Six years ago on this first day of spring – when one thinks of
returning songbirds – I ‘retired’. ‘Retirement’ is one of those stupefying
words that claim to help shape and explain our life. The man in the picture,
about my age, is gathering cattle feed and firewood, perhaps conversing with
the mountains, trees, and birds. He lives in Chitkul village at the top of the
Baspa Valley, high in the Indian Himalayas. No one here thinks of ‘retirement’
as we have come to do – nor did anyone else for tens of thousands of years.
In the village, labour and leisure slosh
together, attuned to the seasons and a deep ethic of mutual aid. People make
lot of distinctions, around gender roles for example, but there’s little of the
arbitrary-feeling, bureaucratized segmenting of life that we know.
Down the Baspa valley are vast pesticide-covered
orchards; farther down are enormous,
landscape and village-wrecking hydro dams being built to fuel ‘new India’
industrialization and instant glass corporatized cities. Down there they also talk
about ‘retirement’.
I hear that in the past 50 years the world has lost half its
songbirds – in large part, researchers believe, because of factors like modernity’s
pesticides, glass towers lit up 24/7, atmospheric pollution and deforestation. That dismays and disheartens me. This first
day of spring, I want a world with plenty of songbirds.
