Original post May 7, 2021
Last week we celebrated the peak of spring, and it seems that this year is kicking us straight from there into summer. Although mornings are still pleasantly cool, the chrysanthemums are still blooming, the oak leaves are still soft and clean, and flocks of bee eaters are swooping above, the annuals are already yellowing and the midday heat hints at what is to come: our climate’s extreme season, the season of death.
So it’s fitting that I’m now reading Stephen Jenkinson’s Die Wise, another animist book about the road to death. I am still far from finishing it, but it seems he agrees with Barbara Ehrenreich’s conclusion that death can have meaning only in a living world, a world in which we are not the center of the story. It goes perfectly with the previous book I read, Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, about the wondrous ways of mushrooms. Not surprising that fungi and death go together nicely, but mostly I’m encouraged by how much other creatures – fungi and lichens and microbes of all kinds – are the main characters in the biosphere’s story of life. I’m encouraged to learn how intelligent they are in their own ways that are so different from our own. When I reflect on the state of the planet and the dominant culture’s lack of understanding regarding the consequences of its actions, I’m comforted to see how much we are not the whole story, not even the main plot.
This unprecedented and unbalanced Anthropocene period won’t go on long – it cannot. Whichever way it plays out, we are going to arrive at a reality that is not characterized by graphs of exponential growth.
In the meantime, I wonder to myself, what does the world ask of us along the way? To learn to listen and live in dynamic balance with the rest of the biosphere, of course. But what about personal, everyday life, when I’m on my way from here to there, or busy with life’s details? I am not alone in speculating that what the world asks of us in such ordinary moments, as much as possible, is wonder. To give our attention to the endless wonders that surround us instead of passing by them casually. Jenkinson writes:
“You need witnesses for wonder. Some things in life are too hard to see by yourself, because they take up the whole sky, or because they happen every day, unwinding above your busyness, or because you thought you knew them already. Wonder requires a willingness to be uncertain, to be thrown.”
I invite us to open a space of wonder for ourselves, and even more so, for each other.