Pause.
Feb 10, 2023
Day 102
Dear friends and family,
I’m currently sitting on the floor of my jungle cabin, the sounds of chirping birds and crashing waves surrounding me. I am taking a break from writing my narrative this week. I am both physically and mentally unwell.
Physically, I am suffering a head cold and achy body. I don’t say this to make you worry… I am taking medicine, resting, and will be restored soon. My symptoms, I believe, are a representation of something larger.
The utter density of greenery that surrounds this cabin are like something of a fairytale. Growing up in a city I was about as removed from this Atlantic Forest as I could have been, and yet, my well-being is tied to its health, to the health of all natural places.
Everywhere I go, from the highest peaks of the Andes, to the windy lands of Patagonia, to the ice covered Antarctica, to the humid forests of Brazil, things are changing. This is, of course, the simplest statement. The only constant in the universe is constant change. And yet, my heart is breaking.
I thirst with the Peruvian whose well has dried due to rapid glacier melting, who will soon become another of the thousands of climate refugees. I hear the flap of the flamingos wings searching for safe nesting ground, as year after year their home turns into more mines consuming more fresh water and producing more toxic waste.
I find myself unable to heal without first diving deeper into this communal, planetary suffering and my relationship to it. How do I live a life that causes less harm when all I know of success is tied up in a system of dead end cycles? What does post-capitalist financial sustainability and independence mean in a capitalist world? How do I find what I love to do when I feel so much pain I can barely breath? What does hope mean amidst all this suffering?
Maybe the best we can do is not enough to save the world. Maybe we are not supposed to save the world. Maybe we are simply supposed to love each other, love ourselves, try to have an impact for good where we can, try to minimize pain and suffering where we can, and in the wake of this insurmountable grief we feel as the world burns and floods around us, there is something being born. Maybe our hearts break so there is space for this something new to come into existence.
And so, I am taking some time to explore these questions without noise and chaos. I am turning off for a few days, or weeks, to listen to nature, to listen to myself, to love and heal my body, and to take tender care of my heart and soul.
I’m sending you love, peace, and presence.
Be well,
Hannah
An excerpt from You Don’t Have to Be Complicit in Our Culture of Destruction and interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer By David Marchese
Marchese: I could easily imagine someone reading your work and drawing the conclusion that you believe capitalism and the way it has oriented our society has been a net negative. Both for the harm it has caused the earth but also for the harm it has caused to our relationship with the earth as individuals. But as plenty of other people have pointed out, capitalism has raised countless millions out of poverty * (we developed the concept of poverty through capitalism!!), led to improved life-expectancy rates and on and on. Is that all fool’s gold to you?
Kimmerer: Unquestionably the contemporary economic systems have brought great benefit in terms of human longevity, health care, education and liberation to chart one’s own path as a sovereign being. But the costs that we pay for that? It goes back to human exceptionalism, because these benefits are not distributed among all species. We have to think about more than our own species, that these liberatory benefits have come at the price of extinction of other species and extinctions of entire landscapes and biomes, and that’s a tragedy. Can we derive other ways of being that allow our species to flourish and our more-than-human relatives to flourish as well? I think we can. It’s a false dichotomy to say we could have human well-being or ecological flourishing. There are too many examples worldwide where we have both, and that narrative of one or the other is deeply destructive and cuts us off from imagining a different future for ourselves.
Lyrics
With the conviction of the woman you made me
I find
Blades of grass from the island you lent me
I find
On every floor
In every drawer
Though I'm not an island I'm a body of water
Jeweled in the evening a solitary daughter
If picked at by noon
By midnight I'm ruined
Leave me alone to the books and the radio snow
Leave me alone to the charcoal and the dancing shadow
If each blade of grass was meant here for me
Split apart, sliced, and wedged in for me
Who's gonna treat it?
I'm not going to need it
Leave me alone to the books and the radio snow
Leave me alone to the charcoal and the dancing shadow
I am a lake
Don't need to be watered
I am an ocean
I don't need to barter
I play with the moon
My only friend
It pushes it pulls me
I don't pay rent
I don't need the walls
To bury my grave
I don't need your company
To feel saved
I don't need the sunlight
My curtains don't draw
I don't need objects
To keep or to pawn
I don't want your pity
Concern or your scorn
I'm calm by my lonesome
I feel right at home
And when the wind blows
I get to dancing
My fun is the rhythm of air
When it's prancing
Leave me alone to the books and the radio snow
Leave me alone to the charcoal and the dancing shadow