Lawnmowers are Dragons

What is a lawnmower? You do not need an advanced understanding of engineering to know that a lawnmower is a machine, often gas-powered, that moves on wheels and utilizes a spinning blade to trim the grass. You've likely done this chore at least once, and perhaps you wondered how the littler world, of insects and creatures amid the turf, perceived this event.

How would the natural world perceive a machine? The styles of both early and modern machinery are equitably beyond the understanding animals, although those that inhabit the same spaces as machines do adapt to them. Cats and crows are keen enough to avoid cars, although our road-filled biome remains dangerous.

The lawnmower must seem a lumbering and horridly loud thing. It comes and goes, droning powerfully in the distance and then roaring near. The aroma of smoke that fills the area tells animals that fire is nearby. This fire, they know, can only be coming from this roving beast. The machine has a shell no claw or bite could possible pierce. It lays dormant, sleeping, for many days or weeks, until suddenly it awakes, feasting upon the lush growth of the land.

The dragon and the giant are commonalities in our worldly mythology. Here the insect and small-animal world perceives a draconic being wrestling with a giant, whereas we understand this event to be a human being pushing a lawnmower. The lawnmower, and all machines, can only be perceived as a draconic entity to the animal world. Their minds will not comprehend it as being a mechanism, but rather perceive it as a fire breathing beast.

Consider your perception of the world if you had been born a squirrel.

The distant groaning of powerful animals is heard all around you. Lumbering giants dominate the land. Massive shelled and scaled beasts rest in spaces at the perimeter of your green and wooded territory. They are usually dormant, but when awake, move with a roaring cry at rapid speed. To be caught by one would be certain destruction for you, but most seem too large to even care about chasing such a little creature. All the same, you fear them, and what would become of you if one crossed your path.

Then, one day, the local giant of your territory begins to fiercely wrestle with a small dragon. You smell the fire, and you see the giant chasing the dragon all around, back and forth for many long minutes. Finally the giant has wrestled the dragon back to sleep, and the land soon returns to a more peaceable state.

Your squirrel brain will be deeply influenced by this incomprehensible image. You and any other critter who has perceived a machine close enough to have the comprehension of it as a dangerous beast. Crows must wonder why it is that the humans go willingly to be swallowed up by the massive dormant dragons outside of their home, only for that dragon to wake, traverse at immense speeds across the stoneways, only to spit their humans back out at other nests and food castles.

So if critters in the natural world are perceiving machines as being dangerous creatures beyond all comprehension, comparable to dragons, then this dramatic perception will have entered into the squirrels collective unconscious. It is my hypothesis that the collective unconsciousness of life on earth includes dragons for this reason. In the human world, there are no dragons, though we have encountered fierce and dangerous beasts like the Siberian tiger. From the perceptions of machines had by animals, to the perceptions of fierce and dangerous beasts had by both animals and humans, an image formed in the mind of all early human cultures of the dragon.

Don't be sad, though, if you do need to mow you lawn. I mean, an electric razer is probably like a dragon to the bacteria on your skin. Lawns are sort of like public faces. Cars and houses are both sort of like people in that they are a part of our presentation. A well groomed lawn suggests that the person in the house has extra labor to spare in grooming their lawn, and so is generally indicative of personal wellness and prosperity. Lawns sort of suck, though, in terms of water-cost and environmental effect. It's so much better to just have a lawn made up of native plants and ecosystem supporting pollinators. Consider planting clover on your lawn because it's lush and you can roll in it with the bees.

It's morally acceptable to mow the lawn if your mom asks you too, even if you are sort of against having a lawn of grass, because of the water-cost and the way the lawnmower probably chops up some tiny bugs and scares the local squirrel, and you really want your own house so that you can plant a bunch of native pollinators and stuff. You are waiting for when you have your own enduring home to really invest all the time and energy into making your garden beautiful, but wow, it's going to be a terrific place to hang out in when you get there.

By the way, I'm not necessarily saying that the people who came up with draconic mythology in early human storytelling were actually humans that had been reincarnated from squirrels in the future. I just think there is some leakage from one sphere of the collective unconsciousness to another. We probably get some squirrel memories from the planes of reality in which dreams and imagination occur. Or it could even be some other creature in a different world that experienced an advanced threat, which may often be characterized as having hard scales or a shell and emitting lots of dangerous energy. I know I am extrapolating far to talk about any non-earth scenarios involving life and alien technology but I think it's fair to say that these perceptions might occur. And as far as I'm concerned collective unconsciousness stuff gets launched out into the past and future.

Let me know your thoughts. This is not a factual piece of writing but rather a conversation starter. No real science was used to create this article.