I’m sitting outside writing this in a notebook instead of on my laptop. I’m planted in the backyard of the house where my grandmother died six years ago. I am visiting Andy. Her husband since before I was born. My grandfather who isn’t like other grandfathers in that he’s still out here playing games of golf twice a week and going dancing — he’s a hot commodity, it seems.
He lives alone here surrounded by the things they made a life with when they moved to South Carolina ten years ago from New Jersey. I’ve found many remnants of her here in the three days since I arrived, from old and expired boxes of tea and pudding, to her favorite perfumes (sweet pea and cucumber melon) in the guest bathroom. I sleep in her clothes.
We were the same size, small, petite. Underestimated women. I possess more muscle than her, delicate little lady that she was. Vinnie, everybody called her. Vivian. We share the same slight chest, and lots of fire.
Her ashes sit in an urn laced with turquoise on his dresser in the bedroom. Ladybugs crawl across the screened-in Carolina room out back. The table is thick with pollen that I had to wipe off before I sat down with my book about saving what’s left of our natural environment. He misses her.
The silence of this big house, occupied only by Andy and memories and ladybugs, helps me sleep. He shows signs of aging and longing and singleness. He is over the moon that I’ve come to visit. I’ve not cried yet.
Yesterday, when we walked around the complex (2.5 miles just to see a slice of it) we passed a squashed baby turtle — clearly it’d been run over by a car. We’d spent the morning watching nature programs, learning facts about everyone from the giraffe to skeleton shrimp, and turtles in between. Thus, the baby turtle, crushed, broke my heart. I lifted it gently off the road and buried it amongst leaves in a divot of wet earth.
May she return to the Earth.
Walking on, I began to contemplate the ways in which we do, or do not, care for one another. We came to another turtle whose life was ended in the same way. My exasperated sigh prompted Andy to joke, Another burial?
I had to. So I repeated the ritual.
Defeated and sad and thinking more about death than I wanted to on that walk, I turned to what I’ve been reading and researching these last few weeks. I turned toward the belief that if I don’t, in (and with) my little life, advocate for loss of habitat, loss of life, loss of land, alongside those who are already doing that important work, I am letting…something down. Perhaps myself.
Not all people are cruel, but we can certainly be short-sighted as a species. This makes us vulnerable to placing ourselves first, believing that what is here is limitless, boundless, here for us. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The land, the animals, the water — it was all here before us, and it will outlast us, that much I believe is true. We have to offer more care. We have to look.
As a child I came to understand my relationship to nature was reciprocal and that nature had a relationship with me. We call to one another. We called one another into being. I trust what I see and I believe what I feel. Trusting direct experience is the open door to revelation. This was my foundation for faith. It still is.
- Terry Tempest Williams, Erosion: Essays of Undoing
I know some of us arrive to the seeing slowly, circling closer to the drain — the hole through which to look, that which plunges us into this channel toward seeing what is real. For others, it feels innate. They’re raised in the woods, or by people sensitive to them. For me, it feels to be a bit of both. What I know because I feel it in my heart AND because I have done research, is this:
If we don’t take care to place ourselves in the way of the powers that are working to strip
and drill
and pillage
and pulp
and steal
public lands — lands that will not last in their splendor if we don’t protect and care for them — what hope do we have? And (though I use a nuanced definition of “deserve” here) do we deserve (to enjoy, to respect, to experience) them if we don’t step up to protect them?
Hope for the future of creatures everywhere grows larger and clearer if we as humans take steps to care. To advocate for. It can be easy to think us doomed; climate projections are bleak and difficult to swallow. I have fallen victim to thinking this way, and letting it discourage me. But then I learn about the raven population skyrocketing and how this is due to the explosion of human waste which necessitates more of these garbage-pickers. As a result, the raven’s overpopulation correlates directly to the killing of many tortoises, as the ravens will nest nearby and, being ravens and doing what they instinctually do, prey on the unsuspecting tortoises, sometimes scooping the babies right out of their too-small shells.
Everything exists in cycles. There is a chain that moves through all life. Cause and effect. They taught us these things so young. Why haven’t we remembered? Why don’t we recognize that we are directly in charge of the future? Why don’t enough of us care?
It is worth considering that a gift to the future is the preservation of:
Native burial grounds and sites of ritual
plant/animal/all species
clean waterways
public lands
national monuments and preserved sites
old-growth forests
and on.
The more recognition, reverence, and appreciation we have for what is here all around us — not ours for the taking — the more redeemable and deserving I believe we are. But if we continue as a species to trend in the opposite direction, one that is defined by ignorance and vanity, thoughtlessness and species-blindness, there’s no hope for us. In morality, not just in literal terms. And isn’t that more important?
In Erosion: Essays of Undoing, I find these words, which feel like prayer:
May a congress of Raven greet us in ceremony. May we recognize our need of a collective blessing by Earth. May we ask forgiveness for our wounding of land and spirit. And may our right relationship to life be restored as we work together toward a survival shared. A story is awakening. We are part of something larger than ourselves, an interconnected whole that stretches upward to the stars.
Sitting in my grandmother’s house, surrounded by photos of her and her smiling face, I do feel her. I know she is proud of me. I know that her spirit dances alongside mine on days like today. I know that I am more like her than the rest of my family members are. I know she had an affinity for the Earth and being out there, everywhere. I know she loves me, and is out there, everywhere. I know that I am out there too, part of something larger than myself.
And so, too, are you.
A