Colors of the Wind

Blue is for the half-burned hydrocarbons
Red the nitrous oxides in a haze
Yellow is the airborne sulfur acids
And green is from a heavy metal glaze . . .
 Green is from a heavy metal glaze.
...
You can own the Earth and still
All you'll own is earth until
You can free the hidden elemental powers
And you paint with all the colors of the wind.

OK, so maybe that isn't quite the way Disney Co. wanted it to read. But there was a line from the original that I find horribly stupid: "But I know ev'ry rock and tree and creature Has a life, has a spirit, has a name."

There's a word for this: animism. The definition in the dictionary doesn't improve on Disney's lyric. In a nice comfortable country at a nice safe distance this view of the world sounds comforting and inspiring.

In the real world, though, nature is not all sweetness and light. For every beautiful vista there's a snake hiding in the bush. The terrors of nature--floods, lightening, cold, heat, silent predators, disease, death in childbirth--are more dramatic. If every rock and creature has a spirit, a lot of them are malign. The world of the animist is not full of joyful recognition but of terror and perpetual uncertainty--"have I run afoul of some spirit I didn't know about?"

I'm not being theoretical--this is how they actually live. We forget how liberating monotheism is.