Tripping Habit

a letter to a friend

This morning’s mist and deer - air so full of water it is almost like swimming.

To my dear friend, feeling disheartened by humanity in the face of ecological crisis,

'Hmmm' was all I could say to you the other day, concurring when you spoke about how at least the earth will thrive without us – not those words exactly, but the sense of them. Amid the annihilation we humans are causing, your concern, not so much for us but for our children and for the children of all living beings. I could not disagree with you, nor could I find words in that moment, but there was a twinge in my heart. A constricting little squeeze, that I will attempt to unravel here. For me, for you and anyone else that needs it.

I have no answers of course, no blind hope, nothing solid to offer, but I do have a burning desire to offer you something. A candle for your altar, a glimmer of light. Not a remedy but perhaps something to hold in the other hand. Something mending while the other end unravels, something cradling while the other falls into the void - though the void seems far more benevolent in Tibetan Buddhist terms - 'Womb of the Great Mother' gives me invitation to surrender. But surrender I did not, I simply gave up in the midst of our conversation. If I could wish something, it would be the ability to respond more quickly, but I am a slow boat, it takes time to digest, to finally find meaning through writing.

Perhaps the crux of this squeeze, of this line of thinking, is the paralysis it brings. I feel it viscerally, a thick skin of numbness, an immobility – almost like the onset of encephalitis, when I couldn't move my arms or face and thought I was having a stroke. As we spoke, the sense of agency in my cells got hollowed out by apathy. Draining the infinite meaning of the infinitesimally small acts that I conspire with. This is not to blame you, but to apologise from me. I wish I would have resisted my own collapse. That I would have jumped up from my chair, pulled you to your feet and sailed us outdoors. To your garden, to a tree, to open a liminal space of magic. To make a ritual right then and there, a lament to shake the sky open, to liberate our voices, without a worry for the neighbours. To make a dedicated connection, a ridiculous dance with mud between our toes, a declaration of love for earth. This, I guess, is a prescription I am writing for myself. Let this be my psycho-magic act for the next time I feel apathy crawling into my skin.

It's just so easy to be caught up in the conventions of conversation, to not want to break the flow, even with such a wild heart as yours. It is high time for me to shake off the residue of that shy, well-behaved and sometimes bullied child. It's time to rock the boat, to be a dedicated tripper of habits, to be willing to step out on a limb of the ridiculous. To shed any sediment of shame and walk blindly into the unknown, fuelled by none other than my own intuitive inklings. Of course I do this to some degree in my art, this is effectively my job. But art happens mostly in safe spaces for the strange and new, when really I'd like to do it a lot more in life and in social interactions, that don't necessitate the framing of arts practice or participatory performance. Still, there is a threshold to cross and I have some courage to gather.

There was another inkling that I ignored that morning at your place, when we discovered the cat had snatched your dear fish, just to play with. Brute we said, swallowing the uncouth ways of the wild, laying their once dancing fins flat in the compost. Not that I have a problem with the composting of bodies, I would wish that for my own rather than a coffin, but I would have liked to hold the fish in my hand and sing a song together. The same thing happened yesterday, just after I returned home, our kitten came in with a dear little dead bird. I was so upset with her and so tired from travel, I turned away and asked Patrick to please take the bird outside. This little body is still awaiting burial and song, and now the kitten wears her bell, to give the birds a chance. Killer cats they may be, but here we have a choice to live with cats or mice and I have made mine.

I don't know if I am nearing any kind of clarity here. Waffling on about ritual intentions and funeral rights for one small fish and bird in the face of ecological collapse. But somehow these rituals, this child's play, feel to me like reweaving the world. That the weft of relations gets thinned out when we are immobilised in global dispair, and yet can be so simply strengthened by small acts of connection. Clearly I am not much of a scientific mind, this is the measure of a heart I am talking about. Still I trust it, this resonance that is the measure of a heart. Imagine for a moment, if we were able to measure the quantity and effects of despair and apathy, as felt by humans in relation to ecological crisis. Then, imagine the measure of transforming this sense of fear and inaction into connection, into tiny little acts of resonance within the natural world, of which we are an inseparable part. Imagine the ripples! The butterfly effect of chaos theory – though the original model was actually a seagull causing a storm, not a butterfly causing a tornado – a poetic quirk I'm sure you'd appreciate. Either way, you get the idea, a very small change in initial conditions creating a significantly different outcome. How we do this on a grand scale I have no idea, other than doing it myself and having the courage to share it with others. That's the task at hand.

I can't not mention that you have magic hands, that they hold the capacity to reweave worlds, as well as the many wonderful things they make. Three days later, I can still feel my nervous system humming, reweaving connections from my scalp to feet. It was of the most beautiful gifts I have received from a friend, to have my hair brushed and played with as you sang to me. I lay there like a small child, held and trusting, half asleep. This is a treasure and one I happily reciprocated, though accompanied instead by our 'organ recital' - the wonderfully apt term your Uncle came up with for the recounting of illnesses when the ageing meet. In the recital of our births and scars, crashes on roads and waves and viral entanglements - our brains, wombs, skulls and bones all accounted for. These stories of our bodies became just as much the stories of places, people and invisible beings that have torn us apart and stitched us together again. It gives me the sense that we are becoming more and more places as we grow old, volumes of places, bodies changing, becoming more landscape until they eventually become land again.

I'm reminded of this beautiful phrase that

Sally Gillespie

wrote for our gathering in February - ''that we are never alone in engaging with the work of attending and caring for our world and all her beings, including ourselves.'' We are never alone. And even though you and I grew up near the bush, with wild places shaping our becoming and now find ourselves in concrete suburbia and cultivated forests, the wild is still becoming. There is infinite potential for concrete to crack, for the cultivated to go wild and for the tripping of habits.

I was asked this week – ''can living in a yurt reintroduce some wisdom our ancestors knew?'' I think this porous nest does make it easier to remember the connection, perhaps I need it because I'm so forgetful. Need to hear the rain to know it falls, need to see the stars to remember they are there, need to pee outside to remember myself as part of the ecology. To live with comfort, with a degree of separation, it takes more mindfulness to remember, where the water from the tap is coming from and where it goes, how the electric grid - a neural network-like system is connecting houses, towns, cities, nations. I caught a glimpse of it from the plane on my way home and for all the horrors of carbon emissions and industrialisation, there is beauty. I thank the ancient forests and creatures that became with eons oil for this gift of flight. That I could visit you my dear friend and find this thread to call on my courage.

With love.

Oak mist before dawn

---

Here, by the way, is an invitation for you and all to gather online on the 12^th February -

In our hands: Responding to the ecological crisis with creativity and care, with myself and Sally Gillespie

A conversation circle on the themes of cultivating care and creativity in times of ecological crisis. We invite you to bring along something of what you are holding and/or making in response to the crisis. This might be a symbolic representation of a feeling or place (a shell, a stone), of work you are engaged in (gardening, mending), a poem, image or a book that speaks to you.

Sally and I will hold the space open for reflective conversations to encourage companionship and inspiration, grounded in the recognition that we are never alone in engaging with the work of attending and caring for our world and all her beings, including ourselves.

We will meet on the 12th of February for one hour

9:30 am CET ( Stockholm) / 8:30 GMT (London) /19:30 AEST (Sydney) / 16:30 AWST (Perth)/ 21.30 NZT

To register and get Zoom link, please DM Julia or Sally, or email sallymgillespie@icloud.com

---

Subscribe for fortnightly letters, delivered every new and full moon to your inbox. All posts are free but if you’d like to support the building, growing and flourishing of A R T I S T S in R E S O N A N C E with your comments, likes or paid subscription, we warmly welcome you!