Climate Cultures essay: We Run On – Connection, Grief, Trees, People

An essay exploring our connection with trees, their biology, lore, patience and weathering; deep connection with people, place, love; and grief for personal and planetary loss. View the full essay here, and see below for a short piece explaining the context and intention behind the essay.

Sitting and looking around and watching things get worse and waiting for them to get still worse, and wondering if we can smell burning: that, at best, is what life is like as we move through the extraordinary times of the Earth Crisis, and one of the ways I deal with it is to write.

My essay, We Run On – Connection, Grief, Trees, People, is taken from a collection of linked essays which share a theme: how else to deal with the times? What are some of the responses I’m finding interesting, useful or pattern-making? What are some of the conversations that are happening – on podcasts; among my friends who are working out their activism; around the table? The angle, broadly, is how the crisis — and thoughts of the crisis — can hit psychologically and what some of us might be trying to do about this; what some of the ways through might be.

So, the title of the collection is Trying Not to Lose It. The pieces are coming along in the form of lyric essays, exploded essays, poetic journalism, nature writing, diary pieces. All I know is, they’re not poems, which are my more usual medium.

“Radical noticing”

The process can feel much like Arthur C Clarke’s description of getting information from the internet: “like getting a glass of water from the Niagara Falls.” The chatter about the crisis is everywhere, of course; omnipresent and with endless different angles. It’s almost ludicrously overwhelming. And the disciplines interweave. And a lot of the people conducting the chatter, and leading the ideas, are very stressed, understandably. And heartbroken. I keep blinkers on as I pick my way through, and trust my instinct regarding which strand to pick up — most strands lead somewhere interesting, and can form unlikely braids with other strands; this is writing, I suppose.

I just want my writing to be useful. And I believe in the act of paying witness to things. I think of Kathleen Jamie’s notion of how paying attention is potentially a political act in itself — radical noticing, as she calls it.

I also think of Mary Oliver’s famous lines in ‘The Summer’s Day’:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

What else should I be doing? Things being quite urgent, I don’t want to waste airspace or anyone’s time in reading. So there‘s a particular sense of responsibility: I’m doing this because I couldn’t care more about it, and wish to be an effective messenger. Or a sort of cartographer — to add to the road map we are constructing as we go on together, up the mountain, trying our hardest not to lose it.

I want to get the pieces I am writing out there in accessible ways so I can add to the map as quickly as possible. Thank you ClimateCultures for putting this one out there. I am looking for other places – and am open to ideas.