As I sit down to write this morning, Lyra is on my lap. He's picked up on my mood--his timing is often, like today, uncanny. He has come to mitigate the profound sadness and despair I feel. How many times will I begin a blog post with the words "It's not been a good couple of weeks"? Until the midterm elections in the U.S., I suppose. But it has seriously not been a good couple of weeks. The floods in Texas and the heartbreaking loss of children and other innocent people living on a flood plain breaks my heart. I want to tell everyone who lost a friend or a family member in those floods to dedicate their lives to addressing climate change. Yes, it's not the only cause of those floods, but it's something people can actually do. It's something all of us can do through daily choices. Make each "green" choice an active act of remembrance for people around the world who die of weather or the disease and starvation that are exacerbated by a hotter climate, for people who have lost their homes or livelihood because of forest fires.
Then there are the people who die in Gaza waiting for food or water. I don't know how we can fail to see this as genocide.
And then there's the Big Beautiful Bill--the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich that history has ever seen. It's obscene that the wealthy get tax cuts while the poor get Medicare cuts.
It is also midsummer in Regina, and we've been gifted with rain. The city is quite lush. One of the unexpected effects of my cataract surgery is that I can see every leaf on a tree, and I register the variety planted through the city with delight. My clematis is vivacious and ecstatic. My bush beans have put out the most etherially-coloured blossoms and the pole beans are half way up their poles. My pots of herbs are jubilant. When I make a salad, I simply go out and pick a handful of herbs and drop them in like more lettuce leaves. Last week, I told Nikka that my moods are super-charged, intense, and that I walk a very sharp knife blade; they could go either way. If I'm disciplined enough to "Be. Here. Now." what I feel is joy in the fact that my small part of the planet is not hot and has plenty of rain. I know there are parts of Saskatchewan where this is not the case. But when I look up into the distance--into the future or into other parts of the planet, I feel despair.
My fiction reading has taken a hit. I have no resources left to tolerate the anxiety and uncertainty of a tense plot. I'm re-reading a lot of things I know I can trust, like Frances Itani's The Company We Keep, about a group of people who are struggling with their individual and idiosyncratic griefs--no grief is like another, I suspect--but who nevertheless help and support one another in the most surprising ways. The novel is a celebration of the power that kindness, attentive listening, and conversation have to make us feel part of the human family, and so less isolated in our despair.
Or I turned to nonfiction, often about nature, to educate and enliven my sense of wonder. That was my intention when I picked up Robert Macfarlane's remarkable Is a River Alive? The answer, of course, is yes, but connecting to, listening to, understanding that aliveness in a way that doesn't anthropomorphise the river is a deep undertaking that requires unselfing ourselves and our language.
But of course, the three rivers he visits, one of them Canadian, are all under threat. Ever a thoughtful writer who doesn't (like me these days) avoid tales of doom, Macfarlane listens to the story of resistance to exploitation that many people, often at the cost of their lives, have put up to save his first river, Rio Los Cedros, a river in the cedar cloud forest of Ecuador. Capitalism is hungry for the mountain's precious minerals. Do we really need more gold? What for?
Macfarlane writes of his and my fragile equilibrium as he hears about two waterfalls of the same river, side by side, one destroyed by mining, one pristine: "I'm pierced again by hope and futility: the two streams of the waterfall. Hope at the tirelessness of these people, resisting across generations. Futility at this living forest's vulnerability in the face of the force that comes from the barrel of a gun or the corporate profit motive. Could such power ever be brought to recognize the river and forest as complexly alive?" As I read these words, I realized that my fragile mood is simply an effect of living in the twenty-first century and paying attention. (Maybe paying too much attention for my own good.) Maybe my frame of mind is simply an effect of being human, certainly during hungry late capitalism in a time when power has been rendered toxic and self-serving in many places in the world.
Because what's being fought out are two different understandings of power. The power to exploit, to turn nature or the suffering of others into dollars. The power to take, to gather into one's already sizeable hoard anything that's not physically or legally locked down. The power of Smaug. How lonely and isolated and ultimately inadequate such power is, even while it steals the well-being of others.
Or the power to give. I've also been reading A Different Kind of Power, Jacinda Ardern's remarkable memoir of her journey from being the kid of a cop whose "beat" was a small, poor town to Premier House, where the New Zealand prime minister lives. On her way to her swearing in, she takes a call from journalist John Campbell. He wants "one last idealistic flourish" from her. "What is it you want to do?" "'I want this government to feel different,' I said. 'I want people to feel that it's open, that it's listening, and that it's going to bring kindness back.'" Ardern goes on to write "'Kindness.' That was the word. It is a child's word, in a way. Simple. And yet it encompassed everything that had left an imprint on me....All the people I'd known through the years: family and friends, people I'd worshiped alongside or worked with, even fought with, but always--always--in the service of something better. Some people thought kindness was sentimental, soft. A bit naive, even. I knew this. But I also knew they were wrong. Kindness has a power and strength that almost nothing else on this planet has. I'd seen kindness do extraordinary things: I'd seen it give people hope; I'd seen it change minds and transform lives."
The other natural resource we have as these conceptions of power vie for world domination is awe. We can begin with the awe we feel in the presence of acts of "moral beauty," acts of imagination or compassion or generosity toward people who are struggling--as we all are. But we can also be in awe at the tiny green beans that I found this afternoon as I harvested some rhubarb. I learned from Zoe Schlanger's book The Light Eaters, a book on the intelligence and consciousness of plants--though the scientists she follows argue with those words even while the plant behaviour they describe can't be seen any other way--that seeds have been called a plant's lunch bag containing its first meal and its DNA. Those beans I saw this afternoon, about an inch long and not much thicker than a darning needle, were contained in that little package I put in the soil about six weeks ago. In turn, those tiny beans will contain seeds of their own--a set of magical nesting dolls. Or the awe that we should feel about butterflies. We don't actually know what happens in the chrysalis a caterpillar makes. We know the caterpillar more or less dissolves completely, but we can't exactly open it up to see what is happening or we'll halt the process. So for a while the chrysalis is full of goo. Then it has wings. What's the point of awe? Or of kindness? Or of sharing with someone who confesses that while she was grieving the death of her husband sometimes all she could do was curl up on the floor that you did the same thing after your mother died. I'll let Robert Macfarlane close today:
"Ideas move in space and time. They swim like fish. They drift like pollen. They migrate like birds. Sometimes their movement carries them right around the world, and they find new niches in which to flourish."
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