An ugly balance

This Equinox, what is really coming into balance? What is really growing amidst this year’s harvest?

I frowned. The balance hovering in my minds’ eye looks ugly.

Every solstice and Equinox, I offer an online circular time reflection space, using a simple circular temporal technology that was given to me in prayer several years ago. Circular calendars are ancient temporal technologies — they’ve lasted as long as they have across different cultural contexts because they work. I use them in part as a dynamic tool to reconnect people to place. I also use it because it is a powerful and simple way to sense patterns. Every solstice and equinox, I bring a different set of questions to the process and the folks who sign up get to answer the questions. Together, we find patterns beyond our individual vantage points.[1]

Simple questions. Simple process. Profound impact.

Autumnal Equinox 2020. The Equinox traditionally associated with harvest, especially in the northern hemisphere. The simple questions: What are you harvesting? Where are you in balance? With what are you aligned? And this year: How are you harvesting well(ness)?

My own reflection happened to fall on the same day that I was teaching one of my courses on the connection between climate change and colonization. We were discussing the bio-cultural destruction of the Caribbean, Latin America and South America. It is a story, still, my European students inform me, largely untaught in much of Europe (and only barely in the U.S.), that would come to dominate global history: indigenous dark-skinned communities and their ecosystems are disrupted, their knowledge ridiculed, their customs held in contempt and their land and waters plundered, rendering them poor and dispossessed of much of their own inheritance; and then, usually, sent into some kind of labor camp, or forced migration, or slavery, or indentured servitude, or barely-surviving factory workers. There have been many variations on this theme. Global inequities result. “Development” pretends it didn’t happen and somehow poor countries are at fault for what rich countries stole from them.

Meanwhile the mental attitudes, social constructs, including that of race as the fundamental marker of identity, and ecological extractative behaviors have become institutionalized, given theological and moral acceptance first by the Church and later other secular and religious leadership. The apocalypse that was the colonial experience led to the fundamental altering of the earth’s chemical balance. Today, we call this phenomenon, climate change.

Humans are always wedded to our ecosystems. We cannot survive, which is to say create new life, or, reproduce, without the intimate acts of eating and shitting; of farming and giving our waste back to the earth. And the ecosystems always respond to however we treat them. The question is only what kind of relationship is it.

The child that was conceived between the dominant human socio-ecological systems (often associated with westernization or modernization) and the ecosystems during the long colonial moment, which came to include and incorporate industrialization, is a monster.

We who played God — did we know what blasphemy would result? Had we been sensitive — paying attention at all! — to the cultures that we have been literally destroying for the past few centuries, then yes, it should have been obvious.

So, the histories of the 1500s were fresh in my mind as I reviewed the last few months.

For most of Quarantine I had been in California, the land that fed and watered and in so many other ways raised me to love land. This past Summer Solstice I took my first outing: from the east Bay Area four-ish hours south to one of my favorite places: Big Sur, where sequoias and dramatic cliffs and the foaming Pacific Ocean are all in within a short walk of one another. It was a beautiful moment. Over the next few months, I visited some of my favorite spaces in the area: Carmel Valley, where I spent so many glorious weeks as a child; St Helena to the north; the Russian River not far from Healdsburg, where some colleagues in the wine industry have been quite successful; a beautiful valley wherein lies an grove of trees I love near Santa Rosa; the redwoods in Ben Lomond and Big Basin, where I lived a year learning the business of a spiritual retreat center, and listening to the stirrings of my own heart that redwood trees seem so adept at quickening.

And then, the night before the new moon in August, came that horrendous lightening storm. I marked it on my circular calendar only as “lightening.” In my minds eye, I remembered shaking as the cracking of thunder awoke me, my heart beat mimicking the sky around me. From my window I could see the lightening against— our hills. I knew — every Californian knows — how dry those hills are. The fear of fire filled me. How bad would it be?

Bad. Really bad.

All of the places I loved and visited in the previous few weeks, having no idea that their future hung in the happen chance gust of wind — have been touched by fire. Most of “my” places are still “ok”, but their ecosystem is not ok.

What are you/we harvesting? I asked myself.

My business is doing well. My family is doing well. Most of my friends who were evacuated have returned to their homes. Four friends have had babies during these last few months: all were born healthy. Most of the people I know who had Covid have recovered, though sometimes without smell or taste. The anti-racist/decolonial work my colleagues and I are doing is gaining traction, sometimes in quite unexpected places (which is such a good sign!) Seeds I planted in March — pivots I made to my business, dreams I seeded with others — are baring fruit. The tomatoes in my garden are a deep red, and the squash is plump. Heck, I’m even losing some of those Pandemic Pounds that resulted from a lot of baking in April.

But looking for the larger pattern, I saw the four weeks of smoke. I saw the smoke that covered the state during the four-hour drive from the Sierras to the coast. I saw the farm workers in Oregon and Washington, harvesting the crops that feed thousands if not millions of people barely able to breath as they work in smoke-drenched fields. I saw the images of fire burning through some of the most beautiful landscapes I know. Multiple fires burning simultaneously. I saw ash falling from the sky.

What balance is this?

Is this the balance of the centuries?

Centuries of colonial extractative, diseased imaginations combined with industrial tools and hardened, even brittle hearts.

Sometimes we harvest the fruit of what was planted centuries ago: planted and replanted, replanted and grafted, grafted and re-seeded: dominion over people and place. Hearing only the need for profit and the false promise of continual growth; the fatted comfort of a few over the starvation of the many. This monster of a climate that is growing older and stronger by the year: one whose heat is calling attention to what has been ignored for far too long.

A friend told me she sometimes felt that the fires didn’t want to burn so high or so hot. This is not what fire was made for. I don’t know what the fires want. I do know they’ve been suppressed too long, and we have done so many things wrong in our relationship to the environment and good land management practices in the west that it is, sometimes, hard to know where to start. Certainly, these fires are unlike any other fires I’ve known.

This is a harvest of Reckoning. A reckoning of who we — my ancestors, maybe yours — have been. Too often, of who we continue to be.

The arc that balances the world has a time frame that is not our time frame. I could say it is long and maybe that is true but these days it feels spiraling and short. Time itself as measured by seasons not equinoxes is changing.

Somewhere, on a balance beam, we hover. Looking out at the fires and the floods: of a world whose time is ending: at the fruit of seeds planted centuries ago — the last time the world was so horribly turned upside down for so many. Right now, many people are spinning. Unmoored. Ungrounded. Uncertain. In the midst of so many life transition. Every death seems bigger, heavier than before, though dying itself is nothing new.

Death, really, is the oldest thing of all. Or did food come first?

There is nothing wrong with spinning. Maybe we need to spin a bit. Unhitch ourselves from that which is not actually serving us, for all that we thought it would bring us stability. The work of being unmoored is to ensure that you re-align yourself with that which is good, and just, and beautiful. Even if you are not always sure what that is. Start simple.

***

My friend Kristine Hill from the Tuscarora nation, part of the Haudenosaunee (or if you don’t know your indigenous nations in the contemporary United States, the Six Nations of the Iroquois) told me a Harvest story today as I was cooking squash and salmon and miso soup for lunch.

One day, even now, her community have started re-growing their own corn. Traditional corn from seeds were passed down, generation after generation. And then, finally, it happened: growing their own corn on their own land. She offered her garage as a place to store the corn: for several weeks, so many people came by, putting in corn, then coming back and husking it. Preparing it in the old way. Someone came by with a big ol’ pick-up truck to pick up the husks. From the husks, some made dolls and tell stories. In this magnificent moment, they are making dolls from their own husks grown from their own corn on their own land.

I nodded my head as I sprinkled some herbs on the squash, letting the steam from the little fire on my stove bring out the flavors of oregano and thyme. One’s own corn. One’s own husks. What a blessing.

When we harvest, she said, do we use everything? Do we use the husks? I smiled at the question. It was not a question that I had thought of.

This is how we learn: at the kitchen table, trading stories of corn and squash. Beans, too.

So this is also what we are harvesting:

Sometime, a long time ago, a community started making dolls out of corn husks. The dolls don’t have eyes or mouths or noses, but they have hands and arms and costumes. Even after big names like George Washington scorched their corn fields, the people kept making these dolls. Over time the costumes of the dolls changed as the people themselves changed. For a while the dolls were not shared widely. There were missionaries and then boarding schools. But somehow the knowledge was passed on. Seeds were saved, even when they could not be planted. Somehow. I don’t really know how so much was remembered, given all the terrible things that happened and the many forms of dismembering and forgetting. So much was forgotten. But even so much was remembered. Some seeds were passed down. Held in hands, hidden in plane sight, hidden away at the bottom of a pouch in a chest. And then there came a time when the seeds could be nurtured again. When the songs could be sung again. When the children started to learn the language at school and the people could plant their own tabacco and use it in a good way and plant their own corn and tell stories using corn husks and dolls, and these traditions were not scoffed at, but respected, as an art form, as a way of making meaning between people and place. As part of who they were.

And my friend’s garage was filled with the sweet scent of the harvest.

This, too, we are harvesting: Resistance. Play. Memories. Stories. Craft. Not in some other land, but here. Even now.

***

“Collapse is always an attractive option,” said the director of a major Futures company recently. I was a speaker at her conference, where I did a Dialogue on Equity. I was listening to her keynote address, where she was discussing the four possible scenarios they foresaw as we emerge from the Pandemic. Social collapse was one of the scenarios.

“There are always some people who gravitate towards this option. It is because it seems easy. The work of changing things seems so hard. It is so complex. Why not just let everything fall down and start over again?”

“Of course,” she went on to say, “Collapse is always worse for those at the bottom. It hits the poor the hardest. The rich can usually figure out a way to survive, but for those whose lives are already fragile, social and economic collapse is devastating. It’s not what we are going for.”

Her words have stayed with me. Watching those fires does make me feel that collapse is close. And not just the fires. So much change. But that doesn’t mean that collapse is inevitable.

The seasons are changing — and the meaning of the seasons is changing. Late summer and early Fall to me now means “fire season.” “Get your air filter changed” season. “Make another evacuation plan” season. But my family is not moving out of California. We are not giving into a narrative of collapse.

I have some dear friends who tend and are tended by a beautiful Grove at the edge of a river that flows to the sea, wherein lives a Bay tree who looks like the living embodiment of a portal between this world and some other world. Maybe the world I sometimes can almost hear whispering to us of possibility.

My friends prayed for this land. They had prayed and prayed for a place to live: a place to grow in sacred relationship to land and to one another. A place to plant their seeds and harvest a community, as well as a family; a better way of living together. They prayed and the land came to them in a dream, and then they found the land. They knew it was in the middle of a fire zone. They came anyways. Now they too have corn growing, corn grown from seeds my friend kept on her alter for 7 years as she searched for the place where she could plant them. Last year, they and their twelve-year-old daughter and their dogs and pet boa constrictor were all evacuated during the fires. This year, the family once again planted seeds. A few weeks ago, together we walked amongst the tall stalks and the sweet sensuous silk that emerged from them. They continue to watch for fires. They are better prepared, but who knows which way the wind will blow?

The fires from the Lightening Complex are, as I write this, largely contained. Fire season is not yet over. We all wait upon the wind.

Which way will our monstrous child born from our corrupt, colonial desire, come this next time? How will we, collectively, parent her? Is it even possible to parent a monster? Let us say that it is. Then the question becomes: who do we need to become to parent a monster, a monster who is even now growing in the winds?

And, somehow, even now, the land still offers herself to us.

Even now, our seeds grow. Even now, there are amongst us those who remember how to turn the husks into dolls. Not just for our children: also, for the child within ourselves. To remember the practices that our own parents never knew. To remember: even now, the arc of balance trembles.

How we walk sends shivers along it, echoing in ways we do not yet see.

[1] Many thanks to Kristine Hill, Cassandra Ferrera, and Anna Mudd for the conversations that sparked the ideas for this essay.