Every time I get a hold of a thought, it flutters away. I feel like a tree who’s losing her leaves. Sure they’ve been dead for a while (the leaves being attachment to capitalism, approval, control) but the feeling of letting them go, or of them letting go of me, is a snap, a separation, a severance.
And while the weather keeps pointing toward spring, all I can feel at the moment is a visceral chill setting in.
The constant confrontation with the limits of our human knowledge exhausts me. And promise that we are so very close to a break through that will make all this uncertainty go away exhaust me more.
This feeling is like a dream.
In this dream, you and I are walking through the meadow where we’ve lived all our life but suddenly we realize we are surrounded by a menacingly unknown wood.
We’ve heard of others making their way through this wood tentatively with New Yorker articles and truisms about how little we know about the ocean. But now you and I are stalled on the edge of the unknown, and a rustle and shadow flicker on our periphery.
Ahh, we think, this is the monster Red Riding Hood warned us about.
We think the rustle is just a creature in the wood, one we could kill we could run home and get properly prepared. We decide to make our way back, but just when we can see the smokestacks of our old lives, we realize that the rustle is a growl and it’s coming from our backyards.
We have no choice, we realize, but to make our way through this unknown wood, through all those things we’d rather not think about, through fear and danger—and quickly at that.
Currently, we are hacking and hacking, finding any way to keep moving.
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But soon, in my version of this collective dream (or nightmare depending on the day), the unknown wood will open into a new meadow. We will have nothing of what we had before but the lumber we had to clear to make it through the wood and the stories of the last time we rebuilt.
We will finally have the space to build something that suits us better. Something with a foundation measured to our size.
There will be those that leave this new colony, that make their way back through the wood to that old home—sure there are no more of Red Riding Hood’s creatures there. Those that denied the limits of human knowledge. Those who will say we had the cure all along. Those that want to go back to work so badly they are willing to risk their lives to do so.
They will probably get back safely (we are all a little old for the gory retribution of children’s fairy tales) but they will return to a place I don’t want to return to. What is left there for us?
A life where our friends are in danger? A life where we talk over the lessons the earth is trying to teach us? A life where human value can only be conceived as currency? A life that never fit us quite right?
Right now we are in an unknown wood. It is terrifying and it doesn’t make sense. But I beg of you, keep hacking your way through with me.
We will be out of this danger eventually, to a clearing where we can see this thing in the light for what it is. And when that happens we will focus on building things the way we’ve always talked about instead of following them back to the old homes for redistribution of things we don’t want or need.
We will get to build something new. And it will be worth it.
But for now we hibernate.
And I am but a bear in her cave (with wifi).
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A side note to wedge between at-home fitness ads:
Bears lose a third of their bodyweight in hibernation not because they’re trying but because they die a little. Their heart rate and breathing slows. Their body temperature is ice cold. Their existence is reduced to being.
Don’t get it confused. We are not building yet. This hibernation is not a time for hunting, production, personal improvement. It is a time for survival.
What do bears believe when they crawl into their caves for winter? Do they make their assets more liquid just in case? Do they stockpile salmon in case the rivers aren’t running when they wake? Do they pace by the opening of their den?
I think the trick is they don’t think much at all.
They sleep.
They wait.
They dream.