Can I dare to soak in the sun? To feel pleasure, satisfaction, and oozing well-being so viscerally that I can snack upon them? Should I cultivate a willful disregard of the mounting evidence of rampant destruction? Quell my sorrow when there are no raucous bird calls in the woods, when my favorite bugs appear no more?
This is my aching daily conundrum: I love this world, this life – rocks, snakes, sunflowers, wind – and it is dying. I love it all with a palpable intensity. Can I thrill to an early-morning elk call on my run while smelling the acrid fumes of the county’s weed control efforts along the gravel road? Too much destruction! Yes, but so much life!
How to be in this world, how to lament for all that enlivens my senses? Even in its death throes, this earth enchants me. Should I numb myself to the experience of its daily demise? Attempt a stolid remove as its consuming aliveness slowly shrivels?
Ursula K. Le Guin says, “I must be able to imagine, for one does not get on without hope.” But imagination assumes a future, an expansiveness, and hope is predicated on life, on survival, on meaning and beauty. There is no such hope, no make-it-all-OK utopian solution. Irreparable damage has been done and is ongoing. The profit-mongering machinery chugs on; the systems of exploitation continue. Every year clocks in at a record-breaking level of fossil fuel consumption. Every year is now “The Hottest,” with records broken and crisis routinized.
Some respond with frenzied use-it-all-before-its-gone political agitation, online hatefulness, and head-in-the-sand book banning. Others trumpet individual actions, as if my avoidance of paper towels and loyal composting could somehow alter the inherently destructive machinations of global capitalism.
The truth is, we are fucked, all of us.
How, then, do we live into this ongoing extinction, this loss of multitudinous species, this daily death watch? To paraphrase The Lion in Winter, “When the fall is all there is, how you fall matters.” So I want to do this end-of-days, this fall, with others. I will “dance at the edge of the world” (Le Guin again) but I’m not going to do a solo shake.
This dance is a haphazard, lurching, laughing tumble. I will do this dance with a friend of mine…Fergus the toad, that is, a sign of life in the greenhouse, back for another season of hopping.
I will do this on the road.
I will do this here or there.
In fact, I will do this anywhere.
Will you join me?
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