For those of you who’ve heard the rough mixes of our song, Earthling, you might be wondering why the voices of wolves have been featured in the beginning and ending of the song.
Their voices blend with mine in the beginning of the song for a lot of reasons. If you’ve been reading my blogs or following me on twitter or facebook for any amount of time, you know that I’m very attuned to the kinship of all species, and am very involved in wildlife protection.
Wolves and humans have a long and intertwined relationship; our ancestors have alternatively respected them and villified and slaughtered them. In many places, wolves are extinct already…so the use of thevoices of wolves in the song represents the voice of all Earthlings calling out to awaken the sleeping consciousness of humankind.
Did you know that all dogs can be traced back to wolf lineage via DNA? It used to be thought that perhaps some dog DNA came from dingos or coyote or whatever, but dog DNA is directly from the gray wolf. The irony is that dogs are perhaps the species most willing to love humans unconditionally, while in return human beings have almost driven the wolf to extinction out of ignorance, greed, and fear. It was not until the 1970s that we began to undo that negative karma and help to restore wolves and thus also restore the natural balance of our dwindling wilderness.
And right now, scientifically ignorant politicians have once again declared war upon wolves. Those of us who love wildlife and wolves have written countless letters and signed countless petitions, but the war continues unabated. “Humans” who consider killing a “sport” have been let loose upon the dwindling and fragile wolf population. It is quite likely that wolves may soon join the list of species that are becoming extinct in this current great wave of extinctions.
So, adding their voices in this song is just one tiny way of giving them a voice, and a way of honoring our extended family of earthlings.
If you, like me, see our ecological crisis as both a symptom of humanity’s dis-ease… and also the opportunity for us to awaken and evolve beyond the lame cycle of greed and selfishness that has created it… then you’ll appreciate “Spiritual Ecology”:
http://vimeo.com/wwo/spiritualecology
PS)There is a powerful film that came out in 2010 entitled “Earthlings”; I had not yet heard about it when I first wrote these lyrics in the same year. The song is about humankind waking up and joining the rest of the planet in healing, while the film is about the abuse of animals in the factory “food” system, and is quite painful to watch. If you are brave, you can see it here.