Dear Beloved,
A tree lives in an ecological dance of energy. As it lives, the tree breathes in and breathes out its life. It moves the energy available and sought-after and dispels the energy spent. Perhaps in its life it found sunlight above and shaded out other trees below. For me, I feel indifferent to describe this, I can imagine no nefarious plot of one tree over another. Certainly it is true, one tree's flourishing life is another tree's crippling shade.
When this large tree dies, when it falls over, all the sun it gathered to move and reassemble the forms around it, the empty trunk is a cathedral of nourishment and shelter for those scavengers who might take up home here. The dance goes on beyond the tree's most immediate consequences of being. The dance is what brought the tree into being, and what brings it out! The joke is the energy from the sun is spent so haphazardly into the cosmos, and that energy is most certainly the hub, the most physical bass drum hum of the song of our planet.
I consider the way energy moves around me, how do I know what energy is available? Where do I store it, how do I know what to store? When do I know to spend it? Where is it spent? Sleep, rest, food, hunger, thirst, fullness, quenchedness, these are all words describing energy and structures which energy moves through. I consider these systems and consider the words economy, subsistence, capitalism, socialism, these systems of trade, philosophies and agreements for common ways and means of moving energy, holding energy, releasing energy.
Across the news here in Portland has been the resounding gong of calling Wildfires a consequence of Western Colonialism. Be it through land management and controlled burns, or climate change as a whole:
- https://www.opb.org/news/article/northwest-plants-animals-wildfire-help/
- https://www.npr.org/2020/08/24/899422710/to-manage-wildfire-california-looks-to-what-tribes-have-known-all-along
- https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54278988?intlink_from_url=https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/ce2gz9mdde3t/wildfires&link_location=live-reporting-story
The wake of death in conquering of the native people lead to the halting of the ceremonial fires which were set by this land's original inhabitants for generations. These ceremonial fires now being looked to by the Western Authorities as legitimate and necessary when massive wildfires grind the industrial machine to a halt. Grounding helicopters, challenging power grids, invading the comfort of even the most climate-controlled, season-resistant homes.
I thought to myself in my two weeks that perhaps what we call a tragedy, some more ancient cultures called the season. When night meant a darkness which would halt work. When winter came halting chills, without insulation and coal to burn. When summer brought blistering heat that dulled the mind to an idle trot.
Perhaps climate change could be a reintroduction of
"...I believe that as inheritors of Western civilization, we must humble ourselves enough to return to these atrocities in search of some piece of humanity that was lost there. For without this missing piece, we will not survive.
"In effect, that search itself must be what we do for a living - that search for a lost chord that imparts meaning to those of us who can no longer find ourselves in this strictly mechanical economics of things. And while it is true that many of us may very well merge with our machines to eat coal, others of us will not do this, and at whatever moment we jump ship we'll have to extract our identity from the story of the capitalist machine and find a refuge in these other stories of the soil, of falling leaves, rotting wood, of blood, bone and bacteria; these stories that we've lost and found so many times."
-From "Eternal Return" by Paul Feather, as featured in the Dark Mountain periodical, Issue 17
I consider the capitalist machine from an ecological standpoint: Perhaps how when the wolf dies, the deer consume the mountain. Perhaps capitalism or consumerism is an overpopulation of something much more serene and pure, like the innocence of a doe. Perhaps to hate the consumerism and desire for comfort is not so effective as it is to recognize the role of the wolf in the whole story.
I wonder about capitalism's wolf. Perhaps it is the idea of the wilderness itself, preservation of the unpredictable. Perhaps our wolf is the experience of the big bad seasons. Perhaps this Great Smoke and these Great Terrible storms are guardians of the planet, in effect, though they are unbiased consequences of a system finding new balance.
Perhaps this climate change is making space for us, rather than destroying us. Perhaps it is clearing out a space for us to sit as our fragile human selves, humus, oh to be humble in these times.
So I look for the fallen trunks.
For those who are intrigued by this work:
https://dark-mountain.net/
