Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Between the sea foam and the sea sand

Of all the 'things' that I left behind in Massachusetts (this does not include people!) I miss nothing except my books. All 30 boxes of them. While there is a distinct pleasure in being able to go to the Google homepage and type in 'feral' and find out all sorts of interesting things, it is nothing like the pleasure of following a wave of synchronicity.

I had bookcases in every room of my home in Sheffield except the two bathrooms. I had a series of semi-circles scattered over the floors of living and bedroom that would begin, innocently enough, with one book that reminded me of something in another book which reminded me of something in another book and suddenly there were many many books scattered about as I dove in and out of them as a dolphin leaping from wave to wave.



I've tried to put that particular loss out of my mind - I don't know when/if I'll be able to return to the green hills of the Berkshires to load up a truck and bring them 'home'. I don't yet know where home lies for me. But recently I've been re-minded of the experience. I sit now with piles and half-circles of books and journal articles behind my chair. I turn my head to the right and I see actor network theory and nature writers and writer's manuals ... I turn my head to the left and I see wolves and myths, semiotics and research design, and book after book on the philosophy of nature. As if. As if we really need a philosophy of nature. As we needed more than to walk with respect and attention through this world. But, we funny little sapiens ... we think and ponder and wonder and we become lost in the maze of our thoughts rather than found on the paths of woodland or desert or prairie.

The past few days I've been caught up in a wave of synchronicity. It began with the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan like Thor's hammer. The images of the waters moving so powerfully over the land, like a giant, still asleep, shrugging and shifting in a dream. No clear intention but oh, so indomitable. And we, frightened little sapiens rushing around with a sudden knowledge and cold fear of our complete inability to control ... anything.

The drowned number in the thousands ... too many for us to truly comprehend, and too many for us to want to. The drowned trouble my sleep. Not the thousands of anonymous that were swept away last Friday, but the two who I knew.

One, a stranger ... a young girl who was walking home in a snowstorm with her brother. We chatted a moment and then they went off to play along the banks of the sleepy Housatonic River. The boy was dragged into the water, the younger sister pulled him back to shore and then was lost herself. They found her days later, downriver. I think of her from time to time, and the brother as well. Both lost in different ways.

One, my husband. Diving with friends in Gloucester Harbor. They disobeyed the cardinal rule of diving: never lose sight of your partner. But when you're too stoned to think clearly all kinds of accidents can occur that would be entirely avoidable otherwise. I never told his parents that it was easy to explain the 'unexplainable' accident. They were more comfortable blaming a mysterious god who had his reasons than they would have been blaming the victim of his own, regrettable foolhardiness. He and I were also both lost ... in different ways. His, perhaps the easier path.



And so I sleep and my dreams are filled with waves. I am caught, I am tumbled, I am surrounded by the untamed and untameable power of water. This is a visceral experience for me ... I spent much time in the ocean as a child and a teen. I know the joy of riding wave on wave, I know the fear of being tugged and pulled into the undertow, and I know the relief of being tossed out onto the sandy shore. Safe. For another moment.

Earlier today, I was reading Wendell Berry's collected essays for my thesis. I'm trying to find words ... mine, anyone's ... to explain the damage done by humans as we have taken the natural continuum between 'wild' and 'domesticated' and twisted it into a continuum between sterile and feral. I'm trying to explain the hubris of our attitudes as we attempt to pull away from the web of life and only end up distorting it. Here is what Berry had to say to me this morning, as he wrote about a canoe trip on the rising Kentucky River:
There is something deeply horrifying about [the river] roused. Not, I think, because it is inhuman, alien to us; some of us at least must feel a kinship with it, or we would not loiter around it for pleasure. The horror must come from our sense that, so long as it remains what it is, it is not subject. To say that it is indifferent would be wrong. That would imply a malevolence, as if it could be aware of us, if only it wanted to. It is more remote from our concerns than indifference. It is serenely and silently not subject--to us or to anything else except the other natural forces that are also beyond our control. And it is apt to stand for and represent to us all in nature and in the universe that is not subject. That is its horror. We can make use of it. We can ride on its back in boats. But it won't stop to let us get on and off. It is not a passenger train. And if we make a mistake, or risk ourselves too far to it, why then it will suffer a little wrinkle on its surface and go on as before.
I think that it is this horror (to tremble or shudder) that many of us disconnected little sapiens feel when we extirpate a species because it is competing with our financial well-being, when we shave off the top of a mountain so we can heat our homes, when we clear-cut a forest so we can print out a ream of marketing mailers that everyone will throw away.

I am wandering the land between the sea foam and the sea sand of the old folk song, negotiating my way between horror and beauty and companionship. It is, like all ecotones, rich and dangerous.

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