(Image: Big bluestem and the Loess Hills of Iowa and Eastern Nebraska)
Our present moment is full. Overwhelming. I want to offer you a couple of suggestions.
They come from the rocks and the trees.
Do “deep time” work: remember yourself as cosmic; think geologically. Everything on earth has its origin in an ancient cosmos; our story is documented in layers of rock.
So, I want to dig down deep into myself and find out what’s there, make a note of it, then possibly accept or even welcome it. Once I’ve spent time in my stratified layers, I can bring what I’ve found back to the surface and share it with others. I want to remember my ecology and that I share the same elements with everyone and everything else, perhaps in different quantities, both frightening and interesting, but nevertheless the same. And I want to remember what the rocks already understand: we’re always changing, being created and destroyed, and that we are also a mystery. Because while we know that basalt is ancient, sandstone is malleable, and our bodies contain exploded stars, we still don’t know why we’re here.
Question the trees. Listen to their reply.
The day after the recent U.S. election, I went to the forest. I walked and my mind worked. I hadn’t allowed my mind to do much of anything that day. Instead, I’d kept my self firmly in my heart, feeling. But the motion of my legs set my mind free to perform its acrobatics and heavy calculations, to interpret the world through contortion, to forecast its fate through equation. My emotions marked the movements of my mind as I grew alternately frustrated, angry, frightened, and depressed.
Nearing the end of the trail, a ten-minute uphill walk from my car, I stopped and spoke to the trees losing their leaves and the dying brush beneath them, “why am I here?” I turned to a cottonwood just off the path and asked, “do you know why you’re here?” Within moments I had a response,“what’s why? there’s only am.” I made a noise that was half-shout, half-laugh, then rolled my eyes at the tree. A tree can be a tree. Can I be me?
I walked out of the forest and into a field of big bluestem that reached as high as my head. I climbed the trail, damp from recent rain, then stopped when I spotted a bush a hundred yards in front of me covered in yellow flowers. As I got closer, I realized that my short-sighted eyes had mistook the golden leaves of late fall for spring blooms. I smiled at the bush. Of course, it couldn’t be anything other than itself.
