“Eileen Crist reminds us that while it is important to know
that human language and storytelling are crucial in understanding, it is also
vital to consider there are other ways to communicate, many of which have been
drowned out by the very noise of language and story. ‘These others have been de
facto silenced because if they once spoke to us in other registers – primitive,
symbolic, sacred, totemic, sensual or poetic – they have receded so much they
no longer convey such numinous turns of speech, and they are certainly unable
by now to rival the digital sirens of the dominant culture.’ Mars, a eucalyptus
tree, an owl, a baby. We have to listen carefully for the registers they use to
speak. At times, we need to be silent.” – Maeve Higgins, Tell Everyone on This
Train I Love Them.
I closed the book, and looked out past the woman in the
window seat to take in the view from 30,000 feet. I saw a snowy mountain peak,
alone amongst foothills. My mind wandered to its seismic or eruptive beginning,
the power of the earth as plates collide or molten rock erupts. I hesitated to
use the word “violence,” the violence of the earth as mountains were formed. It
seems a human observation to put a descriptor onto what is natural simply
because the plates colliding wreak havoc to our human societal structures. I
wonder when we lost the connection to “listen carefully for the register they
use to speak.” As I listened, enclosed in a human-made contraption using fossil
fuel to get me from one place to another more quickly, I heard the mountain
remind me of how small I am. How the mountain had existed and would exist long
beyond my time on the planet, whether reflecting the sun from a snow-pack or
the flint of bare rock. I received a sense of rest, of connection to the earth,
even that earth that heaves up mountains.
Scrolling stories a few days ago on Instagram, I think it
was Ella F. Sanders, a writer and artist whose reflections on her world enlarge
my understanding of my own, who posted something along the lines of, “I find I
don’t have anything to say.”
I'm sure she felt she would again have words and images to
share to help us all process these moments,, but in that moment, there were no
words. I’ve been experiencing that lately, a numbness and exhaustion, a tinge
of warning of depression. Also a need to process and be quiet. Days in which I
still find some joy and joys, but also find myself wishing to fill the hours
with mindless tasks, laundry, dishes, grocery shopping, til the sun is setting
and it is socially acceptable to pour a glass of wine and disappear into the
stories of the shows I’m watching, to then sleep and wake in the wee small
hours to wonder about my anxiety-ridden bizarre dreams and then finally wake to
start again.
I haven’t felt curious, a state for which I strive to be in
as much as possible. The lack of feeling is for me a warning sign of the precipice
of depression, but also a normal trauma response to living in this world – the
daily news filled with violence, wars, refugees, mass shootings by terrorist
white men, a minority of powerful people leveraging their faith as a weapon to
take away the human rights from the majority. Friends suffering and I can’t
take any of the anxiety or fear from them. I feel it all and it is too much.
The unrelenting lesson that to love is to open yourself to
pain alongside all the joy it brings. To feel fully is frightening sometimes,
so I begin to feel nothing, to survive, to ignore and pass the days without the
joyful highs of life, because with them come the murky, dark lows.
The mountain, the words of thoughtful writers, allowed a bit
of curiosity back, I do have something to say. I crave an escape to be in total
silence at the edge of the ocean or foot of a mountain, but I also need to sit
in stillness in my noisy neighborhood, to listen to what the planet is trying
to tell me, what doing the dishes and laundry has to teach me, that life is
worth living for our connection, to the rocks, the earth, and each other. My
empathy for the precious souls whose lives were ended with so much violence is
nothing unless it leads me to action, to eradicate white supremacy and racism
when I see or sense it in my own life, in our systems, in our land that we have
crushed with environmental racism. (Check Last Week Tonight for a solid lesson
on that front.)
Maeve Higgins notes that the use of the term “’Anthropocene’
which the National Geographic Society defines as ‘an unofficial unit of
geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when
human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and
ecosystems.’ In ‘On the Poverty of our Nomenclature,’ Eileen Crist argues
against using ‘Anthropocene.’ … in that the discourse ‘refuses to challenge
human dominion, proposing instead technological and managerial approaches that
would make human dominion sustainable. By the same token, the Anthropocene
discourse blocks from consideration the possibility of abolishing a way of life
founded on the domination of nature.’”
Higgins notes: “Humans lived on the planet for thousands of
years before the Industrial Revolution without causing the massive damage we
suffer today.”
This may be why watching the show “Station Eleven” was such
a beautiful and powerful experience. A catastrophic virus forced the surviving
humans to live differently, without the internet or petrol, and together,
creatively, they found ways of living in society, caring for one another,
creating and sharing art. It wasn’t utopia, and violence and egos were present
as destructive forces, but they were not what the majority wanted or needed.
I hope that as we face what seems insurmountable,
eradicating and unlearning white supremacy, changing our lives to embrace
living in harmony with the earth instead of extracting from it, and
guaranteeing human rights to every person, we can do so with a great
imagination of what could be, not fear of what is. Listening beyond our limited
language to what messages the planet and others have to teach us.