Original post from June 20, 2021:
Today I saw the destruction of another tangled grove. A habitat – a home – for countless creatures. One I know. It’s where I first met convolvulus dorycnium, which probably won’t bloom there anymore. I knew people were afraid of fire, an expert warned that a thicket like that was dangerous. There was nothing I could do but stand for a few minutes with the relatively young oak friend at the edge, say I’m sorry and share his grief. I recalled how, about two weeks ago when I attended a shiva (the Jewish tradition of visiting bereaved family members during the week following a death), I sat next to a stranger who pointed to a magnificent blooming rosewood tree and said that it should be cut down, because it makes so much litter. (These are the flower petals, right?!) I knew it wasn’t the time, and I also had no way to reach him with the message that it’s we who turned a fertile fallout into “litter”, so I just said that in my eyes the tree was beautiful.
Sometimes it’s hard for me to find a depth of joy comparable to the sadness brought on by animist perception today. I know that as things stand now, I am clinging to a paradigm that has lost – the world, through humanity, is choosing otherwise, and I have no way to move the masses who are under the spell of man-made technology. I also know that the world will not continue on this path for long. Exponential changes must end, whether in collapse or sudden transformation, but by the time it becomes clear to the common man (what an apt phrase), it will be too late for us to choose.
A few years ago I came across a quote from Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of Nonviolent Communication, “Never give anyone the power to make you submit or rebel.” Or rebel?! What?! How!? I pasted it on the cover of my planner that year and pondered it like a koan, until I began to understand.
I’m learning to trust Gaia even if she destroys much of the biosphere through our hubris or goes in some other direction that looks to me like a nightmare. According to another quote, this time from my favorite pagan band Gaia Consort, “There are things you can’t unsee.” Among them, the sense of belonging, happiness, devotion, and immense love I’ve found as an animist, keep bubbling back up to the surface.
Tomorrow is the summer solstice. I don’t adopt northern cultures’ interpretation of the holiday. There, it is the peak of the flourishing season of life. Here, it marks the beginning of the season of death. We must remember that death is also essential in the circle. Many gods die and rise again, and all life depends on death and feeds on it. This does not eliminate grief. Gods are greater than individual humans, they are more like faces of cultures, or even the entire enterprise of human culture. But the cycle is the way of the world, and the spiral and the fractal, and the ancestors also exist and are present.
There is a degree of peace and resilience in realizing that we have probably lost – “we” being we animists, who want to return to a human culture that cherishes and cares for the prosperity of humanity and other species – and that, in a way, it doesn’t matter. There is something steadying and empowering to know that this is who I am, this is what I know, this is my love and vocation and dedication, whether as humanity we transform or go extinct.
“Speak these things,” said the young oak. “Teach them.”
“I will,” I promised. So here I am.