Calling all pixies, elves, faeries, nymphs, dryads etc.

The actual author of this story, writing under the name of Buck Young, is Mat Jacobson, He’d like to hear from people who’ve read this, and to get comments and mails from them. You can e-mail him directly by sending your comments to: mat.jacobson@wdc.greenpeace.org

A Historical overview of the Whereabouts of Gnomes and Elves, Fauns and Faeries, Goblins, Ogres, Trolls and Bogies, Nymphs, Sprites, and Dryads, Past and Present.

A long, long time ago, the Earth belonged to the creatures of the woods. By creatures I mean Gnomes and Elves, Fauns and Faeries, Goblins, Ogres, Trolls and Bogies, Nymphs, Sprites, and Dryads. They tended it and took care of it, played in it, danced and sang in it, cared for wounded animals, worked out disputes between species, sat on mushrooms discussing matters of import and drinking labrador tea, rode downstream on leaves and bark, and parachuted from trees with dandelion seeds. This was the world into which mankind was born. These early days, when man was but a newly arrived dinner guest who hadn’t yet taken over the entire house, are fairly well documented in the literature and folklore of the world, so there’s no need to go into it here. What I am intrested in, and what I am asking you to be intrested in, is the question “Where did all the Fauns and Faeries, Goblins, Ogres, Trolls and Bogies, Nymphs, Sprites, and Dryads go?”

The friction between man and the wood creatures began with the discovery of agriculture. With the discovery of agriculture civilistaion rose and spread. The forests were cleared to provide wood for shelter and fields for pastures and crops. Mankind had set up camp. No longer just a visitor in someone else world, he pushed the wild back from his newly built doorstep. At first this wasn’t a problem. There weren’t many people and everyone felt that it was only fair to allot them their own little half acre to do with as they wished. Some of them even decided to help out. Gnomes moved into the barn houses and helped out with the gardening chores. The devic spirits of the vegetables helped the humans better organise their crops and plant rotation, taught them the correlation between the planetary and lunar cycles and the agricultural year, plant radishes when the moon is in Cancer, harvest when the moon is in Taurus. Many trolls felt that the heaping piles of manure were a change for the better, and decided to stick around too.

The rest of the wood creatures just backed of into the wood, occasionally playing mischievous tricks on the new settlers, like turning milk sour, rearranging the furniture, tipping the cows, and occasionally stealing babies and leaving bundles of wood in their place.

But man’s dominion spread (and spread and spread and spread), the forests got smaller and smaller and smaller. Things got real crowded in the woods, and things were getting worse in civilisation. Most farmers weren’t listening to devic spirits anymore. People found that they could increase their output by by disregarding the needs of the Earth. They were raising productivity and killing the soil. Petrochemicals were just a step away. Most of the devic spirits and gnomes fled. The trolls stayed. Today they live mostly under bridges and in the shallow, mucky ditches beneath the metal grating on farm roads that cows are afraid to cross. Be sure to honk your horn before driving over one of these. A troll may be hanging from the grate and swinging over its living room, as they are apt to do after rolling in muck and manure. If you don’t give a warning honk, you may run over its fingers and it’s not a great idea to get either your name or your license plate number on a troll’s shit list.

Now there is little wild land left at all and even that is shrinking at an unprecedented rate. There is simply not enough space for all the Gnomes and Elves Fauns and Faeries, Goblins, Ogres, Trolls and Bogies, Nymphs, Sprites, and Dryads.

So where are they?

Are they dead?

No.
So where did they go?

The answer is a bit surprising.

They didn’t go anywhere. We did!

Early humans had an intuitive knowledge of their role in nature, just as bears and racoons and mice and every other critter does. They understood, from the ways of the wild around them, that nothing comes from nowhere, and nothing ever just disappears. Things change form. Death is necessary for life to continue. They offered up their kills as sacrifices to the gods of nature. They offered praise, prayer, sacrifice, and song to the spirits of the wild, to brother buffalo, brother deer, brother fish, and brother tree.

Now we know that everything that has ever existed continues to exist, in one form or another, and as far as we can tell, they were more aware of that back then than we are now. So the sacrifice, song, praise and prayer did not ensure the immortality of the slaughtered, either in body or in spirit. That was allready taken care of. What it did ensure was the continuance of the connection of the spirit of the slaughterer and the spirit of the slaughtered. Killing is a risky business. The membrane separating the internal from the external is not necessarily as thick or as clearly defined as we have come to believe. Every time we kill, we risk killing the reality of that thing inside ourselves as well as outside. We risk breaking the connections that lead in and out of the membrane. Taking life to feed life requires a keen understanding of the natural law of give and take. When we lost the understanding, gave up the songs, the sacrifice, the pryers and the praise we lost the connection. Saying grace is not enough.

When we loose the connections, everything becomes dead – fish, rivers, frogs, mice, even each other. There is no way they can reach inside us any more. The five sense we are left with are not enough. We have given up those connections in exchange for the freedom to clear-cut forests with skidders, turn cows into milk machines and chickens into egg factories. We can experiment on animals, club seals, wear mink coats, exterminate passenger pigeons, dodo birds, whales, bear, dolphins and condor with not a twinge of guilt. The lines have been severed.

We are all under the impression that it is the forests, the creatures, the spirits, and the wild lands that are disappearing from the universe and not us. Not so! Thinking that is like thinking that if you stand on the end of a limb and saw the limb from the tree, the tree will fall and you will remain standing. Bugs Bunny might be able to get away with it but we can’t. When a marionette cuts its strings the marionette doesn’t collapse to the ground. When a spider severs the lines that connect its web to the trees, the forest doesn’t fall away. It is we who have fallen away from the real world into a world where we may carry out our twisted sterile dreams without threatening the Earth and its inhabitants. Ever wonder why the trees, stones, rivers, streams, birds, snakes, bears and frogs no longer talk to us as they did in the early tales of the Native Americans, The Hindus, the Africans, the Bible? It’s because were not around to talk anymore. Every clear-cut, every vivisection, every mechanised slaughter of cow, pig and chicken moves our dream-world farther and farther from the tree, making a reunification, which is still possible, more and more difficult.

Somewhere not so far from here, in the real world, the ancient forests are still standing, the buffalo roam the prairies, the sky is full of condors, the deer and antelope play, and the dodo birds wander the sandy beaches, bumping into things. Where there are still wild lands in our dream world, strong connections still exist. Bridges tunnels and portals. Occasionally a traveller will get lost in the wilderness, returning the next day to find a hundred years have passed, or never returning at all. There are more ephemeral connections as well – brooks and waterfalls where you can still hear voices from the other side, if you listen carefully enough. When they sit by these waters they hear loud clanking and screams. When they eat psilocybin everything stops glowing, and condors rise where forests stand. Our children see their world in their dreams. Their children see our world in their nightmares.

And there is another connection. Sometimes agents from the other side infiltrate our world in an attempt to expedite the reunification. Believe it or not, they miss us over there. Sometimes – more often than you might think – they send souls over to our world to be born as human babies. Sort of like a socialist, communist or anarchist entering the American political arena and running for office in an attempt to affect change from the inside. There are quite a lot of them actually – Gnomes, Elves, Fauns and Faeries, Goblins, Ogres, Trolls and Bogies, Nymphs, Sprites, and Dryads – running around in human bodies. They do crazy things like writing on walls, working in co-ops, running inns in the mountains, talking to themselves in the streets, making pottery illustrating children’s books, spiking trees and blowing up tractors. They are planting bio-dynamic gardens, sitting in the back yard naked, arguing with Satan. They are in asylums pumped full of Ritalin and lithium. They live with Indians, They run recycling centres. They are starting revolutions, corrupting the young, inventing paranoid conspiracy theories, making up religions. They’re directing movies, gobbling up acid, drinking heavily and writing poetry!

The transition from their world to ours is not an easy one. Intricate rituals and incantations are involved. The transition is not easy on the soul. A great deal is lost. They may have no idea who or what they really are at first. They may or may not find out. They will know they are not like everyone else. They will know that this world is not theirs. They will faintly remember something better, where things made sense and worked like they ought to, where love and magic had the power to heal. They will know that what makes other people happy does not make them happy, and what makes them happy makes them happier than anybody else alive. They will see things others cannot see, hear things others cannot hear, feel things others cannot feel, and know things others do not know. They will laugh a great deal, cry a great deal or both. They will love humans individually, but have a hard time with humanity as a whole that occasionally may approach loathing. They will have a handful of very close friends, and often be very lonely. They will be unhappiest when forced to act like a human and do the things that humans do, want the things that humans want, or when they are convinced that they actually are one.

Things will not be easy for them. Because of their memories of the other side, the world will seem to them to be a wondrous calliope with just a few teeth missing on one of the cogs. Because of this tiny deficiency, the music is all off key, the horses are all crashing into each other, and the children are frightened, bruised and crying. The solutions will seem obvious and no-one else will listen.

They will be repeatedly punished for shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre when the buildings are in flames no one else can see. They will get slapped on the wrist for pointing to the exit signs when everyone else is running around and screaming and trampling each other. They will be zealous, fanatical, and didactic about their beliefs. They will feel utterly confused. They will have ecstatic visions and babble incoherently. They will be extremely articulate. They are prone to long periods of silence. They have no idea to say what they really mean. They will spend a lot of time with children and animals. They will become drunkards and dope fiends, organic gardeners, essene soap makers, carpenters madmen, magicians jugglers and clowns, lunatic physicists, painters and scribblers, travellers and wanderers. They will dress in bright colours, frumpy sweaters or all black. They will smoke too much and drink too much. They will eat only macrobiotic foods. They will develop addictions to mountain dew. They will often be accused of living in their own fantasy world. They will make great lovers (Yeah, even trolls.) They will spend too much time making love or thinking about it. They will speak to inanimate objects. They will have beautiful eyes. They will expect their magic to work in this world, and their love to heal, they will be crushed by this world, and often they won’t expect it. It will come close to killing them.

They will visit the places the connections still exist: the waterfalls, mountains, oceans, and forests. They will draw upon all the power they have and sometimes, sometimes, their magic will work, and everything will be wondrously easy. The teeth will grow back on the calliope’s cog, the tune will right itself and the horses will bob gracefully up and down, around and around, and the children will giggle and sing with cotton candy stuck to their faces and noses. They will spend their days trying to reconnect a branch that millions are busy sawing away at. Often it will be more than they can bear.

While the rest of humanity is working on new and more efficient ways to lay waste to the Earth with the push of a button, they are saving it, a handful at a time.

They will share the common conviction that they are the only sane individuals in a world gone mad.

They’re right!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Ok I hope you enjoyed reading it as it took me a good few hours to type up from the original magazine I saw it in. (Its called implant, some of you might be familiar with it)

My question is simple.......
Who's with me on this?
Who's one of them?

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