Hope

Every morning the fawn with the broken leg comes to nibble the apples that are rotting under the yellow trees. Her mother is gone, almost surely killed by a car or a hunter. The baby is too young to be alone, and her broken leg ribbons uselessly as she lurches around our yard. I want to collect all the apples she needs and feed them to her, gather her up in my arms, make her a splint. The hunters are out; winter is coming. I can't save her. Sometimes she lifts her head and her longlashed eyes, the color of madrone bark, meet mine. Rain mists her silver whiskers and dappled cinnamon haunches as ravens chortle like tricksters in dripping cedars. Every afternoon, when I run in the forest, an ominous percussion punches the amber quiet: I wonder if she will survive the guns, if I will see her tomorrow.

A few days ago I read an essay by Wade Davis, who I have always admired, in which he writes that he agrees with Peter Matthiesson: "Anyone who thinks they can change the world is both wrong and dangerous." I wonder— is that really what he believes? Or is it his broken heart speaking? In the essay, Davis discusses mass extinction and ecological amnesia, and describes how the skies used to go completely dark with passenger pigeons, and the prairies used to thunder under stampeding buffalo; in a couple of generations, he says, invaders not only destroyed all this but forgot it, and this forgetting is the strangest and most chilling feature of colonizer culture. And then Davis echoes Peter Matthieson's statement, which makes me want to cry and argue at the same time.

I agree with his comment about the amnesia of colonizer culture, but only in part. I think our minds have forgotten, but our bodies have not. Our amnesia is the temporary amnesia of people who have been impacted by colossal forgotten traumas—and in the right conditions, the blocks that stop us from remembering the world beyond screens and freeways and shopping malls, and registering the extent to which our culture’s pathological drive to consume and control has eradicated its pulsing diversity, will vanish. Our memory isn’t gone; we just can’t access it from within the confines of conditioned minds. We might act as if the midwest has always been monocultures of corn, and the sky was always silent, but our bodies register the absence of the beings that were meant to share this habitat— the families upon families upon families eradicated by colonizer violence.

One of the defining features of modern culture is a surging epidemic of depression and anxiety—mental disorders once primarily confined to an older population, now sky-rocketing in youth, along with rates of suicide. I suspect that much of the sadness and terror that afflicts us comes from our intuiton of all that is missing, all that was taken. We are tied by endless fractal webs to every one we call other, whether human or salmon or bison or crane, and no matter how dense our denial or convincing our fictions, our bodies know this. Our denial of our interconnection underlies the loneliness that haunts us, and our loneliness manifests in epidemics of mental disorder. Until we break the spell of being separate and awaken to connection with and responsibility toward creation, all that is unresolved—not only inside ourselves but in our world, this body we share with so many others— will shadow and curse our comfortable lives.

I have moments when cynicism detonates my dreams with the force of my incalculable grief. In a world this bleak, hope doesn’t stick around unless it is regenerated through practice. To witness this world without looking away is to be devastated continually. But to witness and feel the pain of the world without faith to hold us up, without a larger vision to inspire allegiance to wonder and awe, without a community of like-minded earth-loving revolutionaries to catch us when we fall and help us to our feet, is to sabotage our capacity for self-transformation, without which cultural transformation is impossible. When we collapse, our capacity to serve the healing of our world is defeated. And the world needs us on our feet, chins up and senses alert, more than ever before.

How do we do this? Not alone, but hand in hand. Hope needs a matrix, and we weave this matrix by doing inner work that returns us to embodied relationality, the ancestral inheritance we lost when civilization built a wall between us and the earth. We do this by becoming friends with the beings that our culture taught us to ignore, reaching outside the loops in our lonely skulls to recover the rapture of intimacy with the more than human cousins our wellbeing depends on. We do this by keeps our souls tuned to possibility, our minds clear, and our bodies connected to the regenerating powers of nature. We ground our hope in knowledge. We notice what depletes power and we make our choices centered in love. I turn away from the news, and instead research ecology, history, ancient cultures, indigenous traditions and ways of being, movements for social justice, plant taxonomies, animal guides. My studies make patterns clear, which is helpful for restoring perspective but perspective is not enough—ultimately, the only way out of the cage is awakening. Awakening requires humility. Awakening means sitting at the feet of mentors from lineages whose ways of life are centered in the ethic of interconnection. Awakening means putting my head in the lap of the mother of us all when I’m inconsolable, letting her hands of wind and water clear me of the inherited materialist and individualist convictions that block my awareness of porous truths, subtle dimensions, and fluid possibilities. Awakening means bowing deeply, knees on soil, forehead to moss, and letting the mother’s song lead me to the place where I can see beyond the self-destructive, ecocidal mania of the dominant culture to the deep oceanic wisdom of Life itself, and align myself with that divinity, and make my vows of service, with a pocketful of seeds and my eyes on the infinite stars.

It helps me to remember that our culture is not definitive of humanity anymore than a person who has been traumatized to the point of insanity is definitive of the mentality of everyone in the neighborhood. Our culture is an aberration from an evolutionary journey that has an abundance of evidence of cultures who have lived sustainably, and would continue to do so, had not the impact of wetiko madness reached their shore. This gives me hope. And so, though I share the pain beneath Matthieson’s statement, I respectfully disagree. A review of social justice movements provides ample evidence of humans who changed their world, and quantum physics confirms what teachers throughout time express: we are nodes in webs within webs of relationship, and no matter how small our deeds seem, they ripple beyond us and into our world. We were not given these miraculous bodies and fantastic minds so we could watch the tragedy pass from comfortable seats, numbing ourselves with our addictions until the wave or fire or hurricane or army comes for us. We are here to give the gifts within us; this is how we change ourselves, and changing ourselves, we change the world. How could we not? There is no world outside us; the apocalypse cannot be separated from our choices. When we shift our minds, bodies, eyes— the world shifts.

John Lennon said “Where there’s life, there’s hope.” Margaret Meade said: "Never doubt that a small group of individuals can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has." Helen Keller said "life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all". Che Guevara said “…the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.” I’m sticking with these wisdomkeepers; I’m counting myself among the tricksters who find a way around every wall, and the bodhisattvas who make vows to incarnate into lives of devotion as many times as it takes, until all beings are free. I'm with the activists who let nothing stop them. I’m with Edward Abbey and Joanna Macy and Arundhati Roy and Derrick Jensen and Robin Wall Kimmerer and Rebecca Solnit and Paul Shepard and Chellis Glendinning and everyone else whose voice guides us to a kinder world.