future worries « Robin Hill Gardens

A few weeks ago a very good friend and I were driving through town, delivering signs for an event. We were discussing vacation plans and I told her about a rule I’ve been tinkering with, that I would fly only to visit family, not for recreation. She asked me why, which surprised me because she knows me so well. I explained that I want to keep my carbon footprint small. She immediately said, “Oh, so you’ve been riding your bike around town then, have you?”

That struck me dumb. My first (unspoken) reaction was: so a thing is only worth doing if one can do it perfectly? Is that a standard you hold yourself to, or do you only take it out when it suits you? I didn’t say that, of course, but I think my words still had an edge when after a deep breath I said: “I will not take that poison of purity. Yes, I’m not perfect, but that shouldn’t stop me from doing what I can.”

There was so much that was not right about that whole conversation. We were both on the defensive, there was no conversation possibly after that – thank goodness there was work to do! More importantly, I had failed to see what was really going on. The exchange had not, fundamentally, been about purity. It had been about guilt. Always it is guilt, the elephant in the room, behind which hides the mammoth: grief.

I had spoken from responsibility: I take responsibility for the grievous things I do, and thereby work to minimize them. My sense of responsibility stems from grief – some of which is grief that I cannot indeed be pure in a perfect world. I no longer feel guilty about that, but I do grieve it. And I find that grieving gives me insight and strength. It also, seemingly paradoxically, gives me great joy when I do find a way to make things better. I write “seemingly paradoxically,” because there is no paradox: that is what grief does, it allows for joy, it is, indeed, joy’s necessary companion (*). Guilt, on the other hand, is all-encompassing, it smothers everything that is not guilt: if you act for the good out of guilt, you will always only find more guilt, more ways in which you haven’t acted or can’t act, for the good.

So, there it is: I spoke from grief. She instantly turned it into guilt.

Why? I don’t know. I know that our culture mistakes grief for guilt. Why? I think Stephen Jenkinson would say it is because to grieve means ultimately to face death (that we cannot be pure and everlasting in a perfect world), and our dominant culture fears death so much it would rather embrace guilt. Guilt, in its passionate accusation seems to be – seems to be - more about life, more enlivening, but in the long run it is what kills life. Now there’s another culprit: the “long run”. We are no longer capable of thinking seven generations ahead. I’ve even heard a parent say, jokingly: “our kids will solve it!” That’s the same as saying: I refuse to grieve – and therefore I am incapable of taking responsibility. Or perhaps it is because grief, unlike guilt, is not something you can give away or project onto someone else. It is so intimately yours and yours alone and you are alone in it…

What to do? What to do?

(*) The movie about Jenkinson, Grief Walker, was translated into French to L’Accompagnateur, literally, the Companion.

Some time ago (April 16) we returned to the field of the Full Moon/Grief walk. Our group was smaller this time. We had timed our congregation to dusk, because that is when the male woodcock performs its sky dance for the benefit of the females of the species. Woodcocks are crepuscular, most active around dusk and dawn. Every year around April, a flock takes up residence in this particular hay field in the Greenways Conservation Area in Wayland, to woo, mate and nest. Every evening for a month or so, one, two or three males perform a dance in the sky above the wide-open field for who knows how many females watching from the bushes on the field’s edge.

It’s too dark to spot him (let alone the silent females), so you mostly catch the woodcock by ear. When on the ground, he makes a distinctive peent-ing sound. I think it means: Are you watching me? Here I go! Then you know he’s taken flight when you hear the whistling, twittering sound from his voice and the airflow through his feathers. If you’re lucky to spot him against twilit (or street lit) clouds, you’re taken aback by how diminutive he is, and his lack of grace. He is all wings, a small ball of feathers flung up into the sky in a messy, wind-driven spiral. What falling up would look like. Your eye invariably loses him against the dark horizon, the dark earth. Still, you know he landed, and more or less where, when he betrays himself with his peent.

But as I describe it – and even as Aldo Leopold describes it, much better than I can, in The Sand County Almanac – it just sounds way too… big. I’m afraid that I’ve raised your expectations, that when you go looking for the woodcock you’ll be disappointed. He is really only the size of a robin, a small, ruffled silhouette barely distinguishable against the pewter grey sky. The peent is subtle at a hundreds yards’ distance. The pretty twitter is even more subdued and you have to turn your head to aim an ear at it. The wind will try to rob you of your already fragile experience of him.

But we were there to witness the woodcock and we were determined. There we stood, seven humans, in the middle of the grey, breezy field, hummocks of hay, timothy and weeds still small, but tenacious, underfoot. ”Where is he?” someone whispered. “Wait. Listen.” Peent! Snickering. “That sounds kind of rude!” Then, ”He’s up! Hear it? Sounds like…” and “I see it! It’s there!” I looked from the sky down to the group: six dark statues, all with heads raised, some pointing. The question presented itself: what are we doing? What’s with the words, the pointing (like that helps anyone)? The answer struck me hard: you have to care.

There were some among us who didn’t care. Their words, their body language were of puzzlement bordering on disappointment. Was that it? Was it these woodcocks? (There were three hard at work in the field that day.) Or are all specimens of their species this… fragile? Or was it the place, the car noise and orange street light? Or the weather, the thieving wind? No, it was that they couldn’t bring themselves to care.

I realized that I was having to work hard at it myself. These birds, their dance, they live on the edge of our common senses. I was pushing my caring to act like an extra sense to allow me to experience these birds. I wasn’t just paying attention, though that too was necessary. Not content with just hearing two faint sounds and seeing a ghost of a shape, I was also investing myself, digging deep, giving much, caring, so as to drag every bit of marvel and awe out of the experience.

What I found was, again, grief, quite specific this time. This field, where the woodcock has been coming, decade after decade, gets mowed around the time the females lay their eggs on the ground on the edge. The noisy, colorful combine will come for these dull-colored, quiet birds. This field is also being considered for sports field. The flash and shout and strife of bats and balls and orange-clad running bodies, the flood lights at dusk, the fuming parking lots, the weekly mowing, the trash… the woodcocks will not compete.

There are two extinctions here. The birds’. Ours, at least the extinction of a part of us. The suburban noise of the leaf blower, the honking cars, blaring sirens, the slick feel of our plastics and shock of ”butt-kicker” movies, the flash of street and traffic lights, computer screens, the clothes we wear have robbed us of our experience of these dull, small animals, who are nevertheless more alive than cars, leaf blowers, movie action, computer models, gaudy fabrics, plastics…

But they will not show themselves. It is up to us to care about them. So unless we can get more people, more than just seven, to come and stand in that field and to care that much, the Greenways’ woodcock’s passing will not even be noticed, and we will have lost yet another opportunity to connect, the practice connection, to care.

I’m sitting at my desk, drinking hot tea of

. chamomile,

. peppermint,

. licorice,

and honey. There’s a book open, in the pool of lamp light. It’s William Carlos Williams’s Collected Poems, at “Asphodel.” Reading it is like descending, step by step, into a deep sorrow, from

. root,

. to leaf,

. to flower,

The one you hope will never open and unfold. The one you hope you will never see blossoming, billowing. Williams writes:

The poem

. if it reflects the sea

. reflects only

its dance

. upon that profound depth

. where

it seems to triumph.

. The bomb puts an end

. to all that.

I am reminded

. that the bomb

. also

is a flower

Though very tired I went on the Full Moon Walk yesterday evening, a lovely tradition or what we hope will become a tradition, when a group of us walks in the dark under the full moon, either quietly or in conversation. The clouds drifted apart enough to let the moonlight through only at the end of our walk, but before then the blanket of snow reflected enough of the residual sunlight and of course the human-made light for us to get by without flashlights, without breaking any ankles.

Walks like these tend to be spiritually “loaded” – sometimes in a funny, humorous way, sometimes a bit morose, most often both in rapid succession. When someone brought up the very real possibility that these open fields, which in season grow hay and bluebirds, would be turned into soccer fields (and parking lots, of course), we all rose up in protest, but then inevitably the conversation turned to the recent history of other such atrocities, and how it got to be that yet another atrocity, here, in this field, is legally, even culturally possible. No one went too deep into time, though – what atrocities lie there are too much. And someone said: “Well, that was a buzz kill!” and we laughed and enjoyed the walk – the enjoyment of the walk the very reason for, if need be, fighting for this field, and therefore, don’t get me wrong, a very worthwhile effort.

But it set the tone for me.

Geese started honking at each other in the dark distance, calling up that deeper time, and deeper still. How ancient are their species and their flyways and, glory, here I stand listening to them, in what is truly their field. Further off was also the sound of the traffic on the road. I wondered out loud why there was so much light (the cloud cap was still tightly drawn) and why it was so orange/pink – but no, no one else would have it. Someone said it was the snow reflecting the light, believing, perhaps, that one being natural, so must the other.

I was not the only one, though, struggling with the contradiction. It ran through the hour. How ugly and artificial our world is, how nurturing is nature. Someone talked about dragon lines, which are alignments in landscapes. Are they natural, artificial? But the thread was never really taken up. It was – it was – too enjoyable to be there.

It wasn’t time for activism, for plotting how we would save this field, get others to walk it with us and get attached to it. What then, was I feeling that I could not let go?

I laughed with everyone when one of us, who was not looking down at the slushy/slippery treacherous ground while we were descending a slope, all strung-out, called moooo-OOOON in a very wild and haunting way. We all stopped and looked up then and the ice floes in the sky broke up and there she was, that body. Others took up the call, but not the one dog present. I found I could laugh with them while the moon pulled at me. Like Josh Ritter writes,

“she pulls on your heart as she pulls on the sea”

and she ripped the grief right out of me.

Funny, I thought, that it would be the moon, that extra-terrestrial that is oblivious to, above our mayhem. Then I did a double-take. Of course, the moon too has seen our mayhem: we went there, too, planted a flag there. We just couldn’t resist.

And that that was a US flag also mattered. I have been thinking of what it means that I immigrated to this country, that I live on and off the many takings and that I too am therefore a taker. I started reading about the indigenous people to learn what it is like for those living in a dying culture, to see it die. That was at first. I soon realized that by immigrating here, living here, calling this “my home”, I too am living on the corpse of that murdered culture.

I’ve been in that state, lately, of openness to whatever accusation the land will throw at me. If I call it home (whether rightfully or not), the land has the right to call me out.

But here now were the geese, calling me out, and the pink field, too. And now the moon as well!? I wondered, how do I even stand upright and laugh at the wild yell of these fellow human beings clad in Gore-Tex and Ray-Tech, and leather. How is this even possible? And then it hit me.

This is not guilt that I feel, but grief. The field, the geese, the moon were telling me this. Stop feeling guilty, start grieving. You cannot live with guilt, you cannot make peace with it. But we want you to live, we want you to make peace with yourself, and we want you to grieve, because only if you are grieving will you be truly, deeply alive and able to do right by us.

On the way back, five minutes to the parking lot (yes), I could no longer hold it back. I could typically not directly say what I was feeling (I hope that skill, too, I will learn), so I anounced my admiration for Stephen Jenkinson and his observation that

“guilt is grief for amateurs.”

Well, that came out of nowhere for the friend to whom I had directed the pronouncement. She said, but let’s not dwell on guilt, and added that that’s what she likes about Transition, that it’s so positive. And I said, yes, guilt we must avoid, or work through, but grief… grief… I could not make myself understood, but she must have grasped some of it. She brought up the documentary Traces of the Trade, A Story from the Deep North, about a woman (the filmmaker) who realized that her ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in the US, and who set out to stare this atrocity in the face.

Well, had I not just had the Great Insight into grief-not-guilt, I would have stark fallen over, right there in the slush in front of everyone, and wailed. How had I left out that atrocity? This land is piled with corpses…

I reeled but stood, quite speechless. My friend and I left it at that, an opening. I came home and after Amie was asleep I watched the trailer of Traces of the Trade and was in for another surprise. In that trailer, Katrina Browne, the filmmaker, says it, literally, exactly that: that once she looked, unflinching, at the atrocities and her and her family and the world’s role in it,

“it became natural to want to make things right, not out of personal guilt, but out of grief.”

I have to stop being an amateur and start the work, part of which may well be to teach the absolute necessity that we not mistake grief for guilt, that we must grieve because the situation is grievous, and that only then can we start the work of making things right.

2013-02-17-1343_300

Holding the edge with a bunch of intrepid friends. A local “rally” in solidarity with our friends marching in Washington DC. We stayed till I no longer felt my fingertips and toes, and my speech became slurred. Then we had hot cocoa.

This is the article I wrote for the local press:

Waylanders Rally for Climate Change in DC and locally

On Sunday, 17 February, a small group of Waylanders stood on the corner of Routes 20 and 27 holding signs with “Climate Change Act Now” and “No Tar Sands”. They were showing their solidarity with the tens of thousands marching in Washington D.C. that day to urge President Obama to move the nation forward on climate.

“I couldn’t make it to the rally in D.C.,” said Anne Harris, “so it was fun to have our small rally here in Wayland. My hope is to keep climate action in the forefront of people’s minds as we ask our leaders to seek solutions to the country’s challenges”.

The freezing temperature and nasty wind in Wayland rivaled the conditions in D.C., where 35,000 marched to make the largest Climate March in US history, according to 350.org.

Wayland resident Sabine von Mering, who was there, said, “To me this march was a great experience because, like Bill McKibben, I had been waiting for this movement to come about for many years. Since I first came to the US twenty years ago I thought it’s impossible that a country that brought forth the civil rights movement and Dr. King, and people like Henry David Thoreau and Rachel Carson, would fall so far behind Europe in demanding environmental justice and action on climate change. Today at this march I saw the real America, the USA that I love and cherish. People who care that our political leaders listen to our best scientists, people who take a two-day bus ride to make sure their voice is not drowned out by moneyed lobbyists. People of all ages and walks of life who join together saying ‘enough is enough. We must protect this planet. It’s the only one we have’.”

The group at the corner of the Cochituate and Boston Post Roads also had the blowing snow to contend with and, admittedly, not that many bodies to stay warm, but all that didn’t seem to matter. That the day was a typical winter’s day wasn’t all that ironic to Andrea Case. “A snowy winter makes people question ‘global warming’,” she said. “But intense weather, whether blizzards, hurricanes, droughts or repeated record high temperature days, are all harbingers of climate change.”

Asked if this was a successful event, Kaat Vander Straeten, said, “Yes! Look, there were only seven of us, but there was no place I’d rather be. Hundreds of people driving by saw our message, and that wouldn’t have happened if we had stayed home.”

Back in DC, von Mering noted, “There was clearly a somber note to the gathering, because we all know that our chances of winning this fight are pretty slim. Which is why it was so important to see so many of us. Every single person I met today understands what’s at stake. This was a gathering of smart people who care and who want to turn things around. People who are willing to risk a lot for everyone’s sake. I was proud to be with them. I feel greatly encouraged for the future.”

DSCF9939

And here we go again. Nemo is upon us, starting to throw what will amount, according to the forecast, to buckets of snow. Of course the power is going to go: we expect it now. And as I alternate staring out the window with staring at the Wundermap, I realize how contradictory and conflicting my feelings are about all this.

Staring at the Wundermap, it bugs me that our power grid, our communities, our homes are not resilient. Put the darn lines underground – but who will pay for that? Why didn’t we at least get a generator? Why are we dragging our feet on the issue that when the grid goes, the solar array goes as well? Should we get a battery backup or some other way of storing the energy? I check on the chargers, powering up all the batteries in the house. I crank the emergency radios. Did mice get into the bug out bag again? Half that bag is electronics. We’ll have the Kindle and DH’s smartphone to go on the net. The freezer is stuffed: if we don’t open it, the food in there will stay good for a couple of days. We should move our cars to the bottom of the driveway…

Staring out the window — at the towering, whitening, waving trees, the snow horses blowing through, the raccoon’s tracks, erasing — I calm infinitely down. I know there is a big wood pile and lots of dry firewood on the porch still. The wood stove is idle now but it’s ready to warm our house when the temperature drops, and for cooking and boiling water. The pantry is stuffed, and I just made bread. We have enough books and games to keep us entertained for weeks-years. I’m thinking, if he power goes out for a long time we’ll just put everything in our fridge in a box on the porch – latch the door so the raccoon won’t get in. The tropical fish in the heated tank would perish, but the chickens and the bees will be fine. I wish we had a cat, to take care of those mice. Amie can play for us on the cello. I wish I could play the cello…

I find more comfort, more safety in those things: in what Ivan Illich called “tools for conviviality,” in wholesome sources of energy made available by nature, and in the fruits of hard work on our part, and in companionship. The wishes and wants that these conjure are sweet and slow.

In my work I promote both these sides. I am trying to make my community “go solar,” working on energy “solutions” while promoting skillshares, arranging potlucks, joining in hope and despair work. But more and more I know that it is only the latter that I am passionate about because only they make me feel truly safe, fulfilled and connected. No extra machine is going to make me feel secure in the face of the fragility of our technology. I may rationalize that we need “green technology” to buy us the time we need, but I believe it less and less.

More and more it feels like just another postponement of the inevitable, and we’re the kid who did something wrong (terribly wrong), taking a detour on the way home, where the reckoning awaits. But we must and do want to and will go home to the deep and dark ecology.

Update: the next morning:

DSCF9962

In my journal I wrote:

Understanding comes and goes as huge, crashing waves. One recedes and the other comes. It’s hard to catch your breath.

I had just finished reading Stephen Jenkinson’s latest post, “There’s Grief in Coming Home,” when I looked up and I must have had an expression on my face for Amie asked: “What is it, Mama?”

I said: “I just read something by a man with great wisdom, a wise man. You can learn a lot from wise people.”

Amie asked: “Do we know any wise people?”

The question took me unawares. I had to think for a moment.

“We may know wise people, but we don’t know. There used to be a time when people asked for and shared wisdom freely. Now, we wouldn’t know if we were talking to a wise person.”

Amie said: “Just like there are no cobblers any more.”

This went back to her request yesterday morning that I take her to a cobbler so she could learn how to make shoes (she’s reading Little House). I explained there aren’t many cobblers now. She thought this preposterous.

“Who makes our shoes then?”

“Why, machines.”

That didn’t seem so self-evident to her, at all.

“Why?” (as in Why on earth!?)

And we talked, about machines making more, faster, cheaper. About how they do mostly everything, makes shoes, harvest crops.

This had not occurred to her. This didn’t seem right to her.

Why does it seem right to (most of) us?

Through the eyes of your child you look into the dark heart of your culture and your heart skips a beat because the dark heart is your heart, questioning itself, grieving.

So I asked myself that: So what? So what if I feel that I need it or that I somehow deserve it?

The dream of childhood, of what we were “promised”: a happy life that can only be better, faster, bigger than what came before. A world where problems (ecological degradation, economic shortfalls, social injustice, health problems) and inconveniences (having to get water or grow food, or having to wait more than a second for an internet connection) will be solved by technology, science and reasonable action. That is what humans do, isn’t it? Thanks to us, life will always be better, faster, bigger. It goes without saying!

No.

That was a dream so taken for granted, sustainable only thanks to several delusions, chief among them the delusion that no one, human or other, had to suffer for what I felt was rightfully mine. How desperately I clung to that, thinking that if they suffered, it was their bad luck but not my good luck because luck had nothing to do with it, right? Even when I feared that yes, luck does have something to do with it, I had a way out: I’d be a fool not to take it, I actually can’t but take it, because here it is, given, and anyway if I don’t take it, somebody else will, or it will go to waste. And anyway – round and round I went – I worked for this, or my parents did, and now I deserve it, somehow.

Was it a crisis of the imagination? For I could not even imagine that it could all go away, that there could be problems – even problems of our own making – that could not be solved: predicaments. Despite the thousands of stories and images of those who dreamed just like me but who had already lost it, the dreamer clung to her vision of the future as one where the problems will all go away, or it won’t be so bad after all, or it won’t affect me… It became harder and harder to keep that up. I can’t pinpoint the moment, quite a few years ago, when the last straw punctured the bubble. Suddenly I imagined it, that my luck was running out, and I realized it was possible, that all this could be taken away from me. A lot of what you can read on this blog is the result of that realization.

That was not the end of it. When the bubble bursts the bottom falls out as well and instead of round and round you get to go down and down. It took me a while to figure out that what was going on was not just the fear, anger and grief that come with this new vision or the sheer logistics of preparing for a new future, but another, more serious crisis that was yet to be resolved: a crisis of gratitude.

The Thirteenth Moon

Even if you have lost heart
She puts a tide in you
Even if you have lost heart
You will be moved
You will be all lined up
The soil has tides
Bedrock has tides
The horizon heaves
She will drag even you

“That turns out to be a place where it’s just it and me.“

When I wrote that, it occurred to me that that is how – in solitude – many seek their god(s) and that that is how I used to experience spiritually during rich introspective times in my life, before all this came down, before Transition. Why had I lost sight of that? This is why: I forgot it in my sudden rush to act, which soon turned into a full-blown desire to save the world, which meant, of course, coming out of my solitude.

It turns out that what I thought I had to do (save the world) is not my role. These last few months, I have been letting go of the wish to save the world. Being the committed activist that I still am, and still a seeker of joy-even-though-I-have-considered-all-the-facts, and still a believer in my power to change things, there can be only one thing that could make me give that up: I let go of the hope that the world is, at all, savable.

As I write this, I am amazed at how easy it is to say that. It wasn’t easy coming to accept it.

Here, ask yourself: what is it that you most cherish, that you most want and might even have? Ask yourself: why won’t I give it up? Because you made it or worked for it? Because you deserve it and it makes you happy, maybe even makes you you? Consider any of those reasons, and any others. Then ask yourself:

So what?

Do you dare to test

the endurance of your hope

To take it to that far place

where still it refuses to leave

or maybe not.

Where, regardless,

it turns out to be

not what you wanted,

but what you need.

I feel like I’ve gained some clarity in the last few months, but it has been hard to write about it. Every time I sit down to start, the task seems impossible. So let me break it down into pieces – events, insights, decisions, changes in plans.

The first evening when all of my thinking and reading actually “came together” was the evening I decided to leave my church (Unitarian Universalist). I can’t remember what came first in the process: the sudden flare of insight (this is what it all means, this is how it all hangs together), the insight that leaving the church is one of the things I need to do because of this new insight, or the very act of emailing the people in the congregation I care most about – good friends, fortunately, also outside of church – and taking the step. All I remember was the immense empowerment of seeing an insight emerge out of many strands of thought, feeling and soul-searching, and acting on it. Sadness too, that this newly emerging insight meant that I had to give up something that I cherished (and that it wouldn’t be the last thing I will need to give up). And, lastly, awesome too, because I had felt uncomfortable with this cherished “membership” for while, and now here it was: the reason why!

So, as to the reason why.

I work with a vision of our predicament all day long. All my thinking, reading and writing are related to it, and my activism, and nowadays also every act of mothering, shopping, cooking, doing laundry-you name it. I am now at a stage that I carry this vision with me at all times and nothing escapes it. It is empowering, frightening and often exhausting. It is not a comforting vision, though it does allow me or actually inspires in me, a kind of joyfulness. I call this Joyfulness Notwithstanding.

I need a place where I can keep my Joyfulness Notwithstanding alive and cultivate it. How? Not by retreating to a place where I can forget that vision for a while, but on the contrary by actively stepping into a place where I can look at it clearly.

That turns out to be a place where it’s just it and me.

And so a place where I do not have to discuss/justify the vision and where I am not confronted with circumstances that I feel are part of the problem and that automatically bring out the activist in me. Working to eliminate paper cups during coffee hours is fulfilling work for me as an activist, and as an activist, I want to keep working with the congregation on these issues. But it greatly muddles my spiritual clarity.

Robin Hill Gardens

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts

Category Archives: future worries

The Companion (*)

Woodcocks or, Of Extinctions

Of Flowers

Grief under the Full Moon

My Weekend: Holding the Edge, With Friends

Thoughts on Technology in the Face of a Blizzard

Wise People and Cobblers

Clarity, In Pieces (iii)

Clarity, in Pieces (ii)

Clarity, in Pieces (i)

Solar Production