Creatures and Careers
A look into my past future
What do you want to be when you grow up?
The first career I can remember dreaming about was paleontology. Artist renderings and models of ancient creatures with teeth, retractable claws, and feathers piqued my interest and imagination. Eventually, the reality of spending a life digging crept in, and my focus shifted to extant animals. In grade school, this interest grew out of visits to the soon to be remodeled Cleveland Metroparks Rainforest Primate Forest. At one point I could name all the species in the aviary, had a mental map of the building, and could anticipate when the rain came down on one of the premier exhibits. I also knew the areas of a small projection that would be logged and left to die. My son still has evidence of my visits through a few remaining stuffed animal monkeys that can velcro onto your neck, arm, furniture, or each other. They also make great dinosaur bait.
This rainforest interest grew when my sixth grade class took a semester to study these forests across the world. I was thinking less about jobs as a sixth grader than I might have been as a second grader looking at dinosaur skeletons, and in a weird way, this was the time when my career came to be. As a parent, I understand now why my own mother saved so much of my schoolwork. Everything is precious. My mom recently pulled out some of my work from that sixth grade deep dive into the jungles of South America, Africa, and Borneo, and what she found looks alarmingly like this substack, AFIELD Notes.
I’ve included several examples in text, and photographic proof, below.
The Creature
Watch the creature, there it goes, stalking its prey in a tree. Its stealthiness outdoing even a bee.
The coat of camouflage hiding it away from its predator and its prey.
Watch the creature, there it goes, as if darkened clouds elude its body, the gentle aura secreting it.
Watch the creature, there it goes, its more powerful than you or I.
What’s the creature? Think away.
Beautiful
Clouded Leopard
power grace
climbing dashing killing
mysterious dark striped obvious
flying attacking capturing
agile speed
Hoopoe
Rainforest
Rainforest
beauty grace
growing birthing dying
vivid green black dull
polluting slowing overcoming
dead clumsy
City
I hadn’t yet found a camera, or at least hadn’t taken one to the rainforest, but I can see my outlook on the world already forming. But maybe I have it backwards. Maybe who I am isn’t forming, but always has been? I don’t mean to make a heretical theological statement. I mean that what’s taken me years to sort out as an adult was already known as a child. Somewhere along the way, I got buried. But the sixth grade me knew what I know now. I need the animals and the wilds and the poems and the writing. I need imagery and stories and I need life.
Like the above poem, I wonder why our built environment, our cities, are not filled with the wonder of the woods. I’ve come to the conclusion that a large part of that is from a deliberate destruction of beauty through brutalist architecture and other projects of the infiltrating totalitarian state, but that also, the lack of enchantment in our lives is because we don’t believe in it, we don’t prioritize it.
I’ve been criticized for criticizing the nine to five work world. On some level, I understand this criticism, but allow me a moment to say something. Our current system does a lot of good for a lot of people, myself included. I think it’s the best we have thought of so far, even if it needs some attending to. I also don’t want to appear prideful or that I am looking down on certain professions. I’m not. In fact, it’s the opposite. I don’t know how people do it. But what I do know, is that the world doesn’t need me to sell more drugs, make more violent video games, or create the next world destroying bomb. I don’t even think it needs me to be an accountant. I just think it needs me to be me. There’s only one, there will only ever be one; same as you. That wild thing you want to do, that crazy idea in your head, we need it. We don’t need to keep doing more of the same; we know how that looks.
Let’s also say this; there is almost no idea for our lives that is too weird. There were, at one point in time, saints called stylites, who lived on top of pillars in their respective cities. At the time, I can imagine the craziness of their boss’s reaction when they shared their dreams. “What? You want to give up this perfectly good job sourcing olives for the ruling class and instead want to fast, pray, and live on a pillar? What about your bank account?” Now, these bizarre, holy men are venerated. Living out my days high up off the ground is not my idea of retirement, but that’s not my dream, either. Neither, for that matter, is retirement.
But, you might ask, what if everyone became a paleontologist? Who would make the food and the clothes and the internet? For one, they wouldn’t. There are all kinds of people. Some are bakers, some are engineers, some are artists, and some are accountants. As G.K. Chesterton purportedly said, “The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.” Career aside, I agree with him. And, to be clear, this post isn’t really about a career, is it? Neither is it about a job.
On another note, don’t you think it’s odd that so many people might want to do something like be a paleontologist? What if there’s something more amazing we’re meant to find that we keep skipping over to instead spend our time finding the best shelf for selling our bag of toxic gummy nerd candies at the grocery store? What if there is free energy yet to be discovered? What dwells in our oceans? On Mars? Where are all the cures to diseases we’ve invested in so long to fix? Maybe we can find the causes, first? I know there are healers out there, too, those who care for others to an extent I have yet to reach.
Regardless of what happens when we remember that child within us, can we honestly say all of us are doing that which we dream about? I’m not even sure I am, but given the above writing and art, I at least know I’m on the right path. In my estimation, it’s the path that matters because it’s all we can see. The rest is up to God.
Maybe we’re already all paleontologists, it’s just that the bones we’re digging up are our own. They are the bones of the things we knew as a child, the person we’ve always seen on the inside but denied on the outside. Now it’s up to us to put the flesh and blood on these bones, to breathe life into the dreams we’ve always wanted to chase down. It might be in the rainforest, it might be on a shop floor, or it might be living life on a pillar.
Whatever I was thinking as a sixth grader, one thing remains clear: There’s only one of each of us, and I want to meet them.
I love this piece, especially your childhood clouded snow leopard. I used to draw for hours and write as a child as well. It’s so true — the world needs us to shine from the centre of our inner child.