Dearest Julie, I feel that you and I are walking a very similar path right now. Investigating questions and considering our own placement in the findings. I mention Weisman in a story, "Alan Weisman, in The World Without Us, spends a chapter (probably the best chapter of the book) talking about the brevity of time necessary for nature to reclaim." The book is a hard read but what I really like about it is that in the end, we won't be here. Our species will destroy itself but there is something rewarding that decades, eons, times we cannot even fathom, this "big, massive ball hurling through a planetary neighborhood" (that being used in my next post) will get on without us. What we have to do, as individuals, is share that there is a community worth spending time getting to know and value. What we have to understand is that our being here is of a time so very short. Does it hurt? Absolutely. What can we do? Share stories that make an impact.
Isn’t that amazing? It’s not like that book came out recently. I’m still pondering why it hit me so hard. I felt so angry that we are doing all this violence, everywhere. And it’s not even news to me. Maybe having it all in one place, a concentrated dose, is what did it. There’s something else, too. I can’t shake the feeling that knowing how quickly life will reclaim ground once we’re gone — I don’t want it to be an excuse for making such a mess while we’re here. Especially with substances and practices that cannot be healed — radioactive waste and mountaintop removal come to mind. “We can do whatever we want; the earth will recover” isn’t so true in those (and other) cases. A teacher once said in a workshop, our fear for the fate of the earth is really a fear of our own mortality. That does ring true. But I feel such outrage at the injustice, the callous disregard, the sheer ignorance — especially knowing that there are many human cultures who DO know how to live well here. And look at all that people in the dominant culture are missing! The wonder! The magnificence! Okay, now I’m ranting. 😳
You are so right about time. There’s a funny Kurt Vonnegut quote that I saved recently as an image. Maybe I’ll post it on notes and tag you. Thanks for being here. I feel saner knowing you’re grappling with this stuff too.
I'll have to find my written notes about the book. I do not feel at all that "We can do whatever we want; the earth will recover." Quite the opposite but I do feel a sensation of calm believing Mother Nature wins. We might hand her a destructive churn of soil but with enough time (eons) she can cleanse our mess. How much better it might be if humans modified their behaviors.
I'm kicking myself for not seeing how unclear I was in writing that. I know you're well aware of all that. I would never question your ethics! I need to stay on my side of the street, as they say in Al-Anon. 😳
Thank you so much for this. I really felt the pain of marching oneself through a book that is a tally of our horrors. I found myself with a similar book about a year ago and realized that the listening to the audio book made it all that much worse--the voices were literally in my head! It made it much harder to separate myself. That experience inspired some new practices--tough news is read. I can't listen to it. And I have to read it early in the morning, and then take a break. And I'm also really trying to give myself permission to not finish some books. That's a tough one.
Wow, these are all brilliant suggestions. Especially the thing about reading vs listening. It didn't help that the narrator of that book was super annoying! Then when the actual author came on at the end, he was worlds better and I wanted to write his agent and suggest they re-record it with him reading. Yeah, not finishing books is a thing with me. I need to get over it. Life's too short.
Thank you, thank you. From your prose to the Peter Mayer's "Awake." Tears in my eyes. I've just returned from Tanzania and have been journaling and reflecting to attempt to capture the raw feelings from it. It feels like I'm at the base of a sheer rockface staring up and unable to see the top. How can we reverse and unwind the devastation we've caused? I know nature is sentient and that we're connected but the next steps I can take feel a bit futile. Feeling - as your essay evoked, is at least a step I hope. Thank you for this loving thought-provoking post.
I love your essays and how they make me look at everything differently. I also thank you for all the links you provide, though some days I spend hours down those rabbit holes!
Apologies? 😂 Thanks so much for reading and taking the time to comment. It's so helpful to know what resonates -- especially looking at things differently (that's my love language).
Thank you for reminding me of The World Without Us! It really impacted me when I read it, probably around when it came out, but funny thing is that all these years later, the message that remains in my impression of it is that it helped me understand that humans were not the point. We could kill ourselves off out of greed and stupidity and The World would go on. That shift in the human ego-centric narrative was helpful at the time, I remember. I wonder what I’d think if I read it now? Your other ideas really resonate and I’m so glad you had some time recently to drum and dance in community, in the woods. If we were doing that more regularly—at every full moon? To celebrate anything and everything? To mourn and grieve? — how different would we be?
Thanks for reading, Jessica. It’s funny, whenever I’m at one of those retreats, I think the very same thing - even a small dose of drums and dance goes a long way, especially when multiplied by community. Thanks for the perspective on TWWU - that humans aren’t the point. I can see that, and maybe it was more stark 17 years ago. Because the book was so human-centric (necessary to the premise), I missed that entirely. Now I wonder what sort of book it would be if written from the POVs of all the other beings affected by our actions. Not a journalistic assignment, surely! 😉 I’m not of the school that we are a cancer on the earth or a mistaken experiment. More like, middle-school adolescents with no adult supervision.
My goodness - did I say that? 🫠 I love this, Julie - it takes things a step further than "imagine your setting as another character in your fiction" because it really requires no imagination, only stillness.
One thing I've noticed since we moved to Europe and gave up cars is how much more difficult it is to "get out in nature" now, there really are no wide-open parks (well, one that I can think of, but it would take two trains and and two hours to get there.) So I miss that, but it was a conscious choice when we moved that we wanted to live more lightly, environmentally speaking.
"it really requires no imagination, only stillness" - watch out! You may be quoted in my next post! Interesting observation about the trade-off of living in a city. I'm currently living the opposite trade-off, small house on a lovely quiet creek where I can sit on the dock and watch the sunrise, the herons, the osprey, the ducks and geese and be bathed in birdsong. But out my front door and to get anywhere is the usual banal nightmare of suburban sprawl. Sure, historic Annapolis is lovely, but it's not a REAL city. At least cities like Paris have the "bois," but I imagine them to be rather overrun?
Don't know about Paris - Barcelona has a deficit of parks; there is a large one right next to us here and Sitges, but because of climate and ecosystem, it's mainly scrubby, rocky and hilly, and with my extreme pinkness, no shade to keep from wilting, so... Your situation near your creek and your birds sounds divine. We have a pair of ducks currently summering in our community pool, that's about as close as we get. 🦆🦆
Ducks count! 😊 I'm aware how spoiled we are with such vast National Parks, but also knowing how we came to "possess" those lands. . . it's all a bit much.
I remember in MFA school in the ‘90s, one of the fiction writers commented about us nature writers that “speaking a word for nature” was cultural appropriation. Didn’t know what to say!
A lot of this goes back to the old question, “if a tree falls in the forest when no one’s around, does it make a sound?” As Shorty, the philosopher-cowboy in my novel, Ship of Fools, says, “Course it does, the sound waves are still traveling through the air, and if nothing else, the squirrels and the deer heard it. Pure piece of human hubris to say otherwise.”
But since my novel is more or less a defense of the scientific world view (with some cracks showing through), I have less and less patience with those who seem to want to discard it. Maybe I just have an allergy to these statements because of the irrationality we see all around us right now.
My own spiritual relationship to nature is firmly based in a scientific world view, something like Carl Sagan expressed when he said we are made of star-stuff. I’m working on an essay about this that will be coming out in a few weeks, and I hope you’ll give it a look then. Or maybe I could send you a draft?
I'd be honored!! I'm more of the Robin Wall Kimmerer school - science is amazing, so is spirituality, so is storytelling. Reality is far too mysterious and complex to be pinned down by any one discipline. In grad school, we read an essay that I think about still, by Karl Popper, called "Limits to a Scientific Understanding of Man." (The title alone is a whole mood.)
What a crazy story about MFA school. I feel equally paralyzed by my more recent MFA experience in trying to include people of color in my stories. It's a fraught time.
I can relate to all of this Julie, being inclined to optimism too, the harder truths can floor me at times, the grief of the unfixable. We need to go gently with ourselves in these heartbreaking moments
Thanks Julie for this thoughtful essay, big yes to more diverse beings having voice in our creations and lives.
Read
Weissman book when it came out. Though some terrible landscapes remain in my memory what really stayed with me was extraordinary capacity of the living world to create more life and recover from human and other destructions. It encouraged me to be more exploratory and hopeful about regenerative processes humans can support. But I think what we take from books is so dependant on when we read them, and perhaps what came before and after,
Thanks for reading, Sally. Yeah, it was a surprise because I usually look through rose-colored glasses. For some reason, I noticed the drearier stuff more. The unfixable. The hells-on-earth. I can assure myself that both are true and yet I’m being called to pay attention to the darker truths. Anyhow, yes, the creative has far more up her sleeve than we can ever imagine.
Thank you for this essay! I have been thinking along these lines for quite a while now. I truly think this is a moment when the earth is calling out for us to remember that we belong to her, not the other way around. And a lot of people are hearing that call, and calling back, as you are doing! Are you familiar with ecophilosopher Joanna Macy's exercise the Council of all Beings? She invites people to meditate on the perspective, needs and contributions of an other-than-human being who's been important for them--and then to take on the perspective of that being and share it, in a room full of other people who are also bearing witness for/as beings they feel some kinship with. I've done it a couple of times, and it's an incredibly powerful way of reframing what earth needs and to hear what she has to teach us in these times...
Yes! We’ve done it on the retreats in West Virginia. It’s wild to give over to imagination, freeing, fun and often profound. Thanks for reading. Glad we’ve connected here.
I loved reading this! I felt Rachel Carson nostalgia.
I must read that book you referenced. I am of course terrified. I appreciate the warning/heads up so I will bookend the book with cushions.
Another mind-blowing book that may be like that is on AI called The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman. Its incredible. I needed months to recover. I never did.
Yikes! Fair warning! Thanks for reading. Glad you enjoyed it. I hope never to write something that someone might not recover from. Unless it’s to enchant them permanently.
Wow wow wow. This essay makes me want to do summersaults all over my back yard. Thank you for opening up my mind to the possibility of animism in literature. I can almost hear the earth and her creatures lining up to get in the spotlight.
Dearest Julie, I feel that you and I are walking a very similar path right now. Investigating questions and considering our own placement in the findings. I mention Weisman in a story, "Alan Weisman, in The World Without Us, spends a chapter (probably the best chapter of the book) talking about the brevity of time necessary for nature to reclaim." The book is a hard read but what I really like about it is that in the end, we won't be here. Our species will destroy itself but there is something rewarding that decades, eons, times we cannot even fathom, this "big, massive ball hurling through a planetary neighborhood" (that being used in my next post) will get on without us. What we have to do, as individuals, is share that there is a community worth spending time getting to know and value. What we have to understand is that our being here is of a time so very short. Does it hurt? Absolutely. What can we do? Share stories that make an impact.
Isn’t that amazing? It’s not like that book came out recently. I’m still pondering why it hit me so hard. I felt so angry that we are doing all this violence, everywhere. And it’s not even news to me. Maybe having it all in one place, a concentrated dose, is what did it. There’s something else, too. I can’t shake the feeling that knowing how quickly life will reclaim ground once we’re gone — I don’t want it to be an excuse for making such a mess while we’re here. Especially with substances and practices that cannot be healed — radioactive waste and mountaintop removal come to mind. “We can do whatever we want; the earth will recover” isn’t so true in those (and other) cases. A teacher once said in a workshop, our fear for the fate of the earth is really a fear of our own mortality. That does ring true. But I feel such outrage at the injustice, the callous disregard, the sheer ignorance — especially knowing that there are many human cultures who DO know how to live well here. And look at all that people in the dominant culture are missing! The wonder! The magnificence! Okay, now I’m ranting. 😳
You are so right about time. There’s a funny Kurt Vonnegut quote that I saved recently as an image. Maybe I’ll post it on notes and tag you. Thanks for being here. I feel saner knowing you’re grappling with this stuff too.
I'll have to find my written notes about the book. I do not feel at all that "We can do whatever we want; the earth will recover." Quite the opposite but I do feel a sensation of calm believing Mother Nature wins. We might hand her a destructive churn of soil but with enough time (eons) she can cleanse our mess. How much better it might be if humans modified their behaviors.
Absolutely. In no way did I mean to say you had that attitude! It was my worry about other readers.
I'm kicking myself for not seeing how unclear I was in writing that. I know you're well aware of all that. I would never question your ethics! I need to stay on my side of the street, as they say in Al-Anon. 😳
I feel all of this. Go Julie! Showing us one way to transmute pain and grief into action.
Thanks, Rebecca. So glad we found each other here.
And vice versa! 💚
Thank you so much for this. I really felt the pain of marching oneself through a book that is a tally of our horrors. I found myself with a similar book about a year ago and realized that the listening to the audio book made it all that much worse--the voices were literally in my head! It made it much harder to separate myself. That experience inspired some new practices--tough news is read. I can't listen to it. And I have to read it early in the morning, and then take a break. And I'm also really trying to give myself permission to not finish some books. That's a tough one.
Wow, these are all brilliant suggestions. Especially the thing about reading vs listening. It didn't help that the narrator of that book was super annoying! Then when the actual author came on at the end, he was worlds better and I wanted to write his agent and suggest they re-record it with him reading. Yeah, not finishing books is a thing with me. I need to get over it. Life's too short.
Thank you, thank you. From your prose to the Peter Mayer's "Awake." Tears in my eyes. I've just returned from Tanzania and have been journaling and reflecting to attempt to capture the raw feelings from it. It feels like I'm at the base of a sheer rockface staring up and unable to see the top. How can we reverse and unwind the devastation we've caused? I know nature is sentient and that we're connected but the next steps I can take feel a bit futile. Feeling - as your essay evoked, is at least a step I hope. Thank you for this loving thought-provoking post.
Joan, I’m so glad this writing served you. We are all in this together. 🥰💚
I love your essays and how they make me look at everything differently. I also thank you for all the links you provide, though some days I spend hours down those rabbit holes!
Apologies? 😂 Thanks so much for reading and taking the time to comment. It's so helpful to know what resonates -- especially looking at things differently (that's my love language).
Thank you for reminding me of The World Without Us! It really impacted me when I read it, probably around when it came out, but funny thing is that all these years later, the message that remains in my impression of it is that it helped me understand that humans were not the point. We could kill ourselves off out of greed and stupidity and The World would go on. That shift in the human ego-centric narrative was helpful at the time, I remember. I wonder what I’d think if I read it now? Your other ideas really resonate and I’m so glad you had some time recently to drum and dance in community, in the woods. If we were doing that more regularly—at every full moon? To celebrate anything and everything? To mourn and grieve? — how different would we be?
Thanks for reading, Jessica. It’s funny, whenever I’m at one of those retreats, I think the very same thing - even a small dose of drums and dance goes a long way, especially when multiplied by community. Thanks for the perspective on TWWU - that humans aren’t the point. I can see that, and maybe it was more stark 17 years ago. Because the book was so human-centric (necessary to the premise), I missed that entirely. Now I wonder what sort of book it would be if written from the POVs of all the other beings affected by our actions. Not a journalistic assignment, surely! 😉 I’m not of the school that we are a cancer on the earth or a mistaken experiment. More like, middle-school adolescents with no adult supervision.
"Have you had any soul-restoring encounters with wild creatures?"
Yes. Thank goddess.
Great post, as usual! It brought to mind this post I read a few days ago that I thought was most excellent.
https://open.substack.com/pub/downtoearth/p/how-did-our-society-become-so-linear?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=7ov7m
Thanks for reading, Geoffrey. Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for the link!
My goodness - did I say that? 🫠 I love this, Julie - it takes things a step further than "imagine your setting as another character in your fiction" because it really requires no imagination, only stillness.
One thing I've noticed since we moved to Europe and gave up cars is how much more difficult it is to "get out in nature" now, there really are no wide-open parks (well, one that I can think of, but it would take two trains and and two hours to get there.) So I miss that, but it was a conscious choice when we moved that we wanted to live more lightly, environmentally speaking.
"it really requires no imagination, only stillness" - watch out! You may be quoted in my next post! Interesting observation about the trade-off of living in a city. I'm currently living the opposite trade-off, small house on a lovely quiet creek where I can sit on the dock and watch the sunrise, the herons, the osprey, the ducks and geese and be bathed in birdsong. But out my front door and to get anywhere is the usual banal nightmare of suburban sprawl. Sure, historic Annapolis is lovely, but it's not a REAL city. At least cities like Paris have the "bois," but I imagine them to be rather overrun?
Don't know about Paris - Barcelona has a deficit of parks; there is a large one right next to us here and Sitges, but because of climate and ecosystem, it's mainly scrubby, rocky and hilly, and with my extreme pinkness, no shade to keep from wilting, so... Your situation near your creek and your birds sounds divine. We have a pair of ducks currently summering in our community pool, that's about as close as we get. 🦆🦆
Ducks count! 😊 I'm aware how spoiled we are with such vast National Parks, but also knowing how we came to "possess" those lands. . . it's all a bit much.
I remember in MFA school in the ‘90s, one of the fiction writers commented about us nature writers that “speaking a word for nature” was cultural appropriation. Didn’t know what to say!
A lot of this goes back to the old question, “if a tree falls in the forest when no one’s around, does it make a sound?” As Shorty, the philosopher-cowboy in my novel, Ship of Fools, says, “Course it does, the sound waves are still traveling through the air, and if nothing else, the squirrels and the deer heard it. Pure piece of human hubris to say otherwise.”
But since my novel is more or less a defense of the scientific world view (with some cracks showing through), I have less and less patience with those who seem to want to discard it. Maybe I just have an allergy to these statements because of the irrationality we see all around us right now.
My own spiritual relationship to nature is firmly based in a scientific world view, something like Carl Sagan expressed when he said we are made of star-stuff. I’m working on an essay about this that will be coming out in a few weeks, and I hope you’ll give it a look then. Or maybe I could send you a draft?
I'd be honored!! I'm more of the Robin Wall Kimmerer school - science is amazing, so is spirituality, so is storytelling. Reality is far too mysterious and complex to be pinned down by any one discipline. In grad school, we read an essay that I think about still, by Karl Popper, called "Limits to a Scientific Understanding of Man." (The title alone is a whole mood.)
What a crazy story about MFA school. I feel equally paralyzed by my more recent MFA experience in trying to include people of color in my stories. It's a fraught time.
Shorty sounds like a man after my own heart. Hubris drives me nuts.
THis POV exploration is a fantastic angle. Love the idea that we need to get back to children's literature to sometimes seek the truth.
Exactly! Why should they have all the fun? 🤩
I can relate to all of this Julie, being inclined to optimism too, the harder truths can floor me at times, the grief of the unfixable. We need to go gently with ourselves in these heartbreaking moments
Yes, thank you, Sally. 🙏💔
Thanks Julie for this thoughtful essay, big yes to more diverse beings having voice in our creations and lives.
Read
Weissman book when it came out. Though some terrible landscapes remain in my memory what really stayed with me was extraordinary capacity of the living world to create more life and recover from human and other destructions. It encouraged me to be more exploratory and hopeful about regenerative processes humans can support. But I think what we take from books is so dependant on when we read them, and perhaps what came before and after,
Thanks for reading, Sally. Yeah, it was a surprise because I usually look through rose-colored glasses. For some reason, I noticed the drearier stuff more. The unfixable. The hells-on-earth. I can assure myself that both are true and yet I’m being called to pay attention to the darker truths. Anyhow, yes, the creative has far more up her sleeve than we can ever imagine.
Thank you for this essay! I have been thinking along these lines for quite a while now. I truly think this is a moment when the earth is calling out for us to remember that we belong to her, not the other way around. And a lot of people are hearing that call, and calling back, as you are doing! Are you familiar with ecophilosopher Joanna Macy's exercise the Council of all Beings? She invites people to meditate on the perspective, needs and contributions of an other-than-human being who's been important for them--and then to take on the perspective of that being and share it, in a room full of other people who are also bearing witness for/as beings they feel some kinship with. I've done it a couple of times, and it's an incredibly powerful way of reframing what earth needs and to hear what she has to teach us in these times...
Yes! We’ve done it on the retreats in West Virginia. It’s wild to give over to imagination, freeing, fun and often profound. Thanks for reading. Glad we’ve connected here.
I loved reading this! I felt Rachel Carson nostalgia.
I must read that book you referenced. I am of course terrified. I appreciate the warning/heads up so I will bookend the book with cushions.
Another mind-blowing book that may be like that is on AI called The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman. Its incredible. I needed months to recover. I never did.
Yikes! Fair warning! Thanks for reading. Glad you enjoyed it. I hope never to write something that someone might not recover from. Unless it’s to enchant them permanently.
Wow wow wow. This essay makes me want to do summersaults all over my back yard. Thank you for opening up my mind to the possibility of animism in literature. I can almost hear the earth and her creatures lining up to get in the spotlight.
They’ve been knocking on my door, for sure! Thanks for your enthusiasm, Kimberly. It’s good medicine.