Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Bennacht - John O'Donohue's lovely blessing

In earlier years, here in the pages of Reckonings, I offered this deeply moving blessing by the late John O'Donohue, an Irish poet, author, priest, and philosopher who lived from 1956 to 2008. He is best remembered as a student of Celtic spirituality, a tradition rich in meaning and worthy of lingering reflection. O'Donohue's books include Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, Eternal Echoes, To Bless the Space Between Us, and Walking in Wonder.

See also the writing of John Philip Newell (https://www.earthandsoul.org), the preeminent living scholar of Celtic spirituality. I recommend his book Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul (2021).

Finally, I've greatly enjoyed reading about the early (5th century) Irish saints - Patrick, Brigid of Kildare, Columba, Brendan - whose lives are buried in history but reawakened in deeply informed and wonderfully engaging novels; for example, Frederick Buechner's Brendan (1987).

I wish I could include O'Donohue's own reading of "Bennacht" here. His Irish English is lovely to hear. He read the poem in a conversation with Krista Tippett in On Being: https://medium.com/@onbeing/beannacht-a-poem-8c2c29a4d14e. 

The only two (Gaelic) words readers may not know are the poem's title, which means blessing, and the word "currach" in mid-poem. A currach is an Irish boat used for sailing in the west of Ireland. The Oxford English Dictionary describes a currach as: "A small boat made of wickerwood and covered with hides [later, canvas], used from ancient times in Scotland and Ireland, and propelled with a paddle, a coracle."

 

With that brief introduction, here is John O'Donohue's "Bennacht."

 

 

 

 

 

Bennacht

by John O'Donohue

 

On the day when

The weight deadens

On your shoulders

And you stumble,

May the clay dance

To balance you.

 

And when your eyes

Freeze behind

The grey window

And the ghost of loss

Gets into you,

May a flock of colors,

Indigo, red, green

And azure blue,

Come to awaken in you

A meadow of delight.

 

When the canvas frays

In the currach of thought

And a stain of ocean

Blackens beneath you,

May there come across the waters

A path of yellow moonlight

To bring you safely home.

 

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

May the clarity of light be yours,

May the fluency of the ocean be yours,

May the protection of the ancestors be yours,

 

And so may a slow

Wind work these words

Of love around you,

An invisible cloak

To mind your life.

 

 

 

 

 

The River of Silence

Thanks to my dear friend Al Braidwood for sharing with me the wisdom of some Buddhist remarks about death, following a few personal recollections of my own.

I was eleven when I first encountered death, that of my father. Early one morning at our home in Berkeley my mother received a telephone call. When I heard the tone of her voice — only a few words as she listened — I knew she was hearing an important message. Minutes later she came to my room — I was still in bed — to tell me what she had learned. I can't remember my feelings in response. I didn't go to school that day. My mother asked a grownup friend of hers, a man I didn't know, to come to my room — to see, I suppose, if I wanted to speak about my father's death. To a stranger? To anyone? Not for many years.

My mother came to understand. She wrote several months later, "Johnny still hasn't reached the stage where he talks naturally and normally about his father... [W]e can never be quite sure of what goes on deep inside a child, and Johnny has been almost completely 'bottled up' about his father since he died....So all I can do at present, it seems to me, is to bring John [my father was also John] into our conversations whenever it seems natural and easy, hoping that before long, whatever bothers him about his father's death will come out in the open and can be talked out."

It was not "before long." I wrote 27 years later, after my mother also had died, "Until very recently I lived with the experience of my father's death so powerfully marked in my consciousness that, in effect, there was no room for his life."

I returned to school the following day. Given my father's public prominence, and the fact of his suicide, the newspapers featured his death conspicuously. My teacher told me she was sorry. I said, "That's OK," as if I wanted to comfort her. For years I had no words to express my feelings. No tears. The impact of his death lived deeply inside.

I had an after-school job, delivering a shopping newspaper to what felt like an endless number of people's front yards. I remember two things in the weeks following my father's death.

First, and only once, at the end of that paper route, I imagined I was walking and talking with God. My family was not religious. (My grandmother Eleanor was, profoundly so, but that is another story I've told elsewhere.) We did not go to church. When I was younger we lived outside of Phoenix — our last home when my family was whole, before my father left us — and my parents came to stand in my room at my bedtime to listen to me say my prayers. My prayers. To my knowledge my family had no prayers. I heard none from my mother or father or from my older sister and brother, or anyone else. I do recall telling my parents on one of those occasions when they listened to my prayers, that I was scared of one of the phrases: "If I should die before I wake / I pray the Lord my soul to take." I was frightened and didn't understand. My father gave me another line, a substitute: "Guard and keep me through the night / and wake me with the morning light." I lost my fear of the Lord, and was grateful to my father for his gift. But I remembered, still remember, both forms of those lines. After he left us my father came for visits with me and took me for some summer trips to dude ranches, but my memories of those visits were dark:

• the dented left front fender of a maroon Ford sedan he drove
• holding and firing his .45 caliber pistol, at his instruction
• a tarantula
• standing on a stump surrounded by hungry pigs
• a wire strung across a horse trail at neck height
• a dark human figure in our room at night (likely my father, but I was too scared to cry out)

I wrote above that there were two things I remembered in the weeks following my father's death. The second was also about that beast of a paper route. Not long after my walk and talk with God, I realized that the big bundles of shopping news were delivered next to a large hedge, large enough to hide a satisfying number of bundles. They were junk, I imagined; no one would miss them. Of course, I was wrong. One day a representative of the shopping news came to my and my mother's front door. I lost my job, and had to drive with him to remove all the wet bundles from the hedge. At least he drove me home. I'm sure my mother chastised me; I certainly recall feeling humiliated. 

Thankfully, the memory of walking and talking with God remained, still remains. I don't recall what we said in our conversation. I don't think that was the point. The walking together endures.

 

Here are the Buddhist remarks: 

The River of Silence

Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

Death, whether our own or others, can be a powerful gateway to complete tenderness. The confrontation with the impermanence of all things is perhaps the widest gate to liberation from suffering. Facing death or dealing with death, our sight becomes clear. “Priorities and omissions are etched in a merciless light,” as Audre Lorde wrote. Given the sheer quantity of death around us, why not use this merciless light to better see who we are?

 

When I was thirty-nine years old it was I who received the call that my father had died in the hospital. I had long known with my childhood intuition that it would be I who would tell my mother. That Sunday I drove together with my sisters to the church where our family had worshipped with migrants from Texas and Louisiana for more than forty years. Mom was coming down the long cascading steps when I ran to meet her. She knew by the look on my face that Dad had died. Ten years later my mother would be diagnosed with a brain tumor and take the great leap into death herself. When my parents died I came to learn that despite the fact that everything appeared the same the day after as it did the day before, death, in fact, changed everything and everyone. Death widens the river’s mouth, loosens our relentless grasp on life, and delivers us closer to the ultimate silence on this earth.

 

I came to see that the great matter of death is not great because it’s scary but because it is profound in its immense capacity to arouse a loving nature within us. It brings our attention to birth as an entrance into belonging. No one should be denied this belonging, regardless of their race, sexuality, or gender. Proximity to death provides an experience by which we can see our profound lives, not as defined by vocations and careers, but as an experience of being awake.

 

Death seals a formidable interrelationship between all beings and all things. All things arise and cease; all beings are born and die. In death we come to know the spirit within us all. When death arrives it reminds us, like nothing else in life, that we are completely interdependent with each other. When a life is lost, we lose. When, in the wake of catastrophes caused by war or weather, many are found dead in the aftermath, we see ourselves in the dead. We tremble as we connect with each other in the face of such loss.

 

Perhaps we can be less afraid of our differences when we realize that this merciless light of death shines upon us while we live. Perhaps we can awaken to the flow of “the river of silence” (as prophet Kahlil Gibran called death), as it courses through the vast continuum of life. This doesn’t mean that we won’t tremble in the presence of our fears of one another, but that we will be more present with our trembling, more awake to the truth that underlies our fears.

Layli Long Soldier's poems

Layli Long Soldier's poems are a treasure.

Her first book, Whereas (2017), won the National Books Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. It is a response to the U.S. government's official apology to Native peoples in 2009. That apology, writes Krista Tippett in On Being, "was done so quietly, with no ceremony, that it was practically a secret." Krista continues, "Layli Long Soldier is a writer, a mother, a citizen of the United States, and a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. She has a way of opening up her life, and American life, that inspires self-searching and tenderness." She lives in Santa Fe.

John Freeman wrote of Whereas in The Los Angeles Times: "Writers who live between two languages face an extra challenge in their role as lexicographers of metaphor. They must create a mythology through language that acts like double-pane glass. As in, they must correct for the distortion of the words they are translating from one language to another...Layli Long Soldier manages this double-ness with the precision of a master glassblower."

She illustrates that quality in her experience as a young mother and her realization that she must speak to her child in Diné, the Lakota language: "Whereas her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don't worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father's language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics."

 

The title poem of Whereas is a sequence—poem and prose poem:

 

WHEREAS a string-bean blue-eyed man leans back into a swig of beer work-weary lips at the dark bottle keeping cool in short sleeves and khakis he enters the discussion;

Whereas his wrist loose at the bottleneck to come across as candid “Well at least there was an Apology that’s all I can say” he offers to the circle each of them scholarly;

Whereas under starlight the fireflies wink across East Coast grass and me I sit there painful in my silence glued to a bench in the midst of the American casual;

Whereas a subtle electricity in that low purple light I felt their eyes on my face gauging a reaction and someone’s discomfort leaks out in a well-stated “Hmmm”;

Whereas like a bird darting from an oncoming semi my mind races to the Apology’s assertion “While the establishment of permanent European settlements in North America did stir conflict with nearby Indian tribes, peaceful and mutually beneficial interactions also took place”;

Whereas I cross my arms and raise a curled hand to my mouth as if thinking as if  taking it in I allow a static quiet then choose to stand up excusing myself  I leave them to unease;

Whereas I drive down the road replaying the get-together how the man and his beer bottle stated their piece and I reel at what I could have said or done better;

Whereas I could’ve but didn’t broach the subject of “genocide” the absence of this term from the Apology and its rephrasing as “conflict” for example;

Whereas since the moment had passed I accept what’s done and the knife of my conscience pierces with bone-clean self-honesty;

Whereas in a stirred conflict between settlers and an Indian that night in a circle;

Whereas I struggle to confess that I didn’t want to explain anything;

Whereas truthfully I wished most to kick the legs of that man’s chair out from under him;

Whereas to watch him fall backward legs flailing beer stench across his chest;

Whereas I pictured it happening in cinematic slow-motion delightful;

Whereas the curled hand I raised to my mouth was a sign of indecision;

Whereas I could’ve done it but I didn’t;

Whereas I can admit this also took place, yes, at least;

WHEREAS we ride to the airport in a van they swivel their necks and shoulders around to speak to me sugar and lilt in their voices something like nurses their nursely kindness through my hair then engage me as comrades in a fight together. Well what we want to know one lady asks is why they don’t have schools there? Her outrage empathy her furrowed brow. There are schools there I reply. Grade schools high schools colleges. But why aren’t there any stores there? There are stores there. Grocery stores convenience stores trading posts whatever what-have-you I explain but it’s here I recognize the break. It’s here we roll along the pavement into hills of conversation we share a ride we share a country but live in alternate nations and here I must tell them what they don’t know or, should I? Should I is the moment to seize and before I know it I say Well you know Native people as in tribes as in “people” living over there are people with their own nations each with its own government and flag they rise to their own national songs and sing in their own languages, even. And by there I mean here all around us I remind them. Drifting in side-glances to whirring trees through the van windows then back to me they dig in they unearth the golden question My God how come we were never taught this in our schools? The concern and furrow. But God the slowing wheels and we lurch forward in the van’s downshift and brake. Together we reach a full-stop. Trapped in a helix of traffic we’re late for check-in security flights our shoulders flex forward into panicked outward gazes nerves and fingers cradle our wristwatches so to answer their question now would be untimely because to really speak to it ever is, untimely. But there Comrades there Nurses. I will remember the swing of your gold earrings. There your perfume around me as a fresh blanket. There you checked my pulse kindly. There the boundary of bedside manners;

WHEREAS a woman I know says she watched a news program a reporter detailed the fire a house in which five children burned perhaps their father too she doesn’t recall exactly but remembers the camera on the mother’s face the mother’s blubbering her hiccuping and wail she leans to me she says she never knew then in those times that year this country the northern state she grew up in she was so young you see she’d never seen it before nobody talked about them she means Indians she tells me and so on and so on but that moment in front of the TV she says was like opening a box left at her door opening to see the thing inside whereas to say she learned through that mother’s face can you believe it and I let her finish wanting someone to say it but she hated saying it or so she said admitting how she never knew until then they could feel;

WHEREAS the word whereas means it being the case that, or considering that, or while on the contrary; is a qualifying or introductory statement, a conjunction, a connector. Whereas sets the table. The cloth. The saltshakers and plates. Whereas calls me to the table because Whereas precedes and invites. I have come now. I’m seated across from a Whereas smile. Under pressure of formalities, I fidget I shake my legs. I’m not one for these smiles, Whereas I have spent my life in unholding. What do you mean by unholding? Whereas asks and since Whereas rarely asks, I am moved to respond, Whereas, I have learned to exist and exist without your formality, saltshakers, plates, cloth. Without the slightest conjunctions to connect me. Without an exchange of questions, without the courtesy of answers. This has become mine, this unholding. Whereas, with or without the setup, I can see the dish being served. Whereas let us bow our heads in prayer now, just enough to eat;

 

George Arthur Wilson (1931-2020)

George Arthur Wilson (1931-2020)

My dear friend George might be touched and amused—or perhaps say "Why not?"—that he reminds me of an Irish saint: 5^th century Brendan the Navigator, the voyager, one of the earliest Irish saints, after Patrick, after Brigid of Kildare.

There is Frederick Buechner’s beautifully composed fictional biography, titled simply Brendan. As Thomas Cahill wrote of that book on its flyleaf (think of George): “A lusty, teeming, festooning, dancing marvel of a book for anyone who cares about Ireland or Christianity or paganism or history or sailing or — reading.”

George was truly an anam cara, a soul friend.

Obituary from the East Hampton Star:

George A. Wilson, Minister and Sailor

By Mark Segal

October 22, 2020

George Arthur Wilson, who started his ministry at the Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor (among the Hamptons on Long Island, NY), ended it at the Springs Presbyterian Church, and sailed the world between postings, died in Mill Valley, Calif., of late-stage kidney disease on October 15, 2020. He was 89 and had been ill for seven years. 

Mr. Wilson had deep ties to the East End (of Long Island) and its waters, according to his longtime companion, Betsey Crawford. His parents bought 20 acres of land stretching from Old Stone Highway to Neck Path in Springs for $2,800 in 1946. As a teenager, he put an engine on a lifeboat salvaged from a World War II tanker and motored with a friend from the Whitestone Bridge in Queens to Promised Land on Napeague. The journey took 15 hours.

Born in Manhattan on March 14, 1931, to John Wilson and Martha Morton Wilson, Mr. Wilson grew up there and in the Bronx. He graduated from Grove City College in Grove City, Pa., and the Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey. He married the former Doreen Jones in 1954 and was ordained at the Old Whalers Church in 1956.

His marriage to Ms. Jones and a second marriage to Sally MacAleer ended in divorce. Both women survive.

In 1962 Mr. Wilson moved to Southern California, where he held ministries in San Gabriel, Pomona, and Wilmington. After he answered the call for clergy to accompany the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on his 1965 march to Selma, Ala., his ministry became increasingly involved in social justice. He worked on the campaign for George Brown Jr., the first congressman to speak out against the Vietnam War, and sought to generate interest in a film on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi dissident.

Always drawn to the water, he sailed to Hawaii with his son Mark in 1984 and, when he left California in 1987, he sailed Aliento, his ketch, through the Panama Canal and up the Atlantic Coast to Boston with his son Johnathan.

He held two pastorates in the Boston area.

Mr. Wilson returned to Springs in 1989 for his last ministry. After retiring in 1993, he got his captain's license and began day-chartering Aliento from Three Mile Harbor. "I met George when he returned to Springs," Ms. Crawford said. "He wasn't hard to meet! He was the most exuberant human being I've ever come across."

In 2000 (20 years ago), he sailed with his son Mark and three other crew members to Ireland, from which his parents had emigrated 80 years before. A storm forced a detour to the Azores, and they proceeded to Ireland from there.

In 2011 he took to the road instead of the sea in another vessel, an R.V., with Ms. Crawford. They spent several years traveling from the Canadian Maritimes to the West Coast and from the Mexican border to Alaska before settling in Marin County, just north of San Francisco.

Mr. Wilson was a member of Redwoods Presbyterian Church in Larkspur, where the Rev. Stephanie Ryder officiated at an outdoor service for the family in October 2020. A Zoom memorial service will be held on Sunday, March 14, 2020, his 90th birthday, and his ashes scattered at a buoy just outside Three Mile Harbor.

In addition to Ms. Crawford, he is survived by three sons, Johnathan Wilson of Apple Valley, Calif., David Wilson of Los Angeles, and Mark Wilson of Oakland, Calif., a daughter, Sharyn Pepitone of Davis, Calif., a stepson, Luke Perrier of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, 10 grandchildren, and one great-grandson, who was born 10 days before Mr. Wilson died. A fourth son, Scott, died in infancy.

According to his family, "He carried with him his Irish spirituality, zest for life, and ability to never pass up a good conversation. His warmth and sparkling blue eyes will be missed by many." I deeply miss all those qualities, which were with him to the end.

Betsey has created a page on her website where friends and family can share reminiscences of Mr. Wilson. The link is thesouloftheearth.com/memories-of-george.

Betsey wrote of their last voyages, “It’s impossible to say when journeys begin, when the first call, just a whisper at first… Before we left in August 2011, people would ask me where we were going, and I’d say, ‘All I know is that I’m driving to the end of the driveway and turning left. [We] were heading on adventures. That was the call. I’d rented the house, found a 33-foot trailer and a pickup truck to pull it… So I left, with man and dog, in a Ford F-350 and a Jayco Super Lite Eagle fifth wheel trailer. We named the rig ‘Kaliento’ after my partner George’s beloved boat. Aliento means breath in Spanish (pneuma). George was 80. I was 60. My dog Splash was 10. No spring chickens among us. George is an adventurer at heart, and Splash was a dog of immense patience and flexibility, so they were, though as surprised as everyone else, game for the journey.

"Kindness": a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye

Although it is well known among poets and those who love poetry, I read this truly wonderful, insightful and thoughtful poem by Naomi Shihab Nye for the first time a few days ago, courtesy of a  nourishing online journal, BrainPickings, written for many years by Maria Popova. 

 

In her preface to Nye's poem, Popova draws upon its spirit in lines of her own: "The measure of true kindness — which is different from nicety, different from politeness — is often revealed in those challenging instances when we must rise above the impulse toward its opposite, ignited by fear and anger and despair."

 

 

 

 

 

KINDNESS

By Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

 

Popova recalls that Nye, in a conversation with Krista Tippett a few years ago, spoke of the backstory of this beloved poem, the real events in Nye's life that inspired it. I want to share that backstory with you, but first ask Krista Tippet to re-introduce her poet-friend to readers of Reckonings, as she did on that occasion:

Krista:“'You are living in a poem.' This is how the poet Naomi Shihab Nye sees the world, and she teaches how this way of being and writing is possible. She has engaged the real-world power of words since her upbringing between her father’s Palestinian homeland and Ferguson, Missouri, near where her American mother grew up. Her father was a refugee journalist, and she carries forward his hopeful passion, his insistence that language must be a way out of cycles of animosity. A poem she wrote, called 'Kindness,' is carried around in the pockets and memories of readers around the world."

 

Here is Naomi Shihab Nye's description of how "Kindness" came to be:

Naomi: "I really feel, amongst all my poems, that this was a poem that was given to me. I was simply the secretary for the poem. I wrote it down, but I honestly felt as if it were a female voice speaking in the air across a plaza in Popayán, Colombia. And my husband and I were on our honeymoon. We had just gotten married one week before, here in Texas. And we had this plan to travel in South America for three months. And at the end of our first week, we were robbed of everything. And someone else who was on the bus with us was killed. And he’s the Indian in the poem. And it was quite a shake-up of an experience.

"And what do you do now? We didn’t have passports. We didn’t have money. We didn’t have anything. What should we do first? Where do we go? Who do we talk to? And a man came up to us on the street and was simply kind and just looked at us — I guess could see our disarray in our faces, and just asked us in Spanish, “What happened to you?” And we tried to tell him. And he listened to us, and he looked so sad. And he said, 'I’m very sorry. I’m very, very sorry that happened,' in Spanish; and he went on. And then we went to this little plaza, and I sat down, and all I had was the notebook in my back pocket, and pencil. And my husband was going to hitchhike off to Cali, a larger city....

"And so this was also a little worrisome to us, because, suddenly, we were gonna split up. I was going to stay here, and he was gonna go there. And as I sat there alone, in a bit of a panic, night coming on, trying to figure out what I was going to do next, this voice came across the plaza and spoke this poem to me — spoke it. And I wrote it down."

 

The Way We Get Through This Is Together

[Preface by John R. Boettiger: Rebecca Solnit is a freelance writer who has written more than 20 books on subjects including hope, feminism, the environment, politics, place, art and human rights. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a National Book Critics Award in criticism.

[Readers will see that my postings on the climate crisis often in these last months have come to focus as well – almost inevitably – on the coronavirus crisis as well. Together they are the two preeminent challenges of our times.]

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/14/mutual-aid-coronavirus-pandemic-rebecca-solnit

The Way We Get Through This Is Together

The way we get through this is together: the rise of mutual aid under coronavirus. Amid this unfolding disaster, we have seen countless acts of kindness and solidarity. It’s this spirit of generosity that will help guide us out of this crisis and into a better future.

Rebecca Solnit
Thursday, 14 May 2020
The Guardian

People behaving badly is a staple of the news, and the pandemic has given us plenty of lurid snapshots. In the US alone, we have seen protesters with guns in Michigan’s capital demanding an end to lockdown, anti-vaxxer women in a frenzy at California’s capitol, opportunists stockpiling hand sanitiser to resell for profit.

One of the biggest cliches about disasters is that they reveal civilisation as a thin veneer, beneath which lies brutal human nature. From this perspective, the best we can hope for from most people under crisis is selfish indifference; at worst, they will swiftly turn to violence. Our worst instincts must be repressed. This becomes a justification for authoritarianism and heavy-handed policing.

But studies of historical disasters have shown that this is not how most people actually behave. There are nearly always selfish and destructive people, and they are often in power, because we have created systems that reward that kind of personality and those principles. But the great majority of people in ordinary disasters behave in ways that are anything but selfish, and if we’re stuck with veneer as a metaphor, then it peels off to reveal a lot of creative and generous altruism and brilliant grassroots organising. With the global pandemic, these empathic urges and actions are wider and deeper and more consequential than ever.

A dozen years ago, the term “mutual aid” was, as far as I can tell, used mostly by anarchists and scholars. Somehow it has migrated into general usage in recent years and now, in the midst of the pandemic, it is everywhere. Mutual aid has generally meant aid offered in a spirit of solidarity and reciprocity, often coming from within struggling communities, empowering those aided, and with an eye towards liberation and social change. Generally it meant volunteer coalitions doing work such as rebuilding or food distribution or supporting resistance camps. One of the most striking aspects of this global crisis is how many forms of aid and solidarity there are. These new forms of generosity we are seeing – organising, networks, projects, donations, support and outreach – are numerous beyond counting, a superbloom of altruistic engagement.

This work has been made more difficult by the great withdrawal – the empty schools, shops, streets and offices. And that withdrawal is itself altruism in action – a withdrawal carried out by billions for the benefit of their communities, as well as their own safety. In the initial phase, we withdrew from the spaces we share out of solidarity: we moved apart to come together. We intentionally produced, in the form of business and school shutdowns and staying home, an unprecedented economic calamity as an alternative to accepting mass death.

In March, many small business owners and service workers in the US willingly shut down their enterprises, and thereby their livelihood, even before the official orders came. In April, 50 restaurant owners in the Atlanta area publicly rejected the Georgia governor’s invitation to reopen. Together they took out an ad in a local newspaper and wrote: “We agree that it’s in the best interest of our employees, our guests, our community and our industry to keep our dining rooms closed at this time.”

For some, staying home may be a strain, but for others it means financial ruin. Sacrificing your own financial security for the common good was a solemn commitment that people made across the world. It was one of the things that made this crisis distinct: how often refraining, not doing, not going anywhere, not continuing activities, was also an act of public-spirited generosity. This is willing sacrifice for the public good. But people have been doing more than that.

In March, the UK’s National Health Service called for 250,000 volunteers to sign up to help seniors, people who were isolating and medical staff who needed deliveries. More than three times that many signed up. Appreciation for the NHS grew even stronger, and the widespread weekly rounds of applause for its workers became one of the welcome interruptions of isolation. In mid-March, a website was launched listing several hundred new mutual aid groups across the country, so people could search their local area.

“In my area in London, we have had so many [mutual aid groups] that we’ve spun off down to street level,” one Londoner told me. “Our two-street collective has done shopping, picked up medicines, created an Easter-egg -in-the-window hunt for kids, all to help one another.” Another wrote: “Hackney in London has all the usual stuff like grocery buying and support, plus people are sourcing donated phones for people in hospital, laptops for kids who need them to access home learning and cars for healthcare staff redeployed to the makeshift Covid-19 hospital.”

A few weeks ago, I heard someone complain that Lexington, Kentucky, had four mutual aid groups – they were concerned that so many volunteers would be redundant; I was awestruck by the abundance. In the course of writing this piece, I looked at various new mutual aid projects: meal deliveries to the elderly in Paterson, New Jersey; the Twin Cities Queer and Trans Mutual Aid group in Minneapolis-Saint Paul; projects to aid the Hopi, Zuni and Navajo on reservations in the US south-west; a Washington state project to support the undocumented; sex workers organising to raise emergency funds.

I saw people stuck at home in isolation teach dance and drawing classes, tell stories, play music online to encourage others quarantining in place; Italians singing together from their balconies and Iranians reciting poetry from theirs; a young native Nevadan going fishing to feed members of her Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe. Most of us have seen, or performed, one-off acts of kindness – running an errand for a frail neighbour, chalking a cheerful message on the pavement, picking up the shopping bill for the struggling couple at the checkout, donating to a fundraiser for an acquaintance who has been laid off or taken ill. But such individual actions are not enough to address this triple catastrophe of a viral pandemic, a financial collapse and the emotional, educational and other consequences of the great withdrawal.

Thus there are also people building organisations to provide broader, ongoing practical aid – such as the young people in more than a dozen US cities delivering groceries and supplies to older and immunocompromised people via a network called Zoomers to Boomers – and others organising emotional support for those who feel isolated, including the UK’s adopt-a-grandparent programme. There are new groups, projects, organisations and networks, and old ones retooling for the crisis.

Fiji-based climate organiser Thelma Young-Lutunatabua told me about the return of traditional Fijian forms of equitable, cooperative food distribution to make sure no one was left out. “The way we get through this is together,” she said.

Fifteen years ago, in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a mutual aid organisation called Common Ground Relief was founded by a handful of people inside the damaged area, including the former Black Panther Malik Rahim. (In the US, perhaps the most famous past examples of mutual aid are the Black Panther party’s 1960s-era food programmes to assuage hunger in inner-city neighbourhoods.) The group’s slogan was “solidarity not charity”, a phrase inspired by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano: “I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.”

As a definition of mutual aid’s ideals, “solidarity not charity” surfaces constantly today. Charity often implies that the afflicted population is powerless or incompetent to address its own needs. Sometimes, it can take away confidence and pride even as it gives tangible aid. Solidarity is, first of all, an affirmation that we are in this together, and mutual aid demonstrates that even in crisis we have strength and capacity to care for ourselves. The term comes from the anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin’s 1902 book Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution, which argues that aiding and protecting others and serving the needs of the group rather than the individual has been essential to the survival of many species, and is evident in early and traditional human societies.

In the time of coronavirus, mutual aid has been used to describe myriad new volunteer cooperative projects that have arisen in response to disaster. But the landscape of outreach is complex and varied. Take, for example, the creation and circulation of masks. There is a whole spectrum of mask economies from corrupt profiteering and outright theft – including by the US federal government– to the very different world of creative mutual aid. Many of us, myself included, have made a few masks for those we know. Others have gone into bulk production.

San Francisco local government supervisor Matt Haney fundraised and organised the distribution of thousands of masks for the impoverished, densely housed – and houseless – residents of the city’s Tenderloin district, which he represents. Adriana Camarena, a lawyer from Mexico City, realised that the undocumented day labourers near her home in San Francisco’s Mission district had few supplies and little access to health information to meet the crisis. So she began making and distributing cloth masks and hand sanitiser, and giving brief educational talks to go with them.

Meanwhile, the artist and art professor Stephanie Syjuco settled into mask mass production to meet the needs of people in Oakland and Berkeley, starting with masks for a group working to address food insecurity among UC Berkeley students. By late April, she had personally made 700 masks. And the Auntie Sewing Squad, founded by Los Angeles performance artist Kristina Wong, now includes more than 500 members, and has produced more than 20,000 masks, by Wong’s count.

The aunties (and uncles, but mostly aunties) began by making masks for hospital workers, and then for farmworkers, people released by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) or getting out of prison, immigrant communities and other vulnerable groups. It’s a model of decentralised, volunteer-driven organising: whoever finds a need obtains pledges from makers until the required number is reached, and the beautifully made masks are gathered and shipped to their destination. Many pay for their own materials and shipping, and donations support others. This week, the squad is sending a van full of supplies, including masks, materials and three sewing machines, to the Navajo nation, which has been hard hit by the virus. The Navajo is just one of several indigenous communities they have reached out to.

The Auntie Sewing Squad even expanded to include cooking to support those who sew. “When you’ve been bent over a sewing machine for 12 hours, a nice order of pad thai is really welcome,” one auntie told me.

The US mask-makers, like donors to food-distribution programmes, are in part compensating for governmental failure. Had the federal government prepared for crisis, and supported the scientific advice on how to respond to pandemics, the need for these mutual aid efforts could have been smaller. There has been much talk of the underlying health conditions that make individuals more vulnerable to Covid-19. The US as a whole has underlying conditions – systemic racism, poverty and financial precariousness, lack of access to healthcare and the internet for rural and poor families – that have made this crisis far worse than it should have been. The old conservative argument against social programmes was that these needs should be met by individual and independent institutions’ generosity. In unequal societies, these were never enough to meet the need.

What is noteworthy for me about this crisis is that there is no clear distinction between purely volunteer- and donation-driven projects, and a host of other endeavours trying to meet the needs of the moment. There are many ways that businesses and workers are stepping up or shifting what they do and how they do it, out of altruism. A Buddhist group in Tallahassee, Florida, raised $500,000 to purchase masks from China for medical workers in their area. The jet belonging to the New England Patriots football team brought 1.2m masks directly from China to circumvent the federal government’s outbidding of Massachusetts on personal protective equipment (PPE).

Elsewhere, the New York Times reported on Amish families who, as other jobs dried up, turned to mass-producing cloth masks, face shields and other PPE for the Cleveland clinic, which urgently needed them. (This, like the California government program that lets otherwise shuttered restaurants deliver meals to isolated senior citizens, is when aid becomes literally mutual, meeting needs on both sides of the interaction.) Then there are the 43 Pennsylvania factory workers who chose to isolate themselves in their workplace for a 28-day marathon of 12-hour days, during which they produced tens of millions of pounds of polypropylene, the raw material from which a lot of PPE is made. Like the Amish, they were paid for their work, and were working in intense new ways, fuelled by social commitment, to meet an urgent need. One of the workers said: “We’ve been getting messages on social media from nurses, doctors, emergency workers, saying thank you for what we’re doing. But we want to thank them for what they did and are continuing to do. That’s what made the time we were in there go by quickly, just being able to support them.”

During the final 1,000 days of the second world war, shipyard workers in the San Francisco Bay Area produced 1,000 warships – a warship a day. Something like that epic, urgent industry seems to be at work now, but outside the federal government, or any government. In early April, the Bay Area branch of the news site Hoodline reported: “On Thursday morning, two tons of rolled sheet plastic arrived at a warehouse in Alameda. By the end of the weekend, it had become 16,000 plastic face shields. That remarkable turnaround is entirely owed to self-organisation by Bay Area makers, who have transformed maker spaces, universities, fabrication shops and almost anyone with their own sewing machine, CNC machine or 3D printer into an ad-hoc corps of medical supply manufacturers.” The report called the self-organised effort involving industrial-design students and teachers a “distributed factory”. Such decentralised efforts, organised without top-down authority, are exemplary mutual aid.

In April, 14 nurses and seven doctors from the same institution set off for a one-month assignment on the Navajo reservation, whose residents are facing high levels of infection. They were coordinated by the existing UCSF Heal Initiative(Health, Equity, Action and Leadership), which works with impoverished and vulnerable communities from Haiti to Nepal. Its mission statement is: “We seek to embody solidarity and contribute to the movement for global health equity led by communities themselves.” This initiative, based on the principle of “solidarity not charity”, has been working with communities under stress for six years, and will still be there when the immediate crisis is over.

During “ordinary” disasters – a hurricane, an earthquake – there’s a phenomenon called volunteer convergence, whereby people eager to help gather in the impacted areas. Sometimes so many people and so much donated material shows up that they pose management problems for those at the centre of the crisis. This is not an ordinary disaster – the impacted area is all over the world, and convergence is banned – but people are showing up in many ways. Some of this work is always going on – there is always suffering and injustice to assuage, and there are always people trying to do so.

Even ordinary disasters never really end. There are many ways in which Hurricane Katrina’s impact on New Orleans and other parts of the gulf coast lasted – though there are, at least, some positive aspects to this lingering impact. The Common Ground Health Clinic spun off from Common Ground Relief. Fifteen years on, it’s still delivering free medical care in the New Orleans region.

The Covid-19 pandemic and economic crisis will not end – if ending means things going back to the way they were. Whatever “normal” meant on 1 January 2020, it will never return, and neither will millions of the jobs financed by the disposable income that has just dried up. It’s worth remembering that, in the past few decades, the return to 19th-century robber-baron capitalism – via the dismantling of social safety nets, and the transformation of education, healthcare and other basic human needs into for-profit schemes that served shareholders first – meant that everyday life had already become a disaster for too many billions of people before this crisis.

There is a long, rough road ahead. Without radical change, the way food, shelter, medical care and education are produced and distributed will be more unfair and more devastating than before. It seems likely that conservatives will argue for brutal austerity and libertarian abandonment of the most desperate, while the rest of us are going to have to argue for some form of post-capitalism that decouples meeting basic needs from wage labour – perhaps the kind of basic income that Spain is planning to introduce.

The devastating economic effect of the pandemic will make innovation essential, whether it is rethinking higher education or food distribution, or how to fund news media. The Green New Deal offers a model for how to move forward on jobs and leave fossil fuels behind as that sector founders and climate catastrophe looms. Protests in many fields – including nurses demanding PPE, and warehouse, delivery and food-service workers protesting against exploitative or unsafe working conditions – suggests that workers’ organisations may be gaining strength.

I believe the generosity and solidarity in action in the present moment offers a foreshadowing of what is possible – and necessary. The basic generosity and empathy of most ordinary people should be regarded as a treasure, a light and an energy source that can drive a better society, if it is recognised and encouraged. Mostly, it’s overlooked, undermined and sabotaged. Capitalism, and its octopus arms of entertainment, advertising and marketing, endeavour to reduce us to consumers. This means making us the kind of miserable, selfish, lonely people who seek fulfllment through buying stuff, and believe in competitiveness as a basic social force. Competitiveness, that driving word behind free-market ideology, means we are rivals and there is scarcity; each of us gets more by seeing that someone else gets less.

Competition is the antithesis of mutual aid, which is not only a practical tool but an ideological insurrection. The fact that even in places like the US, where these competitive, isolating messages have bombarded us for at least 150 years, millions still reach out in generosity, and are still moved to meet the needs that become visible in moments such as this, is testament to something about human nature and human possibility. Those urges are strong and deep, and they can be a foundation for something different. Indeed, they often have been before, when European social welfare was built up, when US social safety nets were created, and when people self-organised on smaller scales to take care of each other.

Some of that sense of urgency and shared destiny will fade away, as it often does after a disaster, but one of the important things to remember is that some of it was here before this pandemic. I sometimes think that capitalism is a catastrophe constantly being mitigated and cleaned up by mutual aid and kinship networks, by the generosity of religious and secular organisations, by the toil of human-rights lawyers and climate groups, and by the kindness of strangers. Imagine if these forces, this spirit, weren’t just the cleanup crew, but were the ones setting the agenda.

What I have seen after earlier disasters is that a lot of people aspire to “go home” and “back to normal”, but some find in the moment a sense of self and a sense of connection so meaningful that something about who they were and what they did in the crisis carries forward into how they live the rest of their life. Sometimes this is as intangible as a change of priorities and habits, and a new sense of agency; not uncommonly, it’s as substantial as a new coalition, a new network, a new set of policy priorities, a new political career or a decision to go into work that supports the whole. And even those who want things to get back to normal often find they are changed permanently in their sense of who they are, and what matters most. The pandemic marks the end of an era and the beginning of another – one whose harshness must be mitigated by a spirit of generosity. An artist hunched over her sewing machine, a young person delivering groceries on his bicycle, a nurse suiting up for the ICU, a doctor heading to the Navajo nation, a graduate student hip-deep in Pyramid Lake catching trout for elders, a programmer setting up a website to organise a community: the work is under way. It can be the basis for the future, if we can recognise the value of these urges and actions, recognise that things can and must change profoundly, and if we can tell other stories about who we are, what we want and what is possible.

 

It Could Happen Any Time

[Preface by John R. Boettiger: This is not the first time that my son Joshua has contributed to Reckonings, as you will see if you seek his name in "Search Reckonings" on the lower right of this page. I have plucked the following poem by William Stafford and Joshua's commentary from the website of his current congregation, Temple Emek Shalom in Ashland, Oregon (https://emekshalom.org/). What Joshua writes below, though written seven years ago on December 1, 2015, and in a different season, seems deeply appropriate to the time of crisis we are now experiencing. I also realize that today is the day of shabat in the Jewish weekly calendar, so I will close this preface with a longstanding prayer addressed to readers: Shabat Shalom. The traditional translation is “Good Sabbath.” This is a decent translation, but the phrase is very nuanced. ... So when someone wishes you Shabat Shalom, they are saying to you “May you dwell in completeness on this seventh day."]

 

It Could Happen Any Time

Rabbi Joshua Boettiger

12-1-15

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon.  It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know.  That’s why we wake
and look out — no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

– William Stafford

 

Sometimes the world feels like a very scary place; sometimes we don’t know what to do with the rush of horrific news in our world that we may receive in the course of any given day. And we feel the truth that, as Stafford writes, “it could happen any time.” So that is true. We cannot deny that it is so. And we wake up and look out and know that there are no guarantees in this life.

And yet there is more that could befall us at any time, and is in fact, is extraordinarily more likely to actually happen: sunshine, love, salvation.

We look out our window now. Sometimes our fear for our world and our loved ones in it clouds and darkens our vision. This is just what it is to be alive. And every generation feels it and has felt it and will continue to feel it.

And yet there is morning, noon, evening. Each of them an indescribable miracle; a gift staring us right in the face. We cannot deny that this is true – the gift that is this life; the miraculous in what we call the mundane.

May we have the courage to be who we are and to be in the world as it is. Hanukah is a season of miracles. May we have the courage to meet the miraculous half-way.

Kahlil Gibran on fear

One of the communities that continues to nourish me in the virtual world that accompanies the coronavirus epidemic is the Community Congregational Church (CCC) at the top of Rock Hill Road in Tiburon, California. In this instance, I am thinking of a weekly meeting called Stone Soup that normally meets in the church's Seminar Room but has adapted to meet during these times through the medium of Zoom. Imagine 25 to 30 of us, focusing our discussion on the readings that accompany the previous and prospective Sunday services (also Zoom facilitated).

Typically, one of the two readings is a biblical passage, the other often a story or poem from a more contemporary writer. In the most recent Stone Soup of which I am thinking, the second reading is a poem by the 20th-century Lebanese-American artist Kahlil Gibran.

Born in 1883 of a poor Maronite Christian family in the village of Bsharri in what was then the Ottoman Empire and is now Lebanon, Gibran had very little formal schooling before being taken by his mother to the United States in 1895. The family settled in Boston's South End. Although attracted to the Western aesthetic culture of the day, his mother and elder half-brother wanted Gibran to absorb more of his own heritage, so at the age of 15 he returned to his homeland to study for three years at the Collège de la Sagesse, a Maronite-run institute in Beirut.

Quiet and sensitive as a young boy, Gibran "displayed an early artistic aptitude and a love for nature that became evident in later works." The writing for which he became best known was the book he called The Prophet, published in 1923.

 

Fear
by Kahlil Gibran

It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.

*She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.

And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.

But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.

Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.

 

"Fear" is a poem of changing consciousness. The reader contemplates a river flowing into the ocean. "It is said," earlier in its life, "before entering the sea, a river trembles with fear." She can look back at her journey, but cannot go back. The source of the fear is clear:

she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.

That is the fear: to disappear forever, only postponed in a tidal marsh whose life is barely ours. I wish I had known that earlier, that there is no other way, that I can not go back. Poet, you speak with such clarity and certitude, brook no argument, no wiggle room. You ironically call it risk, but then say in truth:

Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.

However much we wish to go back, to relive our earlier existence (selectively, differently, to be sure) we can only go forward. That is my word, not yours. But it changes all, as you do, finally, in your very last lines. I see it is not risk you ask, but trust. All that looking back and all that trembling fear is apprenticeship. Learning what is not, in order to know what is.

it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.

 

* The river's gender intrigues me in this poem. Conventional usage suggests male. The river is female. I think the choice is inspired. The learning it conveys, the river's flow and her coming to know, are more yin than yang.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My dear friend Al Braidwood, after reading an earlier version of this post, sent me an excerpt from the Chandogya Upanishad, translated from the original Sanskrit by Al's former meditation teacher Eknath Easwaran.

"As the rivers flowing east and west

merge in the sea and become one with it,

forgetting they were ever separate streams,

so do all creatures lose their separateness

when they merge at last into pure Being.”

 

 

Hope and Falling Together: Rebecca Solnit in conversation with Krista Tippett (2016)

On Being with Krista Tippett

Rebecca Solnit

Hope and Falling Together

May 26, 2016

“When all the ordinary divides and patterns are shattered, people step up to become their brothers’ keepers. And that purposefulness and connectedness bring joy even amidst death, chaos, fear, and loss.” A singular writer and thinker, Rebecca Solnit celebrates the unpredictable and incalculable events that so often redeem our lives, both solitary and public. She searches for the hidden, transformative histories inside and after events we chronicle merely as disasters, in places like post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans.

Rebecca Solnit is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and a regular writer for publications including The Guardian and The London Review of Books. Her books include A Paradise Built in Hell, Hope in the Dark, and a new collection of essays, The Mother of All Questions.

Krista Tippett, host: Rebecca Solnit describes her vision as a writer like this: “to describe nuances and shades of meaning, to celebrate public life and solitary life, to find another way of telling.” She is a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine and the author of profound books that defy category. She’s emerged as one of our great chroniclers of untold histories of redemptive change in places like post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. She writes that, so often, “When all the ordinary divides and patterns are shattered, people step up to become their brother’s keepers. And that purposefulness and connectedness bring joy even amidst death, chaos, fear, and loss.”

Rebecca Solnit: I want better metaphors. I want better stories. I want more openness. I want better questions. All these things feel like they give us tools that are a little more commensurate with the amazing possibilities and the terrible realities that we face.

Ms. Tippett:  Rebecca Solnit’s books include A Paradise Built in Hell, Hope in the Dark, and a new collection of essays, The Mother of All Questions. She was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and moved with her parents to the San Francisco Bay Area when she was young. I spoke with her in 2016.

Ms. Tippett: I usually start my conversations with an inquiry about the spiritual background of your childhood, and — however you would define that. And as I look at the sweep of your writing, I see so many elements that, to me, are profoundly spiritual — a long sense of time, a robust commitment to hope. You describe your childhood in so many ways — in one place, these are words you use: “a scrawny, battered little kid in a violent house.” And I wonder how you would think about that notion of the spiritual background of your childhood. And it occurs to me that perhaps some of these things were seeded by absence, as much as by presence.

Ms. Solnit:  I think that’s true. And when you ask that question, what comes to mind is a map of where most of my childhood took place. I wrote somewhere that I had an inside-out childhood, because every place was safe but home. If you went — just on the other side of the backyard fence was a quarter horse stud farm and then dairy farms and open space. And the landscape and the animals, domestic and wild, were this huge refuge and really fed me and encouraged me, and there was a sense of community with the non-human. And so that was if you went north, even just to the other side of the fence and beyond — it was just endless open space and oak trees and grasslands and wildlife.

And then if you went south, there was a really great public library. And the minute I learned how to read, it was as though I’d been given this huge treasure. Every book was a box I suddenly knew how to open, and in it I could meet people, go to other worlds, go deep in all kinds of ways. And I spent my childhood in the hills and in the books. And those — so that was not maybe what people think of conventionally as spirituality, but that was my company, my encouragement, my teaching, my community.

Ms. Tippett: That’s lovely. So the sweep of your work is wonderful, and it’s daunting, as an interviewer. But I actually thought I would start with — I’d just love to have a conversation with you about this piece that was in Harper’s not that long ago, about — I can’t remember the title of it. But it was ostensibly about the choice not to have children.

Ms. Solnit: Oh, yeah. It’s called “The Mother of All Questions.”

Ms. Tippett: The Mother of All Questions.” And part of what you were reflecting on, or a jumping-off point for your reflection, was the fact that people are so curious about that and, in fact, so presumptuous about it. And I think you make the case very quickly that it’s a valid and life-giving choice, not to have children. But in fact, the piece, like so much of what you write, becomes a reflection on the vast expanse of what it is to be alive. And so there’s this: you said, “People lock onto motherhood as a key to feminine identity in part from the belief that children are the best way to fulfill your capacity to love, even though the list of monstrous, ice-hearted mothers is extensive. But there are so many things to love besides one’s own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.”

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, exactly.

Ms. Tippett: And you say — I love this phrase: “There’s so much other work love has to do in the world.” I just feel like that’s so worth just putting out in public life and reflecting on.

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, and it’s partly — we overemphasize this very specific zone of love. It’s as though we’ve hyper-mapped it and obsessed about it and shone lights on it and things. And then there’s this whole other territory of relationships, to the larger world in particular and to public life, to — I hang out with a lot of climate activists, and there’s this profound love they have for the natural world, for the future, for justice. And that really shapes lives and gives them tremendous meaning. And it benefits all of us that they have this and that this motivates them, because they’re acting on behalf of all of us. And we should call that love. And we should look at the way that —

Ms. Tippett: And it’s a passionate love, right? It’s a passionate love.

Ms. Solnit: Absolutely. It’s just — it’s ferocious, and it’s protective the way that mother love can be. And if anything’s going to save the planet, it’s that love. But mostly we don’t even acknowledge that it exists, and so we have these blank spots on the map of who we are. And I want to try and fill those in and encourage people to go there, to recognize that actually, their lives can take place or are already taking place there and that this will give them this bigger sense of self.

Ms. Tippett :So a lot of the themes that run through your work, the things you care about, I want to say they’re outliers in terms of what we know how to talk about in public — certainly, in intellectual circles. And so maybe let’s talk about hope, because I think hope is one of those.

Ms. Solnit: I can talk about hope till, I think, the cows come home.

Ms. Tippett: [laughs] Well, I just — I want to start — somewhere you write that your fascination with this — maybe you began to articulate your fascination with this when you registered your emotions and the emotions of others in response to the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco. And my sense is that what you — how you responded and how you saw others respond — it was not, perhaps, what you would have expected.

Ms. Solnit: The amazing thing about the 1989 earthquake — it was an earthquake as big as the kind that killed thousands of people in places like Turkey and Mexico City and things like that. But partly because we have good infrastructure, about 50 people died. A number of people lost their homes. Everybody was shaken up. But what was so interesting for me was that people seemed to kind of love what was going on. And when I’d ask people, or when it would come up in conversation, because for years afterwards around here, people would be like, “Oh, where were you at 5:02, or is it 5:03 P.M., on October 17, 1989?” And people would get this expression that I later ran into when I visited Halifax, Nova Scotia, after a big hurricane there, when I talked — and then eventually, I did a whole book on this mysterious emotion. People would light up. And everything we’ve been told about disaster by trashy Hollywood disaster movies with Charlton Heston and Tom Cruise, everything about the news — is that human beings are fragile, disasters are terrible, and we’re either terrified because we’re fragile, or our morality is also fragile, and we revert to our best-deal, savage, social-Darwinist, Hobbesian nature, and go out raping and looting.

Those myths became a secondary disaster, worse than the hurricane that hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005, because that’s why it was — the city was shut off, turned into a prison city, why the police were shooting black people in the back, why people were not allowed to evacuate and supplies were not allowed in while people were dying of exposure and lack of medication and et cetera.

So that was part of where I got hopeful, and then also, in a larger sense, one of the things I’m really interested in is, what are the stories we tell, and what are their consequences? And are there other ways of telling, other ways — other stories that don’t get told? And hopefulness is really, for me — is not optimism: that everything’s going to be fine, and we can just sit back. And that’s too much like pessimism, which is that everything’s going to suck, and we can just sit back.

Hope, for me, just means a Buddhist sense of uncertainty, of coming to terms with the fact that we don’t know what will happen and that there’s maybe room for us to intervene, and that we have to let go of the certainty people seem to love more than hope and know that we don’t know what’s going to happen. And we live in a very surprising world, where nobody anticipated the way the Berlin Wall would fall or the Arab Spring would rise up, the impact of Occupy Wall Street. Obama was unelectable, six months before he was elected.

Ms. Tippett: But I wonder, as you just described that, just then, what you said — in those moments of disaster, of crisis, we come face to face with the reality that unexpected things will happen — as you said, that life is surprising, in good ways and bad. That’s just true. But is there something life-giving, even energizing, about people actually having to face those bedrock realities in those moments?

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, and there’s a way a disaster throws people into the present and gives them this supersaturated immediacy that also includes a deep sense of connection. It’s as though in some violent gift, you’ve been given a kind of spiritual awakening where you’re close to mortality in a way that makes you feel more alive. You’re deeply in the present and can let go of past and future and your personal narrative, in some ways. You have shared an experience with everyone around you, and you often find very direct but also metaphysical senses of connection to the people you suddenly have something in common with.

And then oftentimes, the people who do the really important work in disasters, which doesn’t get talked about much, are the neighbors. Who’s going to rescue you when your building collapses, when the ice storm comes, and the power goes out? It’s probably going to be the neighbors. And so the question is really two things. One is, how can we get there without going through a disaster, and …

Ms. Tippett:[ laughs] That’s right. That’s the question, isn’t it?

Ms. Solnit: And I think of that as this funny way the earthquake shakes you awake. And then that’s the big spiritual question: How do you stay awake? How do you stay in that deeper consciousness of that present-mindedness, that sense of non-separation and compassion and engagement — and courage, which is also a big part of it, and generosity? People are not selfish and greedy.

So and then the other question is, why has everything we’ve ever been told about human nature misled us about what happens in these moments? And what happens if we acknowledge, as I think people in the kind of work that neuropsychologists and the Dalai Lama’s research projects and economists are beginning to say, what if human — everything we’ve been told about human nature is wrong, and we’re actually very generous, communitarian, altruistic beings who are distorted by the system we are in but not made happy by it? What if we can actually be better people in a better world?

Ms. Tippett: A story I have always loved, that, to me — Dorothy Day, I just feel like, gets quoted all the time, more and more. Somehow, she’s really come to the forefront of consciousness. And you do write about — in your book, A Paradise Built in Hell, which I love so much — you write about the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906, which killed 3,000 people and annihilated the center of the city, as you say, and shattered this hundred-mile stretch.

But Dorothy Day was in Oakland. She’s eight years old. She watches this thing that someplace you describe as — you say, yes, people fall apart, but in disaster, there’s also this falling together that we don’t chronicle. And she — the question she asked was — she saw, to me — this is me looking at this — she saw that people were capable of this; that all along, they knew how to do this, to take care of each other.

Ms. Solnit: Exactly.

Ms. Tippett: And she said, “Why can’t we live this way all the time?”

Ms. Solnit: No, that is her formative experience. She said, while the disaster lasted, people loved one another. And Dorothy Day is such a key figure for that book, both because the earthquake becomes a spiritual awakening and the template for what she pursues in her life, and because she’s somebody who had a partner and a child, and she kept the child, but she gave up family life for this larger sense of community she pursued as the founder of Catholic Worker. And she treated poverty as the disaster in which she would create this kind of communitas, this deeper, broader, higher, more spiritual sense of community than private life had offered her. And she’s so interesting as somebody who renounces it directly and connects this other sense so directly to disaster.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, and you talk about — in all the places you looked, and in your own circle as you were in that disaster, there’s virtue that arises, and that there’s a joy — there’s a hope and a joy. And I was thinking about that phrase of hers, “the duty of delight.” So it’s not — so yes, there’s — she makes sacrifices that seem — that would seem extreme in the context of most of our lives. But that joy was also something she claimed and hung onto.

Ms. Solnit: “Joy” is such an interesting term, because we hear constantly about happiness — “Are you happy?” And it’s — emotions are mutable, and this notion that happiness should be a steady state seems destined to make people miserable. And joy is so much more interesting, because I think we’re much more aware that it’s like the light at sunrise, or the lightning, or something — that it’s epiphanies and moments and raptures, and that it’s not supposed to be a steady state, and that’s OK. And I think it’s a word that comes up a lot more in spiritual life than “happiness,” that millstone, happiness.

Ms. Tippett: Absolutely, yeah. You draw a connection often between, I would say, the reasonableness of hope and the reality of darkness. Would you say something about that?

Ms. Solnit: Well, I really wanted to rescue “darkness” from the pejoratives, because it’s also associated with dark-skinned people, and those pejoratives often become racial in ways that I find problematic. So I wrote a book called Hope in the Dark, about hope, where that darkness was the future — that the present and past are daylight, and the future is night. But in that darkness is a kind of mysterious, erotic, enveloping sense of possibility and communion — love is made in the dark, often as not — and then to recognize that unknowability as fertile, as rich as the womb, rather than the tomb, in some sense. And so much, for me, of hope is not, as I was saying, not optimism that everything will be fine, but that we don’t know what will happen.

A guest of yours whose name I’m going to mispronounce — Walter Brueggemann…

Ms. Tippett: Yes, yes, theologian of the prophets.

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, and I listened to his interview, and he talked about how much hope is grounded in memory. And I was so excited to hear someone say that. We think of hope as looking forward, but memory lets us know, if we have a real memory, that we didn’t know. We didn’t know the Berlin Wall was going to fall, and the Soviet Union was going to fall apart, and the binary arrangement those of us who are older grew up in, where it seemed like capitalism and communism and the Cold War standoff was going to last for centuries.

If you study history deeply, you realize that, to quote Patti Smith, “People have the power” — that popular power, civil society, has been tremendously powerful and has changed the world again and again and again; that we’re not powerless; that things are very unpredictable and that people have often taken on things that seemed hopeless — freeing the slaves, getting women the vote — and achieved those things. And I feel like so much of what we’re burdened by is bad stories, both people who have amnesia, who don’t remember that the present was constructed by certain forces to serve certain elements and can be deconstructed and that things could be very different, that they have been very different, that things are always changing and that we have agency in that change.

And one of the simple examples I often go back to is that when you and I were small, to be gay or lesbian or otherwise — something other than standard heterosexual — was to be considered mentally ill or criminal or both, and punished accordingly. And to go from there to national same-sex marriage rights is an unimaginable journey. It’s — and that’s a lot of what my hopeful stuff is about, is trying to look at the immeasurable, incalculable, indirect, roundabout way that things matter.

My friend, David Graber, has a wonderful passage about how the Russian revolution succeeded, but not really in Russia. It terrified, or at least motivated, leaders in Europe and North America and elsewhere to make enormous concessions to the rights of poor and workers and really furthered economic justice in other places. And if you can say that a revolution was successful, but not in the country it took place in, then you can start to trace these indirect impacts.

Ms. Tippett: You can listen again and share this conversation with Rebecca Solnit at civilconversationsproject.org. We are expanding On Being’s Civil Conversations Project to be more of a resource for families and communities. Find audio, video, and a starter guide for beginning new conversations where you live and reinventing common life for this century, because the point of speaking together differently is to live together differently. Again, all that at civilconversationsproject.org.

Ms. Tippett: You have this wonderful sentence that “History is like the weather, not like checkers.” And you talk about — here’s another: “Sometimes cause and effect are centuries apart; sometimes Martin Luther King’s arc of the moral universe that bends towards justice is so long few see its curve; sometimes hope lies not in looking forward but backward to study the line of that arc.” It’s an un-American way of thinking, but it’s an essential way, I think, to inhabit this century, in particular.

Ms. Solnit: There used to be products advertised in comic books and things — “Instant results guaranteed, or your money back.” If disappointment is your goal, that’s a sure-fire recipe for it. For example, Occupy Wall Street was pronounced a failure before it had really gotten going, and at one point, there were Occupies in New Zealand and Japan and Europe — in California alone, there were about 400 Occupies at the peak, in late 2011. And they dispersed, as these encampments and people — in which people had these extraordinary dialogues. And the impact of those dialogues is hard to measure. But you can look at Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio of New — the mayor of New York, as people who are carrying those frameworks into the mainstream and into electoral politics. And you can also look at both national things — the movement against punitive student debt and the …

Ms. Tippett: I feel like what you’re — you’re kind of — you’re drawing a map, and it’s a different kind of map than we came out of the 20th century in our heads with, which is about how social change happens. I think maybe the image people go to, in a default way, is maybe the civil rights movement, simplified — large numbers of people on the street, a charismatic leader, and laws that get passed right in that moment.

So let me ask you this, because, one, I very much appreciated your writing about Hurricane Katrina and the world after Hurricane Katrina. And this is one of these places where we’ve told the story in a certain way. And we — and even from the very beginning, the story was narrated and presented in a way that was largely just incredibly demoralizing. If you met someone — say, a Martian, who — [laughs] who was not here and had never heard of this, how would you tell, start to tell, the fullness of that story of Hurricane Katrina, what happened to this city called New Orleans and how that history is still being made now?

Ms. Solnit: I should say that all my work on disaster draws from these wonderful disaster sociologists who had this — do this incredible work, documenting what happens in disasters, and have since World War II. I’m kind of their popularizer, and people like Kathleen Tierney. But — and they say there’s no such thing as a “natural” disaster, meaning that in an earthquake, it’s buildings that fall on you. So what are the building codes? Who lives in substandard housing? Who lives on the floodplain? Who gets evacuated? Who gets left behind? What happened to New Orleans is that the levees failed. About seven-eighths of the city flooded, meaning that a lot of it was from a few feet to 15 feet or more deep in water, and just all systems failed, and some hospitals were able to run on generators.

There was a supposedly — there was what was called a mandatory evacuation, but people who didn’t have the resources to evacuate were left behind to face what happened. So that’s the set-up for it that creates a disaster. In Cuba, when there’s a mandatory evacuation, everybody receives the assistance they need to evacuate, so it’s our kind of laissez-faire, every-man-for-himself system that left what were often portrayed as the “criminal element,” was a lot of poor women, single moms with kids, a lot of elderly people. And a lot of the guys who got portrayed as gangsters and things were the wonderful rescuers and these really able-bodied young guys who did amazing things.

Then things happen, like they basically get sealed off. You can walk out of the central city to dry land, but the sheriff of a suburb called Gretna, and his thugs, get on the bridge with guns and turn people back at gunpoint. You cannot walk out of New Orleans to dry land, so you’re trapped. You’re a prisoner, essentially.

Ms. Tippett: And that was because of the narrative they were working off, in terms of who these people were?

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, well, the — all the clichés that surfaced in the 1906 earthquake, all the crap about human nature, about how we all revert — especially poor people, especially non-white people — how we revert to our savage, social-Darwinist nature, were aired. And the mainstream media — and this includes The New York Times and The Washington Post and CNN and The Guardian, all the major news outlets — it wasn’t — were the unindicted co-conspirators, I always say. They start publishing all this garbage about how there’s mass killings in the Superdome. And that was just believed so much that the Federal Emergency Management Agency sends a gigantic tractor-trailer refrigerated truck to get what turns out to be six bodies, not the 200 that are supposed to be there.

There’s all these stories that people are shooting at helicopters, so you can’t have helicopter rescues. And so they mount a campaign, not to treat suffering human beings and bring them resources, but to reconquer the city. Kathleen Blanco, the governor of Louisiana, said, “We have troops fresh from Iraq, and they have M16s that are locked and loaded, and they know how to use them.” And it’s like, that is not a humanitarian effort. M16s are not how you help that grandmother dying on the roof. And some of those grandmothers died.

And so people were not a victim of a hurricane, they were a victim of vicious stories; of the media’s failures; of the failures of the government on every scale, from the city of New Orleans that left prisoners locked in flooded jails, to the federal government. And so that’s political failures, but behind those politics are stories.

And what’s interesting is that a lot of people believe those stories. And we often treat stories like they’re very trivial, like they’re story hour for kids or — but people live and die by stories. And people died of vicious stories in New Orleans. Everybody could have been evacuated in 24 hours. Everybody could have been evacuated beforehand.

Ms. Tippett: Well, and the stories you also tell that we don’t hear, which were life-giving — that in the immediate aftermath, more than 200,000 people invite displaced strangers into their homes through hurricanehousing.org, which I never heard about; that the massive number of people who went to New Orleans, who went to the Gulf Coast to help rebuild — that it was like the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, magnified a thousand-fold. So there’s also that taking place, and those lives, one at a time.

Ms. Solnit: And there was — from the very minute it all began, there was tremendous altruism. The first round of rescuers were people who were themselves inside the city who got boats or did other things to rescue people, who came together in buildings that weren’t damaged and formed little communities and took care of the vulnerable. But there are these extraordinary stories. And people really — that impulse to help is so powerful. And they talk — they call it “disaster convergence,” and it often becomes a problem, where you have — you remember after 9/11, people lined up around the block all over the country, to give blood. People really want to help. That’s who we are.

And New Orleans, for years afterwards, had all these people — church groups, and I saw amazing Mennonite builders rebuilding houses, and Habitat for Humanity, and I kind of loved it. It was the whole spectrum, from Catholic Charities to the Mennonites to pretty radical anarchists. And people working with Common Ground, which was founded by the Black Panthers and young white supporters and became a project that did a lot of different things, and not all of it worked out perfectly, but some of it was amazing, and it became really a part of the conversation. But they founded the first really good clinic for people who needed emergency care, who needed their diabetes medicine or their tetanus shot or their wound disinfected. And that split off into Common GroundClinic, which is still going strong more than ten years later. And that’s the kind of indirect consequences that I find so interesting to trace, is that here’s something that came out of Katrina that’s still helping people every day.

Ms. Tippett: Right. So we talked a little while ago about love and your idea that love has so many other things to do in the world, aside from these silos of loving our families and loving our children. So if I ask you just what story or people come to mind — if you think about the word “love” as a practical, muscular, public thing in New Orleans, ten years after Hurricane Katrina, what comes to mind for you?

Ms. Solnit: So many things; it’s a really magical place. People have deep connections in New Orleans. I would try to explain that people in New Orleans and Katrina lost things that most of us hadn’t had for generations. A lot of people lived in a neighborhood where they knew hundreds of people. They knew everybody who lived near them. They might have extended family. They might be like Fats Domino, who was born in a house in the Lower Ninth Ward, delivered by his grandmother. People live in their grandparents’ houses. They have these deep roots and wide branches.

And they engage in public celebration. They talk to strangers. And they — it’s a deeply Dionysian place, with the second line parades all — 40-something Sundays a year; not just Carnival, not just Mardi Gras. And it’s a profoundly spiritual place. So all these things are part of the place, and so they’re already really rich.

But a lot of people, after Katrina, felt like, OK, we really have to engage to keep this place alive. And there was a real rise in civic engagement, and a number of institutions around justice and policing were reformed. The police were actually taken over by the federal government, because it was the most corrupt and incompetent police department in the United States. They got a semi-decent mayor for a change, after a lot of corruption — particularly from Ray Nagin, who went to jail for it, the mayor during and after Katrina. And people really started to dream big, about “OK, here we are on the fastest-eroding coastline in the world, in a city that’s partly below sea level, in an era of climate change, increasing storms, and rising waters. How do we adapt?” And people are having this really exciting conversation about rethinking the city and how water works in the city, building systems of survival.

And again, this is like all disasters. The storm was horrible. It killed about 1,800 people. It displaced a lot of black people who were never able to come back, and impacted the continuity and mental health of the community. But it did create this engagement and this really creative planning of the future. And New Orleans might have just continued its gentle decline, without Katrina.

Ms. Tippett: Right, and it’s kind of an incubator now, isn’t it? Kind of a …

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, yeah, and a lot of the young people, these young idealists who moved there, fell in love with the place and stayed. And it’s complicated; some of them are the white kids who are gentrifying traditionally black neighborhoods. But they’re also — some — they’re not all white, and they are people who are bringing a passion for urban planning, community gardens; for thinking about these social and ecological systems. And the place is very energized right now in new ways, and it has retained quite a lot, if not all, of the energy it had before.

Ms. Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today, with writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit. I spoke with her during the 2016 presidential election.

Ms. Tippett: It seems to me that that story of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina becomes just an extreme example of a larger reality you see. And so here’s something you wrote, where it’s so beautifully stated — and in fact, each one of us individually, if we stopped to take it apart, has a story of a million events or actions or people without which we would not be. And you wrote, “Trace it far enough and this very moment in your life becomes a rare species, the result of a strange evolution, a butterfly that should already be extinct and survives by the inexplicabilities we call coincidence.” [laughs]

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, and it’s also about the unpredictability of our lives and that ground for hope I talk about — that we don’t know what forces are at work, what — who and what is going to appear, what thing we may not have even noticed or may have discounted that will become a tremendous force in our lives.

People in this culture love certainty so much, and they seem to love certainty more than hope, which is why they often seize on these really bitter, despondent narratives that are — they know exactly what’s going to happen. And that certainty just seems so tragic to me. I want people to tell more complex stories and to acknowledge that sometimes we win, and that there are these openings. But an opening is just an opening; you have to go through it and make something happen. And you don’t always win, but if you try, you don’t always lose.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah, you don’t always win, but I think I come back to your idea that history is like — and in fact, our lives — are like the weather, not like checkers. So your point, which actually is, I would say, is the kind of complexity that I think theology at its best imposes — that you walk through the openings, and perhaps you don’t win that battle, or you don’t see the result you hoped for; perhaps you outright lose. But the complex way you’re wanting to tell the stories of reality and of our lives is that whatever we do, there are always consequences that we don’t control and can’t see and can’t calculate, but they matter. They count.

Ms. Solnit: The guy I’m involved with loves to say, and I’m getting — it’s from Foucault, and I’m getting it wrong — that “We know what we do. We know why we do it. But we don’t know what we do, does.” And I love that sense that we don’t know consequences. We can learn and surmise. And that a lot of what matters is indirect and nonlinear. And it’s like even checkers seems too sophisticated and complex for the metaphor. I use bowling, where people are like, “Either we knocked all the pins down with this bowling ball, or we had a gutter ball, and nothing happened.”

And my wonderful environmentalist friend, Chip Ward, likes to talk about the “tyranny of the quantifiable,” and I’ve been using that phrase of his for about 15 years. And it is a kind of tyranny, and I think — and it does get mystical, where you have to look at what’s not quantifiable. Martin Luther King is assassinated in 1968. A comic book about how civil disobedience works out was distributed during the civil rights movement, gets translated into Arabic and distributed in Egypt and becomes one of the immeasurable forces that help feed the Arab Spring, which is five years old right now; and most of it doesn’t look that good, but they did overthrow a bunch of regimes. And the French Revolution didn’t really look very good five years out, I was saying the other day.

Ms. Tippett: Oh, I know. It’s so important that you point that out — that we — and also, our revolution. These things are messy, and they take generations. And we forget that, and we’re already calling it as a loss, and it’s absurd, really. It’s absurd.

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, and I think that there are really good points to be made that — for example, that overthrowing a dictator is nice, but you need democratic institutions. In Egypt, for example, the military was a power that didn’t go away. And you need to not just have that amazing moment in the streets and that rupture, but you need to have an ongoing engagement with transforming the system and making it accountable. But what happened mattered, nevertheless, and I think for people, many people in the Middle East, just the sense that it’s not inevitable that we live in authoritarianism; we are not powerless. And I think of Alexander Dubček — the hero of the Prague Spring of 1968, which was quashed — playing a role in the 1989 revolution that liberated that country.

Ms. Tippett: That’s so true, yeah.

Ms. Solnit: And I want better metaphors. I want better stories. I want more openness. I want better questions. All these things feel like they give us tools that are a little more commensurate with the amazing possibilities and the terrible realities that we face. And what we get given, so often, are just these kind of clumsy, inadequate tools. They don’t help. They don’t open things up. They don’t shed light. They don’t lead us to interesting places. They don’t let us know how powerful we can be. They don’t help us ask the questions that really matter and that start with rejecting the narratives we’re told and telling our own stories, becoming the storyteller rather than the person who’s told what to do.

Ms. Tippett:I ’m very much a comrade in your reverence for something called public life and — which I think we’ve narrowly equated with political life, in recent generations, but opening that language up more. You’ve said public life enlarges you, gives you purpose and context. I want to come to this idea that — [laughs] maybe this analogy is more apt — we’re in the middle of this presidential election year, which is so confusing, messy, and there’s a lot of anger in the room. And where am I going with this? You — I don’t want to compare it to a natural disaster, but you said — [laughs] I think I am, in my mind. [laughs]

Ms. Solnit: Oh, go; do it. [laughs]

Ms. Tippett: But you said, in the middle of a natural disaster, there’s this joy that rises up. So on the one hand, we have this spectacle of — I think — let’s just say — I think I can safely say this: a presidential election is — which is not what any of us — how any of us would want it to be, perhaps. But tell me, where are you taking joy in public life right now? And that might have nothing to do with politics.

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, I totally agree we need a broader sense of public life, that it’s a sense of belonging to a place, by which I mean the physical place — the trees, the birds, the weather, the coastline or the hills or the farms…

Ms. Tippett: The people.

Ms. Solnit: As well as the people and the institutions. And it’s one of the reasons I love New Orleans. People really engage with each other, just in every day, and — whereas sometimes, living in the Bay Area, it feels like where I’m in a zombie movie; everybody’s walking around in a trance, staring at their phone, and nobody’s in the private world your phone opens onto.

But it’s funny the way you describe it, because I think there’s a kind of self-forgetfulness and a sense of having something in common that brings that joy, when it comes in disaster. And of course, a presidential election is the exact opposite. It’s partisanship and this sort of deep attachment to “I’m right and you’re wrong,” and the squabbling.

Ms. Tippett: But — so put that aside, because I think that’s not very joyful for you or me. But where are you finding joy in public life right now? Where do you want to look, in terms of the larger narrative of who we are and what we’re capable of and what this moment — you often talk about — you say, “Whenever I look around me, I wonder what old things are about to bear fruit, what seemingly solid institutions might soon rupture, and what seeds we might now be planting whose harvest will come at some unpredictable moment in the future.” So where are you looking right now with intrigue?

Ms. Solnit: The climate movement, which was this embryonic, ineffectual thing, ten years ago — and I was in Paris for the climate conference, and it’s global. It’s powerful. It’s brilliant. It’s innovative, and remarkable things are happening and real transformations. And ten years ago, we didn’t even have the energy options. We didn’t really have good alternatives to fossil fuel the way we do now, as Scotland hedged towards 100 percent fossil-free energy generation, as all these remarkable things happened. So we’re really in an energy revolution that’s an evolution of — a revolution of consciousness about how things work and how connected they all are, and this incredible kind of war of the world against the fossil fuel corporations. It’s very effective.

But that’s the pragmatic side. What I also see is these deep connections between people in North America and Africa and the Pacific — the Philippines, Asia — this global movement that’s really coming of age and that has a kind of profound beauty, not in only some of the individuals I’m friends with who are doing great things, but a kind of beauty of creativity, of passion, of real love for the vulnerable populations at stake; for the world, the natural world; for the sense of systems and order — the natural order of the weather patterns, sea levels, things like winter.

Ms. Tippett: [laughs] Yeah, things like winter, yeah.

Ms. Solnit: Yeah, yeah — winter as it used — winter and spring as it used to be, where the bird migrations happened in coordination with these flowers blooming and these insects hatching, et cetera. And what we recognize, when we address climate change, is this infinite complexity that has a beautiful kind of order to it, and it’s falling into disorder. And so the love, the intelligence, the passion, the creativity of that movement is one. And there’s many other things I could say, but right now that’s just so exciting.

And it’s negotiating. It’s negotiating, and this is what hope is about, for me. It’s not saying, “Oh, we can pretend that everything’s going to be fine, and we’ll fix it all, and it’ll be as though it never happened.” It’s really saying, the difference between the best-case scenario and the worst case-scenario is where these people in the Philippines survive, where these people in the Arctic are able to keep something of their way of life. And we’re going to do everything we can to fight for the best case rather than the worst case — without illusions; without thinking that we’re going to make it all magically OK and like it never happened. And so that tough-mindedness is also really beautiful; that pragmatic idealism.

Ms. Tippett: That tough-minded hope.

Ms. Solnit: Exactly.

Ms. Tippett: I think you would give it that word.

Ms. Solnit: And hope is tough. It’s tougher to be uncertain than certain. It’s tougher to take chances than to be safe. And so hope is often seen as weakness, because it’s vulnerable, but it takes strength to enter into that vulnerability of being open to the possibilities. And I’m interested in what gives people that strength, and what stories, what questions, what memories, what conversations, what senses of themselves and the world around them.

Ms. Tippett: We’ve run — well, we’re just over about a minute. I just want to ask you one last question. It’s a huge question, but just where would you start thinking about this? How is your sense of what it means to be human evolving right now, as you write and as we speak? What contours is that taking on that perhaps you wouldn’t have expected ten years ago, or when you were 15 and miserable? [laughs]

Ms. Solnit: [laughs] Yeah, yeah. I was a really isolated kid, and my brothers teased me when I did girl things, so I wasn’t very good at girl things, so I wasn’t very good at connecting to other girls, and I was just the weird kid with her nose in a book. And so I have really wonderful people around me and really deep connections, and that’s incredibly satisfying. And it’s all kind of amazing.

I think a lot of us wish you could send postcards to your miserable teenage self. I always thought that “It Gets Better” campaign for queer kids should be broadened, because it gets better for a lot of us. My mother, in her ever un-encouraging way, when I won some big prize, said, “This is all such a surprise. You were just a mousy little thing.” [laughs] But it is kind of a surprise. And it’s like, to have this ability to participate and really maybe be helpful to other people — to do really meaningful work — it’s all just this kind of astonishment.

Ms. Tippett: Rebecca Solnit is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and a regular writer for publications including The Guardian and The London Review of Books. Her books include A Paradise Built in Hell, Hope in the Dark, and a new collection of essays, The Mother of All Questions.

What comes after fossil fuels?

What comes after fossil fuels?

By Bill McKibben, in The New Yorker, March 11, 2020

The fossil-fuel industry is slowly dying. It’s not just because of the transitory effect of the coronavirus, which has temporarily cut demand; it’s secular, as the economists say. Justlast week, Bloomberg reported that even natural-gas utilities are feeling the scorn of investors, who want to put their money in renewable electricity. The key question, of course, is how slowly the industry is dying—we badly need to speed up the current trajectory to catch up with the physics of climate change.

But it’s not too early to start asking what the industry will leave behind, beyond a badly overheated planet. And one answer, apparently, is a huge number of holes in the ground, not to mention a huge number of holes in government budgets. It turns out that, in jurisdictions around the planet, oil and gas companies have been failing to reclaim, or even plug, old wells that are no longer producing in commercial quantities. These unfunded liabilities are truly enormous.

Take Alberta, Canada, for example: the Alberta Energy Regulator has publicly estimated that the province faces $18.5 billion in costs for oil and gas wells that need to be decommissioned. But the A.E.R.’s internal review shows that the estimated cost could be up to forty billion to seventy billion. It has a hundred and seven thousand wells that are depleted past the point of profitability. Another ninety-three thousand wells are inactive, and seventy-seven thousand have been plugged but are awaiting the more expensive part of cleaning up the site. Many of those are “orphaned”—the companies that owned them have gone bankrupt—and some, in addition to leaving scars in the landscape, are still leaking greenhouse gases, such as methane, into the atmosphere, making life hard for the farmers who must work around them. The Alberta authorities have on hand about two hundred and twenty-six million dollars “in security deposits to pay for cleanup if companies declare bankruptcy.”

The picture looks much the same around the world. The Carbon Tracker Initiative, a London-based think tank, published a paper last month pointing out that “asset retirement obligations,” the term for what oil companies will have to pay to decommission their old wells, are significant, though hard to quantify, since “companies are not required to disclose the relevant information and rarely do.” But, in Europe, for instance, in 2006, these environmental liabilities amount to half of the companies’ reported debt obligations. The working assumption has always been that the costs would be paid by the proceeds from future operations: drill a new well, and part of the profit will go to pay for capping the last one. But that assumption no longer makes sense: since climate change is forcing us to keep oil and gas in the ground, the revenue stream for that cleanup is likely to disappear.

“The risk that the taxpayers will be left holding the bag is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore,” the report concludes. “Moreover, industry’s argument calls into question why you would allow the oil and gas activity in the first place, if the project cannot pay for its eventual retirement.” A good point, and one that will be a drag on the already lagging fossil-fuel sector, as investors begin to ask more probing questions.

Mark Olalde and Ryan Menezes, in the Los Angeles Times, provided a really powerful closeup of one city last week: Los Angeles, it turns out, has nearly a thousand abandoned wells. “If not plugged and cleaned up, many of these orphaned wells will continue to expose people to toxic gases, complicate redevelopment and pose rare but serious threats of explosions. If the state were to tackle the cleanup, it would cost tens of millions of dollars.” Oh, and the city’s fire department has just one full-time well inspector.

If there’s a bright spot in all of this, it’s that the need to clean up these wells could provide ongoing work for precisely the workers who drilled them, allowing them an easier transition to the future. Two Canadian activists—Regan Boychuk, a founder of Reclaim Alberta and the Alberta Liabilities Disclosure Project, and Avi Lewis, the co-founder and strategic director of the Leap—outlined in the Toronto Star what they call an “epic opportunity.” A government “serious about sparking the next boom in the oil patch,” they write, would force the companies that have extracted hundreds of billions in profits from Canada’s prairies to use the revenues from their mature and declining wells to underwrite the cleanup, creating “decades of full employment” in Alberta. That would be the closest thing to a happy ending the oil industry can still provide the planet.

 Climate School

• An ominous new report helps us understand the basic math of climate change. Scientists who, for the past thirty years, have studied three hundred thousand trees in tropical rain forests, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Amazon, report that the trees’ ability to soak up carbon from the atmosphere is, apparently, flagging. “We’ve found that one of the most worrying impacts of climate change has already begun,” Simon Lewis, a professor in the school of geography at the University of Leeds, in England, and one of the senior authors of the research, told the Guardian. “This is decades ahead of even the most pessimistic climate models.”
  
  
• A report along the same lines but more hopeful: Can large-scale plantings of a South African shrub help soak up lots of carbon dioxide? “Because of spekboom’s remarkable growth rate, its rate of carbon capture can rival that of tropical forests,” a scientist who has studied the plant for years told the BBC.

Passing the Mic

This week, I interviewed Vann R. Newkirk, II, a staff writer at The Atlantic, about his new podcast series “Floodlines,” which débuts this week. It’s an eight-part look at the legacy of Hurricane Katrina, which means, of course, that it’s also a look at the moment when both climate change and inequality emerged as concerns for many Americans.

 

Katrina felt revelatory—about climate change but also about who counts and who doesn’t in our country. I think a fair number of Americans were shocked to discover that lots of their fellow-citizens didn’t have cars, so they couldn’t simply flee. Was it a significant moment in the wider discovery of inequality in America?

I think Katrina and the levees breaking were a moment comparable to, say, the Dust Bowl, in terms of reorienting people to the shape of inequality in America. Some of the critiques of white supremacy (and environmental racism) that we consider almost standard today were considered fringe or conspiratorial before Katrina. 

The United Nations estimates that we could see a billion climate refugees this century. Given the lessons of the Katrina diaspora, what should we be thinking about when we read numbers like that?

The lesson of Katrina is that we already are seeing mass movements of people within the United States at the leading edges of climate disasters. Hurricane Maria, in 2017, reiterated that point, and state leaders should already be planning for large, permanent population shifts—both due to sudden disasters and to long-term attrition. Lots of people will be rethinking what “home” means. But another thing that Katrina should teach us is that maybe it’s time to also rethink the “refugee” framework. The American obligation to victims of climate change shouldn’t be motivated solely by altruism or charity. Rather, those victims have a claim against the rest of us—against U.S. government policy, against those who might profit off their displacement, and against those of us who warm and degrade the world—that we are morally bound to settle. This was the case during Katrina, and it will be for every climate-linked catastrophe down the road. 

I’ve stood under that new levee wall in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward at commemorations of the disaster and felt a welter of different emotions, from sadness and anger at the history behind it to a fear that it was, at best, a stopgap against a still-rising tide. What do you feel when you’re there, and what do you think longtime residents of that neighborhood feel?

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past year around the Lower Ninth Ward and with people who have roots there, and in my mind it’s become something like a Black Atlantis. The depths of pride and nostalgia people have for it feel, somehow, even more powerful than most folks’ memory of home. It’s a place defined by precariousness but also by the pride of building something of your own, for a community that hasn’t often been allowed to have things of their own. Standing by the wall, thinking about the power of their memory and the depths of loss, I’ve been overwhelmed at times.

Scoreboard

🔄It’s hard to call this a win or a loss, but it’s certainly wild: Saudi Arabia announced that it would open the spigots and cut its oil prices by nearly ten per cent. The news—part of a fight with the Russians for market share amid falling demand—led to the most dramatic single-day decline in world crude prices in at least three decades. For motorists, it may mean paying two dollars or less for a gallon of gas, but for people worried about the climate it cuts two ways. Cheap oil means we’ll use more: expect the already robust demand for S.U.V.s to continue. On the other hand, the lower price makes it hard for many producers to drill new wells—in particular, high-cost producers, such as those in Canada’s tar sands.

⬆️ The Ivies have been the last redoubt for the oil industry, as they fight against the divestment movement—but last week Brown University announced the league’s first total divestment from funds that focus on fossil fuels. “People know that this sector is dying . . . and it’s just not a good long-term investment,” Brown’s president, Christina Paxson, told the student newspaper. “It carries too much risk for the endowment.” The announcement was followed a few days later by a similar pledge from Wesleyan—but, whereas Brown is already in the process of selling ninety per cent of its stock, Wesleyan said that the process could take until 2030, drawing a mixed reaction from student activists who point out that the climate crisis is now.

⬆️ For those keeping track of efforts to stop the financing of fossil fuels, an increasingly common note was struck by the Swiss bank UBS, which said that it was joining other institutions no longer interested in financing thermal coal, tar sands, or Arctic offshore oil projects—notably Trump Administration plans to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. An increasingly fascinating question: Exactly who will be willing to underwrite drilling in what’s been called America’s Serengeti.

Warming Up

Two pieces of music I’ve had on repeat lately: Dreams to Be Born, by Rebecca Foon, and Legacies, by Jesse Paris Smith. Both are meditative, absorbing, masterly; and they come from a pair of musical activists whose Pathway to Paris concert series has turned into an adroit nonprofit that spurs worldwide climate action.

—Bill McKibben

The Pure Spirit of Greta Thunberg

The Pure Spirit of Greta Thunberg

By Carolyn Kormann
The New Yorker
December 13, 2019

The teen-age activist Greta Thunberg is pure spirit, committed to the foremost emergency of our time and to the science behind it.

 

On December 3rd, Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old climate activist from Sweden, completed her second transatlantic voyage, by almost entirely emissions-free sailboats, in the span of four months. Her small figure, dressed in black, stood, waving, on the bow of a catamaran, as it approached the port of Lisbon. Hundreds of people, standing onshore, cheered, welcoming her back to Europe. “I’m not travelling like this because I want everyone to do so,” she told reporters after walking off the boat onto dry land. “I’m doing this to send a message that it is impossible to live sustainably today, and that needs to change.” The scene felt both ancient and precisely of this moment, like Thunberg herself, who writes regularly in a paper journal but has mastered social-media virality, who can seem ageless and androgynous (the fierce stare) while also strikingly young and girlish (the braids), who acts with an otherworldly grace while delivering an outraged message grounded in the latest, best climate science. Her lightning-strike emergence as the planet’s hero, her capacity to inspire students around the world—all in the span of little more than a year—can seem like a prophesied story, an epic poem, a fable. Margaret Atwood (and others, including myself) have compared her to Joan of Arc—if the teen-age medieval warrior, who was burned at the stake in part for impersonating a man, had been inspired by scientific reports instead of divine voices and visions of angels. Centuries from now, we hope, people will live in a thriving, equitable civilization and tell Thunberg’s tale, too.

But it is, as Thunberg says repeatedly, precisely what we do during this century that will determine the fate of those future centuries, and what we do during the next decade that will determine the climate for the nearly two billion children alive today. They are the ones Thunberg represents, whom she is fighting for, and whom she has mobilized, since August, 2018, when she first sat outside the Swedish Parliament with a simple handwritten sign that read, in black letters, “skolstrejk for klimatet.” Hundreds of thousands of students (and, gradually, their parents), in cities around the world, have followed her lead, striking from school and marching in the streets to protest for climate action. “You say you love your children above all else,” she said in her first big address, at last December’s United Nations climate talks. “And yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.”

From Lisbon, Thunberg took a train to Madrid, where leaders from around the world were gathering for another round—the twenty-fifth since 1995—of U.N. climate negotiations (known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP25). The point of this year’s talks was for countries to lay the groundwork for ambitious new targets in the reduction of their greenhouse-gas emissions. By the end of 2020, according to the terms of the Paris Agreement, countries are to commit to new nationally determined contributions (N.D.C.s, in U.N.-speak) that reflect the scale of global decarbonization necessary to limit global heating to two degrees Celsius. (The current pool of N.D.C.s, which many countries are not even meeting, would lead to more than three degrees warming by century’s end.) A related issue at the talks has involved carbon markets—detailed in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement—in which one country can pay another country for its emissions reductions (the equivalent of buying a carbon credit) and then count those reductions towards its own N.D.C. Australia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and India have, reportedly, all been blocking text that would provide strong regulations of these kinds of markets and accounting mechanisms. Though the final text of this year’s agreement is due today, the deliberations will likely continue at least until Saturday.

Thunberg, meanwhile, has increasingly referred, in mathematical detail, to carbon budgets, or the amount of carbon dioxide that we have left to emit into the atmosphere if we want to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In her speech to world leaders in Madrid, on Tuesday, she referred her audiences to page 108, chapter 2, of the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, and she said that, if we are to have a sixty-seven per cent chance of achieving that goal, we had, as of the first of January, 2018, four-hundred-and-twenty gigatons of carbon dioxide left in our carbon budget. That number is now much lower, considering that we emit approximately forty-two gigatons of carbon dioxide every year. This means that we have roughly eight years left to burn fossil fuels at current levels before our budget is empty. For all the efforts underway to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, they are nowhere near enough. Global emissions again hit a record high in 2019. As Thunberg also said, in the same speech, “The biggest danger is not inaction. The real danger is when politicians and C.E.O.s are making it look like real action is happening, when in fact almost nothing is being done, apart from clever accounting and creative P.R.”

On Wednesday, Time named Thunberg the magazine’s Person of the Year. Donald Trump, who is famously obsessed with being on the cover of Time, could not stand it. He has campaigned on fossil-fuel expansion, has betrayed on numerous occasions that he does not understand what climate change is, and, on November 4th, he officially began proceedings to remove the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. (Every other country in the world remains a signatory to the pact.) On Thursday, in response to Thunberg’s news, he tweeted: “So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!” Thunberg, as always, took the President’s mockery in stride, changing her Twitter bio, minutes later, to “A teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with a friend.”

This is not the first time that Thunberg has one-upped Trump’s mocking tweets. In September, she gave a historic speech with the kind of rhetorical vigor that exemplifies her gifts as an orator. “This is all wrong,” she said. “I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!” Later, Trump retweeted a video clip of her remarks, adding, “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!” The same day, Thunberg put the exact words in her Twitter bio: “A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.”

Thunberg is Trump’s perfect foil. She is pure spirit, committed to the foremost emergency of our time, to the science behind it, and to the people who are working every day to rapidly change our energy systems and consumption patterns so that we avert climate change’s deadliest impacts and destabilizing tipping points. Thunberg is devoted to learning, writing, and understanding the world around her. She constantly lifts up other young climate leaders—especially those from indigenous and frontline communities—and begs reporters to focus on them, not her. (On Monday, she and Germany’s most prominent youth activist, Luisa Neubauer, hosted a press conference with young leaders from the Marshall Islands, the Philippines, Russia, and Uganda.) She is a gifted public speaker, not because she stirs up chaos and hate through incoherent rants, but because she speaks elegantly and intelligently, in logical, pithy, unmuddied sentences. Her rhetorical gifts are, perhaps, all the more remarkable considering that, when she was younger, she fell into a major depression concerning climate change and stopped speaking altogether for months. As she said at the start of her speech on Tuesday, “A year and a half ago, I didn’t speak to anyone unless I really had to. But then I found a reason to speak.”

 

On Being

The On Being Project is one of the few programs available online to which I regularly attend. (Five others are Maria Popova's Brain Pickings, Poetry Magazine, Orion Magazine, Yes! Magazine, Betsey Crawford's The Soul of the Earth; as well, of course, as the major sources of news and commentary: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian's US edition, and The New Yorker.

On Being's founder and skilled interviewer is Krista Tippett, author of an excellent book, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living, Unlike standard descriptions of books on sites like Amazon, the paragraphs about Tippett's book are not only useful in themselves, but offer a useful introduction to the On Being program itself:

 

“The discourse of our common life inclines towards despair. In my field of journalism, where we presume to write the first draft of history, we summon our deepest critical capacities for investigating what is inadequate, corrupt, catastrophic, and failing. The ‘news’ is defined as the extraordinary events of the day, but it is most often translated as the extraordinarily terrible events of the day. And in an immersive 24/7 news cycle, we internalize the deluge of bad news as the norm—the real truth of who we are and what we’re up against as a species. But my work has shown me that spiritual geniuses of the everyday are everywhere. They are in the margins and do not have publicists. They are below the radar, which is broken.

"Peabody Award-winning broadcaster and National Humanities Medalist Krista Tippett has interviewed the most extraordinary voices examining the great questions of meaning for our time. The heart of her work on her national public radio program and podcast, On Being, has been to shine a light on people whose insights kindle in us a sense of wonder and courage. Scientists in a variety of fields; theologians from an array of faiths; poets, activists, and many others have all opened themselves up to Tippett's compassionate yet searching conversation.

"In Becoming Wise, Tippett distills the insights she has gleaned from this luminous conversation in its many dimensions into a coherent narrative journey, over time and from mind to mind. The book is a master class in living, curated by Tippett and accompanied by a delightfully ecumenical dream team of teaching faculty.

"The open questions and challenges of our time are intimate and civilizational all at once, Tippett says – definitions of when life begins and when death happens, of the meaning of community and family and identity, of our relationships to technology and through technology. The wisdom we seek emerges through the raw materials of the everyday. And the enduring question of what it means to be human has now become inextricable from the question of who we are to each other.

"This book offers a grounded and fiercely hopeful vision of humanity for this century – of personal growth but also renewed public life and human spiritual evolution. It insists on the possibility of a common life for this century marked by resilience and redemption, with beauty as a core moral value and civility and love as muscular practice. Krista Tippett's great gift, in her work and in Becoming Wise, is to avoid reductive simplifications but still find the golden threads that weave people and ideas together into a shimmering braid.

"One powerful common denominator of the lessons imparted to Tippett is the gift of presence, of the exhilaration of engagement with life for its own sake, not as a means to an end. But presence does not mean passivity or acceptance of the status quo. Indeed Tippett and her teachers are people whose work meets, and often drives, powerful forces of change alive in the world today. In the end, perhaps the greatest blessing conveyed by the lessons of spiritual genius Tippett harvests in Becoming Wise is the strength to meet the world where it really is, and then to make it better."

________________________

 

Here is a letter written and posted online in early 2019 by Krista Tippett, conveying the most recent developments in the On Being Project:

 

It’s been a year of expansion and deepening at The On Being Project. Our beautiful team has more than doubled in size to be of greater service in a tender and tumultuous moment in the life of the world. I’m delighted to announce that Lucas Johnson has joined us as the first executive director of the Civil Conversations Project. You may remember him from this conversation taped at the On Being Gathering — another milestone among many this past year.

And I’m beyond excited to announce the launch of a whole new gathering space and experience here at onbeing.org. Our website had become unwieldy under the weight of 15 years of content and wasn’t serving the ways we’ve heard you engage with and use our work — for personal reflection, for discussion in family and community, and for teaching and social repair. In over a year of intensive labor, full of the care and creativity of many, we fashioned a digital home that is newly beautiful and hospitable.

Transcripts are easier to find and read. Search is vastly improved. And we’ve created new features to meet the needs, thoughts, and suggestions we’ve heard across the years.

There are Starting Points — curated for the kind of day you may be having, for particular challenges or curiosities, or to introduce someone new to On Being. There are Libraries — our entire archive made accessible and welcoming by topic — for browsing and diving deep.

The Civil Conversations Project also now has a robust presence at the heart of our online home. The Grounding Virtues and the Better Conversations Guide are integrated throughout onbeing.org as they have become woven into the fabric of The On Being Project as a whole. Poetry, so foundational to our work and sensibility, also has its rightful place — present along just about every pathway.

As we’ve contemplated the purpose and shape of The On Being Project, we’ve defined our mission in this way:

Pursuing deep thinking and social courage, moral imagination and joy, to renew inner life, outer life, and life together

This is an aspiration we take on with a generational sense of time. Onbeing.org will be a primary place where we are actively watching, learning, adding, and evolving. And you may already have noticed a new interactive volume and vitality as well in various social media spaces, like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

In the discernment of the last year, we have decided to discontinue the On Being Blog and columnists in their original form, but the wonderful writing that graced our project in recent years is present throughout this new site, and we are actively exploring what to incubate next. The Pause newsletter, which has grown in leaps and bounds as a beloved Saturday morning ritual, will be a primary way to stay on top of new developments and experiments to come – including our ongoing ventures on the road, in the old-fashioned flesh and blood.

On Being has always grown and evolved through listening to our listeners and to the world as much as listening to our guests. This is more than ever before, and we are so honored by every voice and life that joins this adventure, even for an hour. I believe that the people and projects and energies alive in our community and its kindred places are nothing less than the generative narrative of our time. This is emerging right alongside the destructive narrative that gets all the attention, and we are committed to nourishing, emboldening, and accompanying it — that is to say, you.

With deep gratitude and, yes, love,

Krista

 

St. Patrick's eve celebration of Celtic spirituality

I spoke briefly to a standing-room-only auditorium last evening as we celebrated St. Patrick's Day a few hours early.

I co-lead (with Carol Saysette and George Wilson) a large seminar of Redwoods folks who are exploring the many dimensions of the Celtic spiritual tradition. I wanted to give those assembled some context about our seminar, which sponsored last evening's wonderful music, song and dance:

St. Patrick’s Eve, March 16, 2019.

"I wrote these brief remarks this afternoon. I hope they evoke some still, small voice in you, as they did and do in me.

"The seeds of this evening are in the hardy band of forest folk, our ‘red-woods-hood’ we call Celtic Spirituality, and earlier in a three-day retreat with John Patrick Newell. I speak of us. We are always in motion and always still, always constant and always changing. The mysteries of this evening, the music, song, dance and drama, the poetry and stories we remember and have forgotten but can recall, and those for which we can as yet only listen. Our celebration of Patrick, the ur-saint if you will, of Celtic spirituality, the weave of the ancient traditions, the druids in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the gifts we know and are still learning and as yet barely glimpse or intuit from the traditions, the stories and the practices—I think especially the practices—of Buddhism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

"All that is part of our inheritance, our foremothers and forefathers, our birth, life, death and rebirth, the legacies we’ve left, still leave, have yet to leave, will never finally leave, for our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren… and they in turn for us and for their children. At our Celtic heart is the earth, the precarious, precious, terribly endangered earth, and our fellow sentient beings, that sustain us as we awaken to them and still destroy them, so often before we even know them, much less their place in the family of life.

"I’m grateful for—and only a little embarrassed by—the number of Johns in our Celtic heritage and in the voices to which we listen: There is John the Evangelist also known as John the Beloved, who listened to the heartbeat of God. We’ve had the companionship of John Patrick Newell and John O’Donohue. Those to whom we—our band of Celtic folks here at The Redwoods—return again and again, growing, deepening our practices, returning, reconnecting, following an invitation. In Newell’s words, 'The invitation is to recover an inner stance of listening that will equip us to move forward into new beginnings we may not yet even be able to imagine. This is my prayer,' John Patrick said to us—'that we may grow in such awareness and commitment. Together they—and we—hold the promise of rebirth.'

"Our spirit is one of pilgrimage, with Patrick and Columba, Brigid and Brendan, and in the green shamrock, the walking stick, the living tree, the bell. Patrick described a vision he had: 'I saw a man [or was it a woman?] coming, as it were from Ireland. He [or she] carried many letters, and gave me one. I read the heading: ‘The voice of the Irish.’ As I began the letter, I imagined in that moment that I heard the voice of those very people who were near the wood which is beside the western sea—and they cried out, as with one voice: ‘We appeal to you, holy servant boy, to come and walk among us.’ So he did; so he does this evening. Welcome, dear brother Patrick."

 

The symbolism of the Celtic cross: heart for love, two hands for friendship, crown for loyalty.

 

 

Individuation, C.G. Jung, and W.H. Auden's poem, "The More Loving One"

I am grateful in manifold ways for C.G. Jung's wonderful enlargement of my chosen field of psychology. That gratitude had its fortuitous, unsought birth in the first of my many years as an analysand, a patient in psychotherapy. The first of my two Jungian therapists was Edward F. Edinger, whose office in those years was on Central Park West in New York City. I was young, in my 20s, newly married, a graduate student of political science at Columbia University.

My understanding of psychology, particularly of the dynamics of human development in its social, historical, and cultural context, which would become the calling of a lifetime of practice, had hardly begun to emerge, so it appeared wholly accidental that, in my search for a therapist, a friend urged me to seek out Dr. Edinger, a psychiatrist and analytical psychologist who was prominent among what I came later to understand as the second generation of American students of C.G. Jung.

Our weekly sessions together over the better part of three years were revelatory and transformative, even if I began them imagining myself as the student I remained. At first, I would characteristically arrive early, sit for a half-hour or so on the greensward of Central Park, consciously preparing myself for what I anticipated as kin to an hour with one of my professors at Columbia. In fact, I was beginning, with Dr. Edinger, a lifelong journey of absorption in a deeply meaningful process of what Jung called individuation, the achievement of self-actualization through a process of integrating the conscious and the unconscious, with central attention to human relations, family dynamics across generations, and the central integrative function of dreams. For a thoughtful interview with Edward Edinger, read here in Psychology Today.

I recall that early work now, a full half-century later, as I contemplate a remarkable short poem by W.H. Auden called "The More Loving One." Auden's poem was drawn to my attention today in reading the current issue of Maria Popova's online journal, Brain Pickings. Listen to the poem as read on Brain Pickings or SoundCloud by astrophysicist Janna Levin. The image that comes to mind in reading this particular Auden poem is the night sky, particularly when we are blessed with clarity of vision, so the stars are not obscured by clouds or by a plethora of more earthly and proximate lights. Here is Auden's beautiful, almost whimsical poem.

 

THE MORE LOVING ONE

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

 

David Whyte

“Your great mistake is

to act the drama as if you

were alone.”

 

       —  David Whyte

 

In no small measure because of their shared devotion to the Irish philosopher and writer John O’Donohue (a devotion that captures me as well), I am drawn toward these excerpts from a conversation between Krista Tippett and the poet and philosopher David Whyte, on Tippett’s truly marvelous program called “On Being.” This episode was recorded in 2016 and replayed in December 2018 (https://onbeing.org/programs/david-whyte-the-conversational-nature-of-reality-dec2018/).

In that conversation, David Whyte said of the poem below, “This poem is written almost like a conversation in the mirror, trying to remind myself what’s first order. We have so many allies in this world, including just the color blue in the sky, which we’re not paying attention to, or the breeze or the ground beneath our feet. This is an invitation to come out of abstraction and back into the world again.

 

 

 

 

Everything is Waiting for You

 by David Whyte

 

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

 

There is a second poem that David Whyte draws from memory and recites during his conversation with Krista Tippett, a  beautiful poem called “Everything is Waiting for You.” Just before he recites it, Whyte says,  

“I’ve often felt like the deeper discipline of poetry is overhearing yourself say things you didn’t want to know about the world, something that actually emancipates you from this smaller self out into this larger dispensation that you actually didn’t think you deserved. So one of the things we’re most afraid of in silence is this death of the periphery, the outside concerns, the place where you’ve been building your personality and where you think you’ve been building who you are, starts to atomize and fall apart. It’s one of the basic reasons we find it difficult even just to turn the radio off or the television or not look at our gadget — is that giving over to something that’s going to actually seem as if it’s undermining you to begin with and lead to your demise. The intuition, unfortunately, is correct. You are heading toward your demise, but it’s leading towards this richer, deeper place that doesn’t get corroborated very much in our everyday outer world.”

 

Working Together

by David Whyte

 

We shape our self
to fit this world

and by the world
are shaped again.

The visible
and the invisible

working together
in common cause,

to produce
the miraculous.

I am thinking of the way
the intangible air

traveled at speed
round a shaped wing

easily
holds our weight.

So may we, in this life
trust

to those elements
we have yet to see

or imagine,
and look for the true

shape of our own self,
by forming it well

to the great
intangibles about us.

 

Christmas III: From Heartbeat: A Sacred Journey Towards Earth's Wellbeing

Thanks to Heartbeat: A Sacred Journey Towards Earth's Wellbeing.

 

 

(double-click to enlarge)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mary Oliver on her great love, Molly Malone Cook

Maria Popova so often evokes a grateful response from me in her own online journal, BrainPickings. Here she is again, describing the poet Mary Oliver's long love of her partner Molly Malone Cook, in Oliver's book Our World. Oliver says she drew from Molly, "Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter."

"Our World — part memoir, part deeply moving eulogy to a departed soul mate, part celebration of their love for one another through their individual creative loves. Embraced in Oliver’s poetry and prose, Cook’s photographs reveal the intimate thread that brought these two extraordinary women together — a shared sense of deep aliveness and attention to the world, a devotion to making life’s invisibles visible, and above all a profound kindness to everything that exists, within and without.'

"Oliver — who refers to Cook simply as M. in most of her writings — reflects in the opening essay:

'Though you have known someone for more than forty years, though you have worked with them and lived with them, you do not know everything. I do not know everything — but a few things, which I will tell. M. had will and wit and probably too much empathy for others; she was quick in speech and she did not suffer fools. When you knew her she was unconditionally kind. But also, as our friend the Bishop Tom Shaw said at her memorial service, you had to be brave to get to know her.

[…]

'She was style, and she was an old loneliness that nothing could quite wipe away; she was vastly knowledgeable about people, about books, about the mind’s emotions and the heart’s. She lived sometimes in a black box of memories and unanswerable questions, and then would come out and frolic — be feisty, and bold.'

Oliver writes of the affair Cook had in the late 1950s, shortly before they met:

"She had … an affair that struck deeply; I believe she loved totally and was loved totally. I know about it, and I am glad… This love, and the ensuing emptiness of its ending, changed her. Of such events we are always changed — not necessarily badly, but changed. Who doesn’t know this doesn’t know much."

The following year, Cook met Oliver and they remained together, inseparable, for more than four decades. That encounter — which calls to mind the fateful first meetings that occasioned such iconic literary couples as Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas or Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes — took place at Steepletop, the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, where Oliver had landed the day after her high school graduation at the age of seventeen and stayed for several years.

One evening in 1959, when Oliver was twenty-four and Cook thirty-four, the young poet returned to the house and found the photographer sitting at the kitchen table with a friend. She describes their encounter with her signature elegance of unpeeling the mundane to reveal the momentous:

"I took one look and fell, hook and tumble. M. took one look at me, and put on her dark glasses, along with an obvious dose of reserve. She denied this to her dying day, but it was true."

Isn’t it wonderful the way the world holds both the deeply serious, and the unexpectedly mirthful?

It turned out that Oliver and Cook, in their regular lives beyond Steepletop, lived right across the street from each other in New York’s East Village. So they began to see one another “little by little,” and so their great love story began.

But perhaps the greatest gift of their union was the way in which they shaped each other’s way of seeing and being with the world — the mutually ennobling dialogue between their two capacities for presence:

"It has frequently been remarked, about my own writings, that I emphasize the notion of attention. This began simply enough: to see that the way the flicker flies is greatly different from the way the swallow plays in the golden air of summer. It was my pleasure to notice such things, it was a good first step. But later, watching M. when she was taking photographs, and watching her in the darkroom, and no less watching the intensity and openness with which she dealt with friends, and strangers too, taught me what real attention is about. Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter. Such openness and empathy M. had in abundance, and gave away freely… I was in my late twenties and early thirties, and well filled with a sense of my own thoughts, my own presence. I was eager to address the world of words — to address the world with words. Then M. instilled in me this deeper level of looking and working, of seeing through the heavenly visibles to the heavenly invisibles. I think of this always when I look at her photographs, the images of vitality, hopefulness, endurance, kindness, vulnerability… We each had our separate natures; yet our ideas, our influences upon each other became a rich and abiding confluence.

[…]

"I don’t think I was wrong to be in the world I was in, it was my salvation from my own darkness. Nor have I ever abandoned it — those early signs that so surely lead toward epiphanies. And yet, and yet, she wanted me to enter more fully into the human world also, and to embrace it, as I believe I have. And what a gift [that she] never expressed impatience with my reports of the natural world, the blue and green happiness I found there. Our love was so tight."

To lose the love of one’s life is something few have dared to live in public — the most memorable such bravery being Joan Didion’s — but Oliver brings to death’s darkness her familiar touch of emboldening light:

"The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention. I don’t say this without reckoning in the sorrow, the worry, the many diminishments. But surely it is then that a person’s character shines or glooms."

Oliver ends with a breath-stopping prose poem that brings full-circle her opening reflections on never fully knowing even those nearest to us — a beautiful testament to what another wise woman once wrote: “You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that’s okay, love is better.”

 

THE WHISTLER

All of a sudden she began to whistle. By all of a sudden
I mean that for more than thirty years she had not
whistled. It was thrilling. At first I wondered, who was
in the house, what stranger? I was upstairs reading, and
she was downstairs. As from the throat of a wild and
cheerful bird, not caught but visiting, the sounds war-
bled and slid and doubled back and larked and soared.

Finally I said, Is that you? Is that you whistling? Yes, she
said. I used to whistle, a long time ago. Now I see I can
still whistle. And cadence after cadence she strolled
through the house, whistling.

I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and an-
kle. Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too.
And the devotions. And for all that, do we even begin
to know each other? Who is this I’ve been living with
for thirty years?

This clear, dark, lovely whistler?

 

Parable — Louise Glück

I confess that I am at a loss on the very first line of this fine parable by Louise Glück: I have failed, at least thus far, to divest myself of worldly goods, as I use my computer to maintain this journal and remain in touch with friends and family near and far; and my closets are full. Since argument is a prevailing presence in this parable, however, I can quibble about whether electronic possessions are really worldly, but I would surely lose that argument. Unless... ah, another opening, perhaps a bit more accessible than the first: is it possible that those particular worldly goods do not distract me by gain and loss? Sometimes — right now, in fact — I do not feel such distraction. But truthfully that case feels a slippery slope. I think I'd do OK on the mountain passes.

On the second question, should we have purpose, I am among the pilgrims more than the wanderers, though I partake of both modes. I am more among those who dream, who seek glimmering among the stones. My journey began long ago,  continues to this day and beyond, I expect until I die and perhaps beyond. I am not stuck in continual debate with anyone (that would be tedious and exhausting). I am glad to be among fellow pilgrims as well as fellow wanderers, though more commonly I tend to wander alone. Truth is both elusive and common, and I treasure it alongside its dearest sibling, that is love. 

 

Parable — Louise Glück

 

First divesting ourselves of worldly goods, as St. Francis teaches,
in order that our souls not be distracted
by gain and loss, and in order also
that our bodies be free to move
easily at the mountain passes, we had then to discuss
whither or where we might travel, with the second question being
should we have a purpose, against which
many of us argued fiercely that such purpose
corresponded to worldly goods, meaning a limitation or constriction,
whereas others said it was by this word we were consecrated
pilgrims rather than wanderers: in our minds, the word translated as
a dream, a something-sought, so that by concentrating we might see it
glimmering among the stones, and not
pass blindly by; each
further issue we debated equally fully, the arguments going back and forth,
so that we grew, some said, less flexible and more resigned,
like soldiers in a useless war. And snow fell upon us, and wind blew,
which in time abated — where the snow had been, many flowers appeared,
and where the stars had shone, the sun rose over the tree line
so that we had shadows again; many times this happened.
Also rain, also flooding sometimes, also avalanches, in which
some of us were lost, and periodically we would seem
to have achieved an agreement; our canteens
hoisted upon our shoulders, but always that moment passed, so
(after many years) we were still at that first stage, still
preparing to begin a journey, but we were changed nevertheless;
we could see this in one another; we had changed although
we never moved, and one said, ah, behold how we have aged, traveling
from day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemed
in a strange way miraculous. And those who believed we should have a purpose
believed this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain free
in order to encounter truth, felt it had been revealed.

 

Glück, Louise. Faithful and Virtuous Night: Poems (pp. 3-4). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

 

From the Talmud

 

Do not be daunted
by the enormity
of the world’s grief.

Do justly, now.
Love mercy, now.
Walk humbly, now.

You are not obligated
to complete the work,
but neither are you free
to abandon it.

 

 

- The Talmud

No Wall Between Amigos - La Lomita Chapel

No Wall Between Amigos

The crisis continues at the U.S.-Mexico border.

By Sandi Villarreal 

November 2018, Soujourners

 A SMALL WHITE CHAPEL sits just a couple hundred yards north of the Rio Grande river in Mission, Texas. While the chapel no longer hosts an active parish, its interior shows signs of frequent use. Prayer candles and silk flowers line the altar and the base of a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe. An entryway table holds dozens of prayers, written on folded loose-leaf paper. Children’s composition notebooks, filled with more handwritten prayers, are stacked in piles.

“Please watch over our brothers, sisters, and all the children being held hostage at the border,” one prayer says. And another: “Please bless our health & the children being separated from their parents @ the border.”

La Lomita Chapel is now part of a municipal park and serves as a rest stop for passersby—while Border Patrol trucks sit just outside the park entrance and a helicopter circles overhead. The chapel land was originally granted to Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate priests in the mid-1800s. Given its location—midway between mission centers in Brownsville and Roma, Texas—La Lomita served as a meeting place and “housed transient visitors to the mission,” according to a historic marker on the site.

I visited the chapel, quite by accident, during a reporting trip at the border at the height of the family separation crisis. The separation of parents and children moved the hearts—and wallets—of people across the nation. But that fervor waned after a U.S. District Court judge gave a July deadline for reunification and more than 1,500 children were reunited with their parents, largely thanks to the efforts of faith groups and advocates. For many, it seemed, the story was over. The reality is that the crisis continues.

As of this writing, 497 children remain separated from their parents, 22 of whom are under the age of 5. More than 300 parents have been deported, and many who signed a waiver to be reunited say they were coerced. Children, including some babies and toddlers, haven’t seen their parents in months. It’s likely that some of those children will never see their parents again.

Residents’ signs listed a host of environmental and humanitarian grievances. The most pressing? Immigrants demonized by the Trump administration are, quite literally, their neighbors.

But even that tragedy is just part of an overwhelming story of what happens every day at our border as hundreds of families cross from South to North seeking refuge and finding a broken system with little space to accommodate them. Instead of engaging in efforts to fix the system, the Trump administration has zeroed in on one “solution”: erecting a border wall.

Last year, Father Roy Snipes, who serves at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church and watches over the nearby La Lomita mission, organized a prayer walk and rally at La Lomita protesting the proposed border wall. The current plan would cut off the historic site and place the chapel between the wall and the Rio Grande. Residents’ signs listed a host of environmental and humanitarian grievances. The most pressing? Immigrants demonized by the Trump administration are, quite literally, their neighbors.

“No wall between amigos,” read one of the church’s signs. Though plans and congressional funding are still on track to build a wall along the border through parts of Hidalgo County, the faith resistance continues.

The prayers of the faithful lifted at La Lomita Chapel serve as a reminder that the story of Christian faith is one of migration, of sojourning, of welcoming—and of warning to those who refuse their welcome. As Snipes put it at the protest, “We continue the journey through time into eternity, and we know we are only here for a little while, so we make haste to be kind and we are quick to love.”