Where the Horses Sing

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Photo by Bear Guerra

---

I LIKE TO WALK early and am often alone on the beach, the ocean and the birds my only companions, the tiny sanderlings running back and forth chasing the waves. Some days the sun rising over the headlands makes a pathway of golden light to the shore. Today, the fog was dense and I could just see two figures walking in the distance, until they vanished into the mist, leaving a pair of footprints in the sand until the incoming tide washed them away. It made me wonder what will remain in a hundred years, when my grandchildren’s grandchildren are alive? Will the rising sea have covered the dunes? Climate crisis will by then be a constant partner, and so many of today’s dramas will be lost in a vaster landscape of primal change.

Sensing this reshaping of the seashore, where the waves roll in from across the Pacific, makes my mind stretch across horizons. How this land and our own lives have evolved. One story of science says it was only seventy thousand years ago that humans left Africa on their long migrations across continents, arriving here on the Pacific coast just thirteen thousand years ago, when the Bering Strait was dry land and not ocean; or possibly they came earlier in boats down the coast. But how was life then, long before the written word, when we traveled as small groups, communities of hunters and gatherers?

They may have carried few possessions, but their consciousness contained a close relationship to the land, to its plants and animals, to the patterns of the weather and the seasons, which they needed for their survival. Fully awake with all of their senses, they had a knowing, passed down through generations of living close to the ground, even as they migrated across the continent. Today we are mostly far from the land and its diverse inhabitants. Cut off from these roots, we have become more stranded than we realize, and while our oncoming climate crisis may present us with many problems, we hardly know how to reconnect, to return our consciousness to the living Earth. It is as if, having traveled to the far corners of our planet, we now find ourselves in an increasing wasteland without knowing how to return to where the rivers flow, to where the plants grow wild. And unlike our ancestors, we cannot just pack up and move on, because this wasteland surrounds us wherever we look, like the increasing mounds of plastic and other toxic material we leave in our wake....

Walking the shoreline, watching the little birds searching for insects, my awareness drawn to the sky, the sea, and the shifting sands, I wonder at this gulf between the simple, magical awareness of our ancestors, and our present-day mind, as cluttered as our consumer world. What has happened to our consciousness, now divorced from the multidimensional existence that used to sustain us? Did we need to exile ourselves from this primal place of belonging? And now, as we tear apart the web of life with our machines and images of progress, is there a calling to return, to open the door that has been closed by our rational selves?

When the fog is dense and you can only see a few yards in front of your feet, the world around becomes more elemental. Watching each wave come to the shore is like watching the breath. Sometimes my feet become wet from the rising water, or I move further up the beach. I try to keep my mind empty, part of the sky and the waves, simple, essential. Here nothing is separate, and the inner and outer worlds are closer.

You can read the entire essay at: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/where-the-horses-sing/

Invasives

Unknitting Despair in a Tangled Landscape

by Catherine Bush

Illustration by Lucille Clerc

---

IN THE FOUR-HUNDRED-ACRE park a few blocks from my home, I uproot plants: small rosettes of serrated, palm-shaped leaves; slim stalks of jagged-edged green topped with florets of tiny white flowers. It’s mid-morning. I’ve brought garbage bags. I make no attempt to be clandestine. I’m not foraging, like the Polish-Canadian women who come to pluck fresh nettle leaves in the spring, or the man whom I spot cutting orange chicken-of-the-woods mushroom from a decomposing log. Of course you’re not supposed to harvest here. I abandon my stuffed bag by the garbage bins. In clearing the ground around a couple of aged black oak trees in Toronto’s High Park, I’ve stopped perhaps a few hundred thousand seeds of garlic mustard from forming, an infinitesimal drop in the bucket of the invasive plant growth that is spreading through the ravine understory. Futile, likely, but I’m searching to kick-start a response beyond the complicated grief I feel at the sight.

Everywhere humans have traveled, we’ve brought alien species, intentionally and unintentionally. Arriving in a new place, the populations of some such species explode, cause land trauma, displace and eliminate native species, chemically altering the soil to make it inhospitable to other plants.

My parents arrived in Toronto at the end of the 1950s amid the vast, postwar boom of immigration. Both had histories tying them to the city. In the mid-1930s, my paternal grandparents gave up their brief immigrant life in Toronto running a fish-and-chip shop and sailed back to the UK with their Toronto-born, two-year-old son, only to meet the onslaughts of war a few years later. Fearing a Nazi invasion, my maternal grandparents sent my six-year-old mother from their English home to Canada; after five years in Toronto with a foster family, she returned to Norwich an eleven-year-old stranger. History nevertheless entangles us in the waves of Anglo-European invasion that have swept across the continents, including the six centuries of genocidal colonialism in North America.

How can I, child of immigrants, with a long cultural history of colonial extirpation behind me, object to the presence of other invasives, I wonder, as I walk the park’s wooded landscape. Aren’t humans apex invasives, triumphant at eliminating other species and creating monocultures? What I’m trying to figure out is how, in these days of mounting ecological loss, I can love and care for land that isn’t mine, land that I’ve inhabited for years yet where I have no personal ancestry, land historically stolen from its Indigenous inhabitants, which has nevertheless become my microclimate.

You can read the entire essay on: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/invasives/

Tough Times

...the old is dying and the new cannot be born

Antonio Gramsci, circa 1930

Emerging from the latest round of Covid-19 lockdown feels like exiting a dark basement. It’s been safe but suffocating. Now I’m taking hesitant steps around my scarred neighbourhood. Which shops are still standing? Who’s been destroyed by the catastrophe? Where’s the street energy? I’m blinking in an uncertain light, wondering what’s next, relieved my favourite Italian restaurant is still there.

The world feels wobbly, tentative. The virus is tamed (for some of us in privileged countries). But it will lurk, hidden and potent. Other bacterial disasters will occur. And we will get used to living with them. As we are used to living with climate catastrophe. Taking in only what we must (I should recycle my plastic) and denying the huge reality of the earth approaching its melting point. I have new routines when going out: Wallet, check. Keys, check. Mask, check. With the world heating up, I will need to add: Water, check. Protective clothing: check. Body heat monitor, check. Avoiding acres blackened by fire, check.

I review the crises I’ve experienced in my lifetime, considering what can be learned from events I’ve already endured. The Coronavirus is not a personal threat. It’s a generalized destruction of a sense of well being. I’ve been here before. What’s different is that I’m an elder now, and my own sense of mortality is hard to separate from the latest assault. When I was younger, there were infinite openings. Not so now. I can’t go about my own affairs so quickly, putting behind me a set of fears. I wonder if this particular impersonal assault will be the one to catch up with me.

My first recollection of global catastrophe was when Mrs. Packard, my second grade teacher, explained to us seven-year-olds what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. We should go under our school desks and cover our heads. Just so, she demonstrated, crossing pale arms across her kindly face. We should huddle there until the all-clear sounded, and follow the instructions given by our school principal, Mr. Watts. Under no circumstances should we panic nor cry out for our parents. They would arrive when they could. I nodded, fearful and not reassured, hoping my dog Cappy would be okay.

The nuclear attack didn’t come, though the Cold War with Russia continued. As it still does, with cyber weapons as potent now as uranium enriched ones. Amazing how solid long-standing enmities are, flourishing unabated over changed times and circumstances. Rooted in Moscow and Washington, DC, blooming still, even as other hatreds arise which equal them in destructive rage.

The fears I felt as a young girl about dying in a nuclear attack faded. The residue is there, though hard to pinpoint except as I consider how little prepared I can be for exterior events. This sense of futility was reinforced during two US wars: the one in Vietnam and the other in Iraq. Both of these conflicts tore America apart. Their impacts continue to fuel hardcore assumptions about what the mighty United States of America has the ‘right’ to do. And they demonstrate how groupthink can pull others into a sinkhole. Vietnam intensified the culture wars that now rage in infinitely more destructive form. Those of us on the Left were horrified to discover that our distress at the catastrophic destruction in another country, a country the US government insisted we had the right to invade, wasn’t shared by all citizens.

For many of our fellow Americans, Vietnam was a just war, keeping the commies at bay and protecting our god given rights.

When the Twin Towers were bombed on 9/11, I was on an airplane travelling solo from London to San Francisco. Watching the flight indicator on the seat back in front of me, I was confused. Even someone as map-challenged as myself could see we were heading in the wrong direction. Soon four uniformed flight attendants appeared, arms akimbo. The pilot’s voice came on, announcing: ‘I have grave news. There’s been an emergency. We’ll be landing in Edmonton, Alberta.’ He told us of the New York City attack along with the bombing in Washington. Passengers were calm, a number of British travellers commiserating with me as an American. One woman screamed out, her cries filling the 727. Her daughter worked in the Towers. Permitted to phone, she learned her family had not been killed. Landing, we were greeted by the Canadian Red Cross, making sure we knew where to go and giving us donuts and coffee. Like refugees everywhere, relying on the kindness of strangers.

That catastrophe was somehow easier to face as I was in transit, neither here nor there. It became more real back home in Berkeley. I travelled over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco twice weekly for work. Due in at 7 pm, I left my house at 2 pm so as not to be on the bridge during peak drive time. ‘They won’t blow up the bridge, I reassured myself, when there are so few of us on it. They’ll do it during rush hours. This crazy magical thinking continued for months, the general atmosphere in the fourth largest American urban area tinged with unease. In public spaces, I sometimes heard an eerie announcement: today’s threat level is yellow (not so bad); red (not so good). And the US President, George Bush, definitely not so good, dumbly leading us into another global mess, the war in Iraq.

I went to protests, wearily carrying my banner. I knew the struggle to stop the invasion was doomed. The powers-that-be had decided upon their course, lying about weapons of mass destruction. Even the British endorsed the Iraq war, their prime minister sucked in by an insane camaraderie with Bush. The Iraq War would happen, as had the Vietnam conflict, until massive and sustained outrage finally cut it off, until the profiteers had what they needed.

Most difficult living through this latest global teeter-totter is the sure and certain knowledge of powerlessness. It’s a struggle to remember that this sense of limited control is true and limiting. But it must not be paralyzing. When I was younger, I felt certain my resolve could alter events. Along with like-minded people, I could shift the direction of the world, definitely help move it in another direction. Living now in a time of profound shifts to the Right, with demagogues and destroyers from the US Republican Party to the UK’s Tories, leaders as corrupt as Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin, corporations as godlike as British Petroleum and Amazon, I’m flummoxed. I don’t give up my shrieks of protest. But I have to ignore the tinniness of the sound. I’ve always told my young friends that futility is not an option. Now I get to see if I can put my efforts where my mouth is and not be overwhelmed by despair.

I don’t want the Coronavirus, the unimaginable dangers of climate catastrophe, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the venality and corruption of world leaders to pull me under. Living with ambiguity and doing the right thing is what counts, right until the last syllables of my recorded time.

…………………..

Share your response to this feature by posting in the Subscriber Salon.