The Earth is Deeper Than They Are Tall

Note: I have referred in this writing to all living things in addition to humans as “They.”

*

Two birds flew out from a cloud,

I looked up as they went overhead

feeling a tug between their bodies and mine

a triangle formed between us,

my heart the center point.

Hope is a form of poverty,

a thief of the present moment

creating debt by nurturing dissatisfaction,

promising something or someone or sometime

other than this, us and now.

As the two birds

flew into the distance

the strings between our bodies

stretched out like a slingshot.

There is a spot along the Mississippi River near my home in Saint Paul, MN, where the water flows in all directions at once. They twist like the downy barbs of a shed feather resting in the leaves, wind-blown and turbid with sunlight. The water threads inward, up, to the side, back into themselves and out, tying infinite knots through the sky and trees reflecting down from above.

Here at this spot the Mississippi makes a quick turn to the west. Beneath their surface is a limestone shelf where up to 20 different species of freshwater mussels make its precipice their home.

For years as commercial barge traffic ran up and down the river between Saint Paul and Minneapolis the tugs pushing these barges would engage their thrusters to make the sharp turn. The pressure of the surging water against the limestone over time cut away at the ledge, making it more prominent beneath the river’s surface.

I do not know how the mussels or the limestone felt about these tug boats constantly going past, pushing loads of sand, metal and grain up and down the river. I imagine clouds of old glacier dust getting stirred up every time one came along, heaving into the darknesses of oil in order to make the turn. I imagine the moments of silence after it passed. Where the plateville particles and snail fossils settled back down to the river bottom, slipping between the branches of sunken trees and snagged fishing lures.

When I stand on the banks and look out across this boiling, searching water, I imagine the stories beneath the surface. The textures of the rock, the sunken timber and fallen shells, Lake Superior agates nestled in the St. Peter Sandstone, glacier memories and ancient animal bones. Here I have witnessed the calmest and the most turbulent water. Like a vortex, like a hole in the day to slip through. This is a place where constant change and transformation is unavoidably visible.

When my imagination is led by water, I am rushed to all of the diverse places they move through. So many of which are unseen to humans. I’ve drawn a notebook full of the myriad shapes water takes on as they fill space. A playbill of the roles and characters they become and transform. Water, the shape shifter and magician.

At first gaze, without engaging our imaginations, we will often only see what is on the water’s surface. Sometimes a standing wave or an eddy will make a suggestion about what lies beneath. But largely the mystery and power are held out of sight. Beyond and under what we see. Down in the low places.

Of all these low places, I am drawn to the bottom of the oceans. As some kind of settling place for water to gather themselves after so much running. An expansive nest. Layers of light and dark, rumbling and shifting. The infinite possibility of what rests there, the stories it could tell, like wind through a birdcage.

Roaming through the memory of forms that water has taken on throughout their passage toward the ocean points to the tops of mountains, inside the thickness of glaciers, through ravines, storm drains, gutters, ship decks, airplane wings, animal fur, and rotted timber. Water embodies all modes.

*

I could no longer see them when it happened

but when the birds let go,

my eyes turned into the bottoms

of stones and I awoke

in the center of a glacier.

History depends on forms of repetition

repeating themselves and

the present moment

offers endless opportunity to

reorganize and disrupt that repetition.

This is what the wind

does with seeds,

the fox with their tracks

and the ocean with its rolling white teeth.

How many humans have been to the top of Mount Everest, the earth’s highest point? The names of those who first climbed their skyward forehead are familiar, almost household names in many parts of the world. Names at least more familiar than those who have gone to the earth’s lowest point, the Mariana Trench at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

The Mariana Trench is not only a “low and unseen” space, it is nearly 10,000 feet deeper than Mount Everest is tall. In a world fascinated with numbers and extremes it’s curious why so many are unaware of the existence of this low place.

What is the fascination about the top of the earth, when in reality the earth is far deeper than they are tall! What causes this fixation with towering and visible at the neglect of the invisible places? Is it merely a difference between seen and unseen, convenience and inconvenience? And what possibilities might we be obscuring from our imaginations by a disproportionate focus on the seen?

I find this particularly metaphoric when considering the above fact that the earth is vastly deeper than they are tall. Not unlike our love, that is deeper than the material things we grasp onto in order to express our love through. Or our imaginations that are deeper than what our daily obligations and routines are distilled down to. Or a conversation about the weather that carries just below the surface immense possibility to dive beyond pleasantries.

While human beings tend to have difficulty holding a multiplicity of emotions, realities and truths at once, we also struggle to allow ourselves to exist in multiple spaces at the same time. Water does not. In both high and low places on earth their prominence is great. With the ability to shape shift, water maintains endless possibility for embodying multitudes. To be still, to run, to pool, to change direction, to fill a plurality of levels at once, holding particles, becoming a solid, a slush, going both high and low in a variety of forms.

If water can hold space within the rivers, oceans and topographical divides, tensioning a balance between high and low geographies while also moving driftwood, sediment, animal bones or barges, then where and what is the equivalent to these geographies within the human landscape? How can we learn from the fluid wisdom of water to awaken an awareness to our own multitudes and potential for holding space? How might going low, rather than high, deepen and expand us?

When the stories of prominent patriarchal and capitalist culture are largely justifications for objectification and extraction, what do the stories of the low places, the shape shifting, the fugitive, the shadowy, the churning unseen, offer us in terms of possibility for enlivened stories about relationship, reciprocity, becoming and consciousness? Inhabiting entwinement and woven-ness rather than separateness?

*

Eventually the glacier began to melt

and as my eyes softened a story emerged

that went something like this.

Collectively we overthrew

the cultural hierarchy

that had embedded our lives

in the destructive patterns and beliefs

that insisted on putting an addiction

for convenience and comfort

over the needs of rivers and butterflies,

viewing Mississippi and Walleye

as resources rather than relatives,

and asserting the word of adults was somehow

superior to the laughter of children.

Soon I was engulfed in cold singing water,

pools of it ran in the hollows of my shoulder,

all that remained of the glacier.

Thought patterns of predominant culture are largely grown out of systematic thinking that benefits from conditioning its constituents to see few connections between things. The patriarchy upholds individual identities rather than collective relationality, allowing for less accountability to the greater web of life. When relationships are removed objects can be produced and then mined. Individual objects are easier to extract, manipulate and monitor than ones bound up in relationship.

This way of sectioning off and subdividing resources permeates the external as much as the internal. A mindset that prefers certain emotions at the expense of others has acted as a pesticide onto the field of our collective emotional understory. And like any biome, the less diverse we are, the more difficult it becomes to adapt and integrate the contagion.

By nature, grief and love coexist. The two travel together. They are expressions and manifestations of the other. They have equal and proportional capacities. The more you love the more you grieve. Yet in modern rhetoric grief has become stigmatized. Rather than representing a capacity for vulnerability and transformation it has been cast as the looming dark figure, the one to be avoided and feared at the dinner party.

The othering of grief has promoted an oversexualized and romanticized definition of love. This has left grief banished as the evil twin, cast out, to the forested edgelands.

At a time of immense plant, animal and overall life loss, grief has become unavoidable. This should be no surprise. What is thrown out the window always comes back tenfold in size. The tragedy being that the less prepared we are to welcome it back when it chooses to rear up from the depths, the more pain and suffering will prevail.

I have brought up grief in many recent conversations, suggesting that it is an important piece necessary to nurture the process and inform the transition through climate emergency. On more than one occasion people have told me, “Now don't get too dark or doomsday. We just need to stay positive. We just need hope!”

Hope has always caused suspicions to arise. What exactly do we mean when we say we need hope? How does hope bring this thing we hope for forward? Hope feels more like the top of Mount Everest, while grief might represent the bottom of the ocean. What I mean is that in its modern usage hope appears to often embody a lack of agency. Hope is letting someone else do the work, while you say the words for what it is you hope for. To reach the summit, take in the view, without doing all the heavy lifting and navigating.

Engaging with grief, rather than passively leaving it to hope, would demand a plunging down to the bottom and sitting with what has been lost. The light, the oxygen, all the life. No one can go to the bottom for you. You sit still. It is dark and scary. Hard to breathe. Yet you are surrounded, buoyed, and held by water, the ultimate source of life. This is the reward. The multitude from which we all come begins to embrace you back.

By going inside the grief, the entirety of the thing begins to show itself. It turns out love also thrives in the darkness. Now that they can be embraced and fully experienced it becomes possible to pass through, to discover what waits beyond. The veil is lifted, to uncover what has been held captive by fear. Now a transformation is possible.

The time has come to welcome grief back to the table. Send the poets and singers into the forest to lead them home with merriment. Throw a party honoring their reentry. This was how they did it in the old stories.

*

I could smell an ending,

like rain seeding the horizon,

but from here it didn’t go

how you'd think it might go.

Endings are a liner construct

and this story is a spiral.

Two runaway horses

came up out of the river

and my breath filled with giant wings,

I could blow holes in the rain

and the rain also blew inside of me,

it washed out the poverty and sorrow

that had accumulated from so much hope.

I was not the only one that this happened to,

it was happening to all of us.

We built fires in the shadow spaces where ice had been,

called back by roses,

we planted trees into the uncertainty and loss,

we healed through our capacity to cooperate.

A dear friend of mine described how they kept searching in bookstore after bookstore for a specific book. They looked and looked, never finding what they were searching for. Finally they realized that the book they were seeking had not been written yet and that they had to write the book themselves.

For a significant amount of time I have been on a similar search, though not for a book. I have searched and searched for conversations and opportunities to engage with other humans about ecological loss, transformation and what for a time was being referred to as “climate grief.”

I could not find the questions and conversation I was seeking in the media, through mainstream resources, or in public space. All I found were numbers, fetishizations of apocalypse, zombies, despair or chimeras, restaged stories of the predominant extractive narrative disguised as “new.”

What I wanted was a place to dwell and plummet into these emotions collectively, to share the loss and imagine with others what could follow. The potential to do this felt obscure, feared and banished, as low and remote as the Mariana Trench.

Much like water, driven by a persisting demand to fill, not only by own spirit, but of others around me, I found the container that needed filling and moved to fill it. In other words, I decided to “write the book myself,” instead of waiting for someone else.

I approached Climate Generation: A Will Steger Legacy, with whom I had already done some work around climate transformation and grief. I shared my intuition with them about what I wanted to offer the community.

Together we created a series of workshops that would use music, poetry, writing and outdoor community space. Our objective was to call people in and to manifest a fracture, a moment of deviation from the present systems of thought, and then to pass an offering through this rupture. An offering that would invite them to re-mingle with grief in a restorative and healing way.

*

As we unbound ourselves from hope

our wills became feral and regrew tails.

The two birds turned around

and flew back and forth crossing in the sky

above where the horses stood,

their hooves dripping

the edge of the river

back into the river.

Our first workshop was held at Tamales y Biciletas, a community garden located in the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis. In addition to Jothsna Harris and Kira Liu of Climate Generation, I asked my friend Strong Buffalo, Dakota elder and poet, to join me in the facilitation of this event. A group of about 15 community members gathered in the fading light of an early fall evening. People came willingly, after work, gladly diverging from their daily routines in order to attend.

With great ease the group shared thoughts, stories and experiences about their unique processes with grief and climate loss. Strong Buffalo and I offered moments of song and poetry, where in the midst of the growing gardens and passing evening, people were given the opportunity to respond through listening rather than talking. These pauses felt essential, honoring the inward component of the process.

About halfway through our time together the discussion turned toward how to move beyond the actual grief and loss we had all come to share. The sky went black. A wind lifted straight up out of the dirt seeming to carry all their darkness and unseen energetic potential skyward. Feeling the electricity of an oncoming downpour we sought shelter in the greenhouse.

As the rain and their millions of invisible fingertips drummed the plastic greenhouse roof our conversation transformed. We had to raise our voices to communicate over the sound. We had to pause and listen because sometimes the storm had more to say than any of us did. Everything smelled like lightning and falling leaves. Then the storm passed.

As we emerged back into the garden from the greenhouse it was time for the workshop to close. A sense of joy ran among us. The growing stillness that hung in the tomatoes and green beans ran down our faces and out our eyes. There were unspoken feelings of rootedness, togetherness and connection emanating outward. Our invisibilities had been seen. We had shifted from narratives of separation and limitation to ones of fluid expansivity and relationality.

By welcoming grief into our circle, we expanded our potential to open towards the low places, the unseen, the invisible. In the low places we transformed in the company of each other. We twisted in all directions like water, carrying each other’s sediment, darknesses and light. With our imaginations enlivened we passed through the storm. On the other side of our climate grief we found waiting, with rain, newly birthed in the late evening, our climate joy.

*

Though this is as far into the spiral as I am able to write,

the inherent wisdom of the surrounding land

stands strongly in their truth

and will speak, as much as one is willing to listen.

When I have placed my ear to their heart, I have heard them say,

“Lead with curiosity, the stories support the systems

and in turn the systems support the stories,

be aware which system and which story you support.

It is a trick of capitalism to shift shape

because its extractive nature

is happy to appear as a different form of energy

enabling itself to remain in control

managing the pace and direction of change

ensuring that nothing actually changes,

if in doubt return to your breath

it serves as a constant reminder of cooperation

if you give too much you die

if you take too much you die,

endings are a linear construct,

this story is a spiral.”

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