The Territory Within

From Menletter July 2006

By Tim Baehr

The cage was offloaded from the truck. The lion had been transported from far away. Maybe it was from an animal hospital; maybe it was simply being relocated in the wild. Whatever the case, the lion had been in the cage a long time. A lion expert opened the cage. I don't remember now whether he was standing by the cage or working from a distance. (If it had been my lion, I would have been extremely careful. I would imagine that a caged-up lion could be ready to spring angrily forth, relieved to be free at last, and ready for a fight. I suppose he might be delighted to be free, leaping out of his cage and gamboling on the savannah for a while before he ambled off into the bush. I wouldn't take the chance, however.)

Minutes passed. The lion lay in the cage, not moving much. Perhaps he sniffed around a bit and surveyed his surroundings. There was no other movement. Was the lion still sick? Was he depressed about finding himself in unfamiliar surroundings?

The lion expert knew, of course, what was going on. With considerable prodding and an enticing treat, he got the lion out of the cage.

Like many animals, the lion is territorial. Lions defend their territories by patrolling the territorial borders, roaring to let other prides know of their presence, and marking with urine and feces.

With enough time in the cage, the newly transplanted lion had established the cage as his territory. He would not leave it without a lot of encouragement.

Our Territories

Are we humans territorial? Is our territoriality instinctual (as with many animals), or learned? With so much social and political influence on our behavior, it might be hard to tease out the instinctual from the learned. Let's assume that we have some sense, however vestigial, of the instinctual need to defend our space. With varying degrees of ferocity, even violence, we defend our nations and states; our homes; our families. We may even feel territorial about a parking space or a portion of highway or one end of a football field. Most of us can probably think of a time when defending a piece of ground had gone beyond the rational. As bad and inadvisable as it may be, for example, road rage may not be crazy or morally wrong so much as it is the overwhelming of our rational selves by ancient instincts.

As real as our poor lion's cage was to him, I think he was also protecting a more abstract territory. What had once been a portion of all outdoors had become, perhaps, an exercise in pure territoriality, stripped of most of the usual cues.

We humans once lived most of our lives outdoors, intimately familiar with our surroundings. Our survival depended on that familiarity. Our survival also must have depended on protecting a territory in which our clan or tribe gathered food. It doesn't take much of a conceptual leap to imagine a modern general tendency toward an instinctual sense of territoriality, stripped of its natural cues. And I think territoriality plays out in more arenas than national defense or road rage. In fact, it may permeate our lives in many ways we haven't thought about.

Territorial Metaphors

We can find one indication of our ingrained territoriality in the metaphors of our language. Here are some expressions whose meanings give rise to territorial images of earth and territory:

● We stood our ground.

● He took the high road.

● Let's see this from another vantage point.

● They wouldn't give an inch.

● I cleverly undermined his arguments.

● You're treading on dangerous ground.

● What's the area of your expertise?

● That therapist has very poor boundaries.

● You've crossed the line.

● That joke borders on racism.

● We're entering unknown territory with this theory.

● It was an uphill battle.

● It's all downhill from here.

● This theory covers a lot of ground.

● Where did you dig up that idea?

Some of these examples are so commonplace that they don't even feel like metaphors - they seem to be examples of ordinary, literal language until we examine them.

Building the Cage

For only a few thousand years, a small fraction of human existence, we have moved indoors, forgotten our mythologies, and narrowed mightily the scope of our lives. We may feel that we're part of a global village; some of us may travel widely; many of us can see events from half a planet away displayed on a TV or computer screen. But our conceptual space has shrunken. We're alienated from nature, from each other, from ourselves. What we call civilization has built a series of concentric cages around us, so that we feel isolated and lonely. Territories have given way to patches of lawn or blacktop. Communities have given way to cocoon-like living rooms or rec rooms with a TV as their only window. Even family members sit facing the same direction, and not each other.

Many of us live in spiritual cages, too. Our sense of wonder at being part of a huge, rich, natural environment has shrunk down to a series of intellectual exercises called theology - or worse, a complex orthodoxy that makes us the only life form that can sin.

Opening the Cage

Here's a bit of irony: Since we have collectively and individually built our own cages, they have no doors on them. What happens when some force - a fortunate or unfortunate accident, a sudden insight, the promise of an intense friendship - shows us the open end of one of our cages? Do we leap out, happy to be free, and gambol in the grass?

Or, like the lion, do we recognize and defend only the territory we've become accustomed to, and trapped in?

We have no one to prod us or entice us out of our cages. That's a job, and we'll either have to do it ourselves or discover external prods and enticements (see below). Even if we're willing to prod ourselves, what if we can't even see the cages? It may be worthwhile to have a look around.

● Has the scope of our spiritual lives shrunken? (A priest friend once advised me, "Never let religion get in the way of your faith.")

● Can we find a better place to live? Are we too stuck in a killer commute or a school system that is damaging our kids?

● Has our job put us in a trap of routine?

● Are we defending old political, social, ethical, or moral ideas that need reexamining or expanding?

● Are we in a money cage? Is it inside our job cage?

● Is our extended family a broad and inviting landscape or a tiny cage?

● What about our society's expectation of us as men? Are we caged by machismo, overwork, competitiveness, lack of emotional outlets, or just having to be and act in a certain way?

● Are we carefully protecting a drug cage? An alcohol cage?

● Has an old hurt put us into a cage of resentment?

● Has a half-forgotten trauma or abuse narrowed our horizons?

Fear and Loathing

Put yourself in the place of our transplanted lion. The cage has become your territory. Everything else is "other," unknown. You're not stuck inside the cage because you're lazy: you're scared. The cage is not the way you're meant to live, but for the moment it's all you know.

Change is scary, even when it leads to greater freedom. Maybe we need to be more aware of the things we're defending or protecting, and figure out if they represent territories worthy of protection, or merely cages. If they're cages, let's find the open ends and come out and play.

Prods and Enticements

Where do we find the prods and enticements to get us out of our cages? Therapy may be one way. Joining a recovery group may be another way. A significant life event - a divorce; a major illness; an accident; or a major transition like graduation, marriage, the birth of a child, a new job - can be a catalyst for change.

Some men leave one or more of their cages when they recapture or re-imagine - through men's retreats or a men's group - their life wounds as initiatory events. I've seen psychic cages crumble, or even be rent apart by men who discovered a larger self that a cage could no longer contain.

The lion has been depicted as King of the Beasts. A caged or zoo-captive lion may hardly look like a king. If we discover to our dismay the tiny internal territory of our cages, we might do well to remember that courage came even to the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz.