Many moons ago there were no cars.

Many moons ago there were no cars.

There were no cars or planes or smart phones or wires crisscrossing the landscape like high voltage shackles.

Back then there was the land, and the land belonged to everyone and no one and from it sprang life. All life. Back then interconnectedness – the link between all living things – didn’t need to be thought about and analyzed and romanticized. That everything depended on everything else was just reality and existence and it required no more thought than drawing a breath.

Amidst the scrub and canyons of the southwest, coyotes will kill cats and small dogs that are left outside unattended. For this – for trying to eat – the coyotes are demonized. Poisoned, trapped and killed with nary a thought.

Mountain lions are being forced out of the hills by gaudy, monstrous tract homes. McMansions for the legions that pollute the canyons with their smooth jazz and their oversized SUVs. When the mountain lions attack a human who is intruding in the only home these cats have ever known, the mountain lion is hunted and shot on sight.

The coyote and the mountain lion - creatures killed for no other reason than trying to ensure their own survival. For following the irresistible instinct to live. Guilty of nothing more than attempting to adapt in the face of a bipedal parasite that lives without regard to the rest of the creatures that depend on this ever dwindling land.

Years ago I stood in a hot, red walled canyon in the desert and heard nothing. I felt a complete silence that seemed to pulse and beat with a primal life whose bounds exceeded time. At that moment it could have been the age before cars. Before the noise of teeming humanity and their endless creations that are seemingly designed to distract and pollute and overwhelm.

It could have been a time long before humanity. It could have been a time when the Earth was ruled by the biggest and strongest and fastest and there was room for every living thing and no creature slept without keeping one wary eye open.

This same trip into the desert I awoke in a hotel overlooking a golf course. Rolling hills carpeted with lush grass that is unsustainable in this dry, arid land. Water wasted in a place where every drop of moisture is precious and is relished by flora and fauna who have adapted to this place over many of our brief and unimportant lifetimes.

I awoke and went outside and the morning was still; the air just beginning to be warmed by the blazing desert sun inching up over the horizon. I watched as several coyotes padded across the grass of the golf course. I imagined their delight at the feel of the soft, wet grass on their paws. I imagined their horror at the relentless, mechanized destruction of all that they know. I admired their determination to survive. I’m quite convinced they will outlast us.