tuesday 2 June / From Nogaro to Aurensan / 27 km
My notes from yesterday have again exceeded a single page, there was so much to say on this globalizing vision of “One,” this famous “One for all.” I resume: beyond the inert whose expansion little by little propagated in space since the big bang, the universe which encompasses everything found there, contains living matter. What is living has been constituted out of matter contained in the inert. The living is also affected by certain laws which have acted on the inert since the big bang, like gravity for example. Science seems to know how to explain more and more everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen to the inert in the expansion which is happening since the big bang. As if there were predestination in all that, we know what will happen to the sun, and suspect what will be the fate of the planets surrounding it. But science cannot boast the ability to predict what will happen to the living, in particular starting from the human in which the concept of predetermination does not seem to hold water. In any case, not for me!
Now, if there is true freedom in the becoming of the living, one must imagine something beyond “all” (the universe and its contents) which permits such a freedom, insufficiently explainable by the laws of science. This something, this great “One” which governs the inert well enough to bring out of it the living gifted with a certain degree of freedom in its relationship with the inert, gives me a certain time (my lifetime) to decide precisely what sort of relationship I will have with the inert, how I will participate in the reality of this nature that surrounds me.
My walk today is an example of relationship between living and inert. I (the living) freely participate—it’s my choice—in the discovery of a corner of the universe situated in the direction southwest of Nogaro. I encounter the inert here, actually consisting today of a pleasant scenery where for the most part low wooded hills dominate valleys that local farmers have plowed in following the elevation lines. The corn (maize) and sunflower fields serve as topographical references. It is a pleasure to observe the undulations marking the more or less accentuated declivity gradient of the natural slopes of the hills and fields: a geographic relief map on the scale 1/1, and not 1/100 or 1/1000!
In unison with this peaceful scene, I feel myself in harmony with Nature. And advancing on the path which goes round one of these basins, I imagine myself being the tip of a pencil in the hand of a creator who has imagined this relief map. I commune thus with his gesture and am delighted to merit this corner of the world which welcomes and integrates me. Me, the little pencil progressing and turning, I am united with a beauty so charming that to die in it would cause me no fear. “See Naples and die?” No, for me today this would be “See the Gers and die!” What does it matter if the tip of the pencil breaks at the moment when it crosses the graceful Adour River? He will die with love!
The farmers in the area, by their planting in curves, make me realize another aspect of the participation between living and inert: the human (living) submits other living things of a lower order (plants) to a possibility of growth dependent on the quantity and quality of the nutritive elements (inert) found naturally in the plowed soil or brought by rainwater. “Oh complacent nature which submits favorably to the human, I commune with you today! Oh joy of the human participation in creation!” Because a succulent polenta [a kind of corn meal] browned in (sunflower) vegetable oil may be the final self-fulfillment of these plants.
Animals and plants are “one” with Nature, but the human, relentless in submitting them for his own satisfaction, rather makes “two” with them. Although coming from the same creation, the human detaches himself from Nature which appears to him most often as neutral, if not hostile: go ask a city-dweller to accompany you to give a hand in making hay in the mountains in summer, and you will see his reaction, if he has not grown up in this environment, which is for him completely inhospitable. Now, more and more people are leaving the mountains to live a more “concrete” existence in the cities! The mountains … hey, here come the Pyrenees, where I will be immersing myself in a few days. I will climb them, abandoning to them a part of myself through effort and sweat! Participation that I can foresee either as a constraint or, on the contrary, as liberating and fulfilling, if I commune wholeheartedly with the beauty of the peaks!
