Me and my gal. I hope I have been a good bhewtic for her.
Quite astonishingly, we don’t have a special word in English for those who would mentor others in studying nature, in finding connections with nature, and in being part of nature.
I want to be able to give credence to those who would do such work. In finding the word, I am simply going back to our roots: to the Proto Indo-European language and keeping it simple.
Bhewtis ~ nature.
With the suffix “ic,” meaning pertaining to, as in the word “medic” which means pertaining to heal.
Bhewtic – pertaining to be of nature. A medic heals. A bhewtic mentors one in and of nature. A high calling. It sounds rather beautiful too, don’t you think?
The Anthropocentric mindset is the root of so many faultlines in our linguistic approach to Earth Crisis/es. One of the latest buzz phrases is “climate breakdown”. I think it was meant to put the fear of God in everyone, to urge everyone to act. What would we all be with a broken climate? Dust!
It’s not very accurate, however, because the climate is not breaking down by the basic laws of thermodynamics. What is happening is an Earthly systemic response to broken ethics and general overreach.
Conditions for survival are becoming unfavourable to many forms of LIFE, especially in places where the parameters are already tight, like the equator and the poles, or where the seasons are rapidly changing: on the edges such as coastal regions, shifting deserts, high mountains, and downstream of melting glaciers, river flood plains, or if the Atlantic Ocean Conveyor (AMOC) stops in its tracks, most of Western Europe. We as a species may survive, or we may not, and this will depend on whether all humans stop emitting greenhouse gases (equitably, at least), and, critically, begin to heal all exquisite flows of LIFE. I’ve already written about climate as an exploited meme because it cannot be split away from LIFE.
“Breakdown”, in common parlance, usually describes a failure of something to work or be successful, like extreme mental suffering that renders us powerless, or a mechanical fault, where energy is lost and a functioning whole becomes mere parts. Earth’s system is gaining energy, climate gaining “power”. It is true that a climate can be successful or unsuccessful depending on what kind of LIFE we are talking about. But there will always be winners and losers. Some (spectacular) oxygenating species, like ocean algae, are critical biological “pumps” and are literally going to explode in a CO2 rich atmosphere if given free rein. We, humans, are being a little biased towards ourselves, yet again, when we speak and write of “climate breakdown”.
The last extinction event we call the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was largely corrected by a tiny aquatic fern that still exists today called Azolla. In sultry carbon dioxide atmospheric conditions around 56 million years ago, and in the nutrient-rich run-off from huge rivers into what is now the Arctic ocean, Azolla grew as thick, floating mats in freshwater that circulated on top of saltwater. For a period of a million years, constantly trapping carbon, dying and sinking to the bottom, it all eventually turned into rock, trapping the carbon for the long-term in the geosphere. As I’ve written before, climate is dependent upon LIFE – what life is another matter ~ there are boundless forms of symbiotic LIFE (holobionts and bionts) and processes and relationships between them. The quantitative life we know today may not be what survives the Sixth Extinction event.
A few friends I have spoken to who aren’t in the ‘trade’ have explained their ideas of what climate breakdown could be ~ our atmosphere is conking out like a car, and will eventually putt-putt to a complete stop. The Sun’s raw heat will then find its way through the atmosphere and parch everything to a crisp. Who can blame them? Breakdowns mostly happen in cars! Or just before admission into mental health units!
On the basis of scientific fact, Earth is already a system of exquisite disequilibrium, and this is the thing that distinguishes “us” as a planet from all other planets we know about so far (Lovelock).
For the past few thousand years since the last Ice Age, more or less, we have neither lost nor hoarded too much of the energy jettisoned towards us in a relatively continuous flow by the bright process that is the Sun. Despite the bias towards pure physics in most energy transfer models, it is LIFE that traps energy in our Earth systems just long enough to sustain LIFE (Gaia theory). But the rate of loss is now decreasing, as the atmosphere traps more energy before it is released back into Space. This happens in three main ways.
The energy *buzz* of LIFE (exergy) is dissipating into the atmosphere due to a fall in abundance and diversity (think dying soils), including the basic ecological production processes of photosynthesis, with an increase in CO2 and methane release overall. .
Fossil fuels ~ humans extracting carbon from the deep geosphere and burning it to release CO2 as waste, which captures the Sun’s heat in the atmosphere and holds it for longer.
The loss of albedo effect (reflective ice depletion revealing dark ocean, tundra), though increased cloud cover and increased carbon-rich vegetation in these areas may offset to some extent.
All are bound to one another, including via ocean organic and non-organic CO2 absorption (now saturation) from the atmosphere and from river out-fall, and by human mind-body-spirit flaws in our sense of who we are, who has the power, and what we then do as a result of that power. Negative feedback loops are also happening now, such as huge quantities of methane being released from warming tundra.
I’ll say it again; the climate is by no means breaking down. Thermodynamically, it is ramping up, trapping, radiating, and circulating more energy in Earth’s global system. This is why storms are increasing in both magnitude and intensity, whilst at the same time speeding and stalling in longer and more intense cycles. There is nothing ‘down’ about rising sea levels either. Everything is on the up ~ except LIFE.
Heads up. “Climate” will still exist even if we no longer do, as long as some life survives, so different perhaps as to exclude the kinds of life-forms familiar to us now. LIFE, though certainly reduced in diversity, is highly unlikely to disappear even under these most intense conditions, especially single-celled organisms like bacteria and, especially, their viruses. Five previous extinction events have shown us that new life forms will eventually emerge from these mega-disturbances, even if over tremendously long periods of time.
The real breakdown right now is in human identity as symlings among symlings. Industrialised humans have broken what it is to be properly and ecologically human, putting all at risk, yes, threatening (and it is already happening), to kill off fellow humans and many other species too, perhaps even LIFE as we know it.
Healing our sense of ecological communal identity with each other and all LIFE is the priority ~ mending that which is truly broken. Climate breakdowns? Perhaps we can talk about LIFE MENDUPS instead and, what’s more, these will always be symbiotically beautiful.
Rain shapeshifts the trees and their unseen communities through glass. Photo by me.
I’ve come to realise, friends, that even some of the most influential speakers and writers of words on climate do not understand even the basics of Earth as an entire dynamic system of systems.
I go further and say that a repetitive use of the word climate as the dominant meme is now serving LIFE poorly. LIFE is mutualism en masse, symbiosis as a continued wave down deep in the rock to surprisingly high in the atmosphere. This is why I have coined the word symbioethics.
Please, think about how you use the word climate, despite the big crowds in high politics going on and on because of pressure to “do” something as opposed to “nothing”. They aren’t system thinkers. Their goals are linear and flat. In terms of Earth Crisis/es, they are the Flat Earthers. Neoliberalism is particularly exploiting the situation; it’s raw like drawing blood. To these people, carbon and carbon dioxide are exchangeable units to trade, and mass electrification means Business-As-Usual in all other aspects of LIFE. There’s blood all over the place, and more to spill.
All aspects of modern life, I’m almost afraid to say it, are what led to the invention of fossil fuel exploitation in the first place, and hence the unfurling, energized, continuing nightmare that is Earth Crisis. Climate change is a symptom, not the disease. You have to recognise this, surely, because those politicians and capitalists may have less of a clue than you.
Earth is different as a planet because of LIFE. I’m animating LIFE in capitals, so as to know and perhaps feel your way into how things really are. I don’t care much about these competitive and anxiolytic obsessions with targets and meeting them, just please stop for a moment and take this in.
LIFE came about because of LIFE.
Sure, it took long-gone, variable qualities of non-organic systems, the chance events of matter, including water, reacting and compounding billions of years ago until an opportunity existed for the emergence of early RNA-like substances, DNA, viruses, and bacteria and cells. In certain conditions again, perhaps under a newly generated organic methane shroud, like smog to deter ultra-violet violence, these basic cells merged again, forming metabolizing and photosynthesizing cells, and in more than one place in similar timescales (symbiogenesis).
LIFE then really took off in this swirling flow of abundance, and when these earliest colonies of dazzling (Lynn Margulis) living matter grew into and around others, more cells found novel roles and began to coalesce in the form of more complex organisms. You only need to understand lichen to realise how it is LIFE that changes the conditions for LIFE. Lichen turns rock into soils; soils are hotbeds for LIFE. And that’s just one example we can all see with our own eyes.
Since those magnificent Earthly points in time and space, LIFE has gained strength by manipulating those very same inorganic and organic systems that produced them, changing them to suit more LIFE (Gaia Theory, even if weak). LIFE has evolved for billions of years subjecting, and being subjected by, the conditions of Earth as a system (Lovelock).
Fast forward three billion years—and five previous extinction events—and here we are, and every living being is still a colony among colonies.
Climate is just one of many interconnected systems that sustain LIFE, though inescapably critical. Its power under change is rage, but the rage should be ours because members of our own species created the volatility, and a minority still pursue it ~ for cash. Climate, on the other hand, simply describes the weather conditions that prevail in general or over a long period. Climate does have the power to let LIFE thrive or die out. But even the atmosphere is largely a product of everything else going on in the world, chiefly… LIFE. Climate is a symptom. As such, it isn’t just physics. The neoliberals, the corporate capitalists, deny it. They may have begun to engage under pressure, at last, but it is only on their terms ~ cash.
Let’s look at LIFE instead.
What are the LIFE supporting systems?
LIFE on Earth is symbiotically related to several Earth and cosmological systems, which are mainly energized by the Sun, our aspect towards the Sun, but sometimes by sources from within the Earth itself. These are all intimately related in flows. We can try to separate them for the sake of study, but the reality is a giant existential, moving system, full of subsystems, cycles, and processes. All is relatedness, flow.
On Earth, the main sub-systems are as follows.
Hydrosphere
Geosphere
Biosphere
Atmosphere
Each one is interconnected to the other by processes and cycles, transforming and exchanging matter and energy over time from the nano-second into deep time.
Evaporation, erosion, convection currents, transpiration, photosynthesis, weathering, erosion, rock formation, ocean currents, climate…no beginning nor end. Carbon, sulphur, salt, food, nitrogen, water, energy, cycled on into LIFE and back again, including human LIFE, which can’t exist without them all.
There are even more systems and processes, macro and micro, even sub micro and meta macro, many of which we have no understanding nor measure. But we know the consequences of them – LIFE on Earth. Sometimes, we have to imagine. Or simply trust in them. But this means leaving soft imprints everywhere we go, or none at all.
SIXTH Extinction Event – Humans.
Scientists relay via peer review evidence that we are into Earth’s sixth extinction event. This includes leviathan climate change.
The five previous extinction events we know about because of the rock record, have been initially caused by activity outside of the organic experience. We know there are historic “orbital” rhythms to climate, which we call the Milankovic Cycles, named after the scientist who mooted the theory, and we know that vulcanicity, tectonic drift, and even giant comet strikes have all altered the stasis of Earth’s spectacularly unified systems that sustain a gradual flow of LIFE.
The problem is that we humans have so manipulated all four of Earth’s main systems that we are changing global stasis and therefore climate (for the sake of argument, the conditions of life as we understand them) earlier and faster than it would otherwise do so. And it is happening so quickly, driven by a power-crazed minority that wrongly perceives accumulation of wealth as the aim. Climate is the global feedback as are ocean currents slowing due to melting ice, displacement of bacterial and photosynthetic drivers of certain cycles, including changing salinity. Yes. Climate change IS heating and weirding and will create more torment and suffering to LIFE, because of the feedback loops in linked systems, like the hydrosphere (flooding, drought, etc).
Existential LIFE on Earth is inherently magnificent. It is so even without humans considering it merely here to serve our needs. But that magnificence is being killed off by humans through overreach in all aspects. All kinds of human development block the flows of LIFE, the processes, and relationships that sustain communities. Climate change so far (no nuclear winters just yet) is a result of the destruction of living and geological systems that trap carbon in long cycles. Significant anthropogenic (human-caused) changes have happened since the emergence of human agriculture and cities, but sky-rocketing because of the industrial revolution, wide-scale fossil fuel emissions, and a rapid greenhouse effect. Smothering soils with tarmac and concrete, burning peat, harvesting woodland, churning out pollution and waste, fragmenting all kinds of ecosystems with hard infrastructure and agriculture, killing sea LIFE ~ all effects the carbon cycle. Space Capitalism is exacerbating all. This is not just about climate!
Kill off LIFE, and we kill off ourselves. Remember, we are all communities within communities. Nothing is separate.
There are signs and signals everywhere that something is seriously wrong with the systems that sustain LIFE as we understand them, the global COVID19 pandemic in humans being simply the latest. Many more exist beyond the human realm if only more of us understood.
Words matter.
Human words are critical in how we relate experience to one another, but are also significantly powerful over all other LIFE forms because that’s the state of play right now ~ human dominion over all LIFE. I’m sick of people suggesting to me that words do not matter, despite them using words to try to communicate that fact. Your words, my words, act as communication capsules fronting deep memory, transformation, emotions, belonging and doing. They can be used as weapons, salves, or instruments of new ways of thinking. Words do matter, especially those repeated and repeated in the public sphere. We should be way more aware of their power.
I’d like to hear the word LIFE just as much, if not more, than the word CLIMATE. It is LIFE that is ultimately of profound worth, even though a clement climate is ideal for life in different regions as we understand it now. To avoid LIFE and its diversity in our language allows human power structures to focus only on CO2 in the atmosphere like a currency and climate as if it were still dissociated with all those systems that sustain LIFE.
Climate this and climate that. Even critical areas such as justice and equity aren’t adequately served well by its narrow framing. Just look at water and food supply, and the terrible inequities of pollution streams. Some solutions to fit the climate narrative even go so far as to kill more LIFE when LIFE is the evolutionary response to climate warming. Curtail LIFE and you are doubling, tripling the problem.
Systems thinking, please, and in the use of language. To continue isolating the language of climate is a folly. It is a kind of othering, something difficult to handle for almost everyone else. Too big, too ethereal. Something only for learned and passionate experts, or politicians.
The way we live our lives in community, as community among many communities (human and teresapien), is the change. This will help steady the symptom of climate change, though we know the genie has already let rip. It will critically help LIFE in mutualisms and flows. Teachers can be a huge part of facilitating that community change by example. As can any local government, library or hospital officer with responsibility for public buildings and grounds. I’ve little faith in private, competitive interests (at the heart of Capitalism), but maybe there is some hope here. I will wait to see if the practice of locaceding is accepted. Meanwhile, Governments can help or hinder, but the change must be a groundswell. At the moment, voting records still show contempt and apathy from the ground. They will take heart from this, and carry on ignoring LIFE.
It is my greatest hope that Fluminism, on the other hand, is a positive word from the get-go. As a symbioethic, it relates easily to all flowing mutualisms, processes, cycles, and systems that sustain and proliferate LIFE in diversity and abundance. As a word with meaning, I use it as a resistance to those Earth scarring ways of perceiving, being, and doing in this world. It’s a treatment of the disease and the symptom. Perhaps you might use it too. Once understood, it is do-able by everyone equally and daily, and a perception of the world that is then very difficult to un-know.
Last year, I attended an online poetry workshop hosted by the great poet Lemn Sissay. We were set a task to create a poem with a particular structure beginning with “You’re the”….
It was meant for someone or something we either loved or hated; an expression to them from deep inside the heart.
Here’s mine. Each line represents a shared experience. It was sent to the subject, by the way, and received as well as was hoped. I wanted to save it here, just in case it’s immediately lost into the dust.
~~~
The tree, the lizard, and the lyrebird.
You’re the tree of all our secrets
You’re the glass held to my lips
You’re the panic of the python
You’re the wine she never sips
You’re the golden of the bower
You’re the butterfly on my wrist
You’re the silence of the fireflies
You’re the lizard in the mist
You’re the painting of the dipper
You’re the rosella of my words
You’re the keeper of our mothers
You’re the guardian of their birds
You’re my lyrebird of the shadows
You’re my orchid on the tongues
You’re my wildfires of uncertainty
You’re the red-smoke in my lungs
Hey you, who abandoned me at life’s worst moment; who lied to all of us. Who told me of a love, un-encounterable to most. The path that cut steep down through red soils was lined by light. Tiny stars of wood anemone watched over my eager feet as I moved down through the bluebells having their first conversations with the early bees. All seemed so narrow, a weight, but with an unfurling canopy of shock-green saving me from a complete molten, lead sky.
But at the base, where woods fall literally into the river, the sky came in with a bright summer blue, and I stopped to take a deep breath. Breaths are gold, each one, even on ventilin. The river moved like a sliding plate of silver down the table, pausing by me, almost stationary, to hear an ornicophony of riverbirds, and the faint shriek of peregrine somewhere high above. Remember, you asked me to write a poem.
Everything opened up to me at this place, Capler, and to everything, flowing through my veins and into my lungs and to the lips. This was what I came for. To try to heal.
I’m suffering again, not in your arrogance, in your image fixed into the eye of red-bellied black snake (poor snake), but a realisation that a lifetime of my own difficulty here at my desk, might be a neural difference, an unbidden mindset, unseen and unfelt by all who have tried to help me until now. I don’t like the terminology (this is a symptom too), though I sometimes give too much of my attention, and am hardly inattentive to others. But it only takes a hairline fracture to let the light into pitch black.
The DNA-flow of great grandmothers, grandmothers who died by their own hand, mothers (me), daughters who swim beautifully but who still feel they are drowning ~ I just thought this is what it meant to be a woman. To be let down by men.
Apparently, only a few are weighted by this “attention deficit”. The anxiety that has ripped through all life’s traumas—there have been many, about as many men in our lives—I just thought we were sensitive. Perhaps, that’s just all we are. It’s hard to contemplate another turn of mental anguish ~ I’ve only just come off the pills.
So the path swings left as the river widens into the most exquisite vista to the south, the Wye leaning into a high slope of woods, carving the opposite bank where thick Herefordshire farmland sits heavy. There’s a grandmother over there, with her granddaughter, and they are throwing pebbles in the stream. Bredwardine memories stop me still and then empty me.
Butterflies filled me up ~ at least six species; little flighty wings got my attention. I sat among them for a moment, down in the undergrowth, smiling with them. How do you tell a butterfly she is beautiful? Then the path sunk into the bedrock cascading in steps to where the salmon try to run old Ballingham, where the proto indo european rip of riparian—that deep climatic tear—is plain for all to see. More butterflies lay prone on the rock, soaking in the heat. I felt lost there, truly lost in that most profound, good sense.
When I came to my other senses, where dream-brain switches into task-brain (as I am now told), I followed a bee into a wide holloway, pushing up into the steeps under Capler Hill Fort, and into a vast auditorium that would have blown your mind.
Ravens sounded their wings in circles above me (put that sound in my pocket and save it for later). Giant red-tailed bumblebee queens looked like tiny ants as they rustled their buzz under dry, tongued ferns. All the passerines from all over the Earth were here it seemed, super-high among the quarry-top trees. One oak lay crashed down at the bottom of the cliff, fallen from the topsoil that looked so thin at the top. Another big tree that looked small because of the scale dangled precariously, its roots like tentacles feeling the air. All life is so reliant on that thinness.
Then, to hear a slow-rising noise, the shallowest anthrophony of cessna above, of brightly coloured canoe-shouters in the channel, and a sit-on-lawnmower droning slowly towards me. Here, at this place! I could hardly contain my anger. I talked to him later when I’d cooled down, about grass clippings and river ecology—they don’t mix—and he talked to me about keeping things tidy for the tourists, and the fly-fishing licenses; saving the kids from being stung by nettles (I laughed out loud); saving Earth from the scourge of balsam. And litter, to be fair. Even a Ford Capri. And I thanked him for that.
I walked back alongside his engine, and we stopped to listen to the noisy peregrines eyeing two-day old ducklings swimming the big, scary river, in little flurries.
The man told me the quarry I’d found may have been the source of the red sandstone that is now Hereford Cathedral. A hole in a hill the size of nine hundred years. These peregrines live there now, perched on the quarry ledges. Peregrines also hunt their quarry around the Cathedral tower.
I think I found a feather of a female the other day near the remains of a dead pigeon. It’s pinned to my notice board for me to admire the inward beauty of her. Like a shock.
Then one flew right over me casting avumbra. And that was the healing moment of the day. The silence of avumbra. I came home wanting, by the habit of four years, to tell the image of me in the mirror ~ you. I wanted to tell the other one too, the earliest bud of cherry blossom, but he’s just told me he found someone else, before the flowers have even fallen to the ground.
Spring has sprung and, locally, the human capacity to create even more noise than usual is in full swing.
Lately, I have recorded on my phone a plague of noises generated by people and their loud, intrusive tools, be it an iPod and speakers aboard a stand-up-paddleboard floating down the Wye, leaf blowers, lawnmowers, and mulchers sounding their destructiveness and scaring all the birds from the trees and fish from their shaded retreats under the riverbanks, or even the abominable racket made at the local recycling yard next door to a so-called off-set ecological site at the new Skylon Park, Rotherwas Industrial Estate, Hereford (see below).
I know other humans have found it a profound nuisance, more, wholly detrimental to their overall wellbeing.
Whether these noises are short, sharp and ugly, or long drawn-out oppressions, like traffic noise in cities, they will be creating acute or chronic pain and distress in proximate interconnected communities, human and teresapien.
Modes of transport are some of the worst culprits, air, land, and sea. But music can be intrusive too, played loudly or inappropriately in nature, as well as the more obvious terrestrial building and landscaping noises that are created at every moment, in daylight at least. Industrial farmers and foresters are by no means innocent bystanders!
And the internal combustion engine at sea and on navigable rivers has wreaked havoc in the form of “noise pollution” on aquatic wildlife.
We know humans and some animals may attempt to adapt. Think of the louder birdsong recorded in urban areas, or cetaceans and their prey moving away from shipping lanes or active military zones due to the impact on their sonar senses, but at what ecological cost? Mass strandings are real and incredibly harmful.
The pain is both individual and collective. At global scale, it is nothing short of an evolutionary force, and not for the good. It’s time to count Anthrophonalgia as a key manifestation of the ongoing Sixth Extinction Event, the worst of which will be an awful silence, for sure.
~~~
Anthropophony – noise emanating from humans and their tools (Drs. Stuart Gage and Bernie Krause) often shortened to Anthrophony.
Algia – general medical suffix for pain.
~~~
This particular pain and distress is not limited to the physical, but also the emotional, mental, and spiritual. We know that such distress can lead to the lowering of immunity, and other perturbations such as anger and rage that can lead to violence instigated upon others.
We talk so frequently about noise pollution, but very little is done about it. Perhaps naming the pain and distress it causes might just help in the resistance against it.
Anthrophonalgia – pain and distress caused by human noise, including vibrations, either naturally or by the tools humans use.
I’ve suffered myself, as have countless humans and nearly all interconnected species within our one biosphere. Let it end, for goodness sake, now.
Breaking the atmosphere: This is literally what rockets are designed to do. To break free from Earth’s immediate gravity, to escape from our atmosphere and into the beyond whilst stealing supplies, all without Earthly consent.
The ultimate dying consumer is one that devours the systems it relies upon. These men (the gatekeepers are white men), are raping the atmosphere, creating a hellsphere most religions could never have imagined.
Over the next few months, I’ll be doing a series of moments on the Wye; an in situ telling and collection of personal experiences that helped shape my creation of Fluminism as a symbioethic.
One: Eaton Camp, Wye.
Trigger Warning: Contains distressing descriptions of the memories of suicide ideation and behaviour. If you are feeling vulnerable in anyway, please, don’t listen. Seek urgent help. Help is available. If the first help isn’t positive, try and try again until you find the RIGHT help for you. You are unique. The right help IS there.
Convergence of root to trunk, Cage Brook, Herefordshire. Photo by me.
Flumilightenment: A resistance to birfurcated thought, and a rejection of the word “environmentalism”.
For too long, environment has been treated as something external to us. We are drip-fed news about the non-descript environment as if it were:
External to us – somewhere “out there”.
A choice, option, preference, or hobby.
Something that others make a fuss about because they don’t have to worry about daily traumas such as racism, all other kinds of prejudices, conflicts, ill-health, paying the rent.
This is a blind alley, and perpetuated through words, phrases, and headlines every day. We live with language and meaning as something that shapes how we live. We shape all because of it.
Our young are being cultivated, too, in this now damaging misnomer ~ the “environment”.
I am suggesting nothing short of a new Enlightenment.
~~~
The physical reality is that ALL IS FLOW, AND ALL LIFE FORMS (EVEN IN DEATH) ARE INTEGRAL to all. Nothing is truly separate in the realm of reality.
What has been separated is our mental and emotional state of being. And continuing to use separating language perpetuates planetary catastrophe.
We must now DROP the term “environmentalism” for the sake of saving life itself.
What we *think* we are putting into the *environment* is actually going into living beings and ourselves in our one shared biosphere.
As symlings, we are infinitely connected at every point within our porous bodies, and the bodies of all symlings, and our porous bionts (our microbiome, including bacteria and their viruses), with all other dazzling matter AND their wave effects within our biosphere and beyond.
Every moment, we are penetrated by atoms and electromagnetic waves, chemicals and biologies of so-called others. And we do the same to and with them. We are flow.
It’s like a kind of giant melding, a sexstorm, a kinmaking, the ultimate anti-racism, anti-speciesism, anti-anthropocentrism, a oneness in flow.
Sometimes, our imaginations are able to envision, though the crisis of imagination right now is profound. Sometimes, we may even think we feel it (I call this symnexia). I want us to be able to protect it all (I call this praximund – processearth).
Life-changing, Earth-saving stuff.
~~~
This is not an Indra’s net I speak of, nor even an entanglement (suggests that we are still separated, at least by a single barrier), but an incredible, complex, porous flow, from the cosmos down to quantum level, in constant exchange in what I call the nagorasphere, which I write about in more detail in Humans and Nature’s Kinship Anthology series published in September later this year.
Within the chaos of the formation of this universe, at least, come patterns and exchanges (Bookchin) that exist through our every cell, breath, heat, and every cell is a symbiosis of other beings (Margulis).
~~~
It IS our absolute existence, even without sensing it with biological organs (we glimpse so much more via the tools we have created). But now our minds and emotions MUST follow, and the way we express all through our utterances and the way we live our lives, each and every day. Please, don’t use the word environment without, at least, considering fully what I am saying.
A FULL KNOWING of fluminism and being it every moment in complete union is a new enlightment; the physical reality, but also the mental and emotional consciousness of this reality. A Flumilightenment: The Great Mental and Emotional convergence.
I hope this makes you feel alert and empowered. You need to be.
Last summer, I am swimming in the cool Arrow just west of ye olde Penebrugge, keeping my nose above the silk-smooth, trying to find a rhythm against the strong flow. The sun is strong, and all winter’s ghosts abandon me for the ocean.
Under me swim a million Atlantic salmon lost to hunting and distress. Above me are the spectres of a thousand white men culpable for the loss. I’m not grieving for the men today.
I get out of the water, and warm blood returns to my cold skin, flush-blush, and I breathe deep the oxygen offered free by the immigrant balsams that shoot from anthroturbed, hot, shade-less, phosphated banks.
Man ~ anthro ~ disturbs ~ turb, from Latin “to stir up”. Anthroturbs.
You ghosts! I ache for you to come back to me, animated and full of the essence of life, like the blood returns to my epidermis, as real and vivid as you ever were.
I look up to a mewing raptor circling under a bright cloud in a deep blue sky ~ a fantail. Buzzard in all her glory, kindred buzzard; your lungs take in my air and mine yours. What are you saying to me? I think I might know. Your polarising eyes bear witness to my dullness under all the silver drops of water and soaked, sun-bleached hair. You’d rather talk to the others who might come to you, and avoid my predatorial shadows. I understand this. I am whiteness, and with all the river washing, I cannot get rid of that.
But you are utterly safe today in the brightness, as I neither possess the inclination to kill you nor a gun. My love for you is about as iron-strong as things are. Do you know it? Others are harming with poisons, and game rearing, and poultry sheds, and I do fear they will turn you into a ghost if you don’t stay away from people who look like me.
Can we ever stay away? “Stay away” is really an impossibility of matter in our dimming biosphere, because we are altogether in flows, bound into processes, like it or not, even in death. You are inside me, and me you. I’ll just sit here and warm for a while, and smell the undergrowth, and keep my eyes open for any other symling to greet who flows into my senses. The river will do its thing, taking my skin cells and some of my microbiome with it.
~~~
This early Spring, dressed hard for cold weather, in boots and jeans and overcoats, there is a human path I follow worn down under cracked willows, where the tree creepers hop from bottom to top. It’s a place forced under pressure between the sewage works ~ subcontracted to a profiteer by the not-for-profit water company ~ and the banks of the Wye just South of Bartonsham Dairy. Raging floods dig down deeper into the buried shingle of ten thousand years, like salt in a wound.
I’m going to check the sewer outfall for a point-source phosphate pollution event.
The path here is the beginning of a chasm, and there’s a terrible and awkward dance to walk it. I call it the Bone Path, where salix roots finger across it like skeletal hands. Fishermen come here with their maggots, their carbon rods and alum hooks. I sometimes find the nylon bits in tweavelets, and they do anger me on behalf of all the animals.
I find the outfall and it is spewing white foam that reeks of soap. White foam of phosphates, the wastes of capitalism down the supermarket aisle where you and I buy our plastic bottles full of washing liquids and chemical softeners. I take pictures, imagining the entire journey to get these eutrophiers here.
There are three fishermen waste-deep in the channel across from the spewing, and I am not sympathetic. But then I change my mind, worried. So I shout across through twigs and willow tits, and suggest they take care with all the phosphates coming straight at them.
“I do not know what you are talking about,” one man shouts back in a heavy accent above the din, and continues to throw his line.
I repeat my concern and he waves me away like a bothering mayfly. They laugh at me. I reach for home, passing more flood erosion, where the river in its fury took more lives from the soils and dumped them somewhere downstream and unappreciated. Ghosts.
I am thinking about the freshwater, which is hardly water at all, so full it is of symbiotic life. Here is where all is easily indivisible like me swimming below buzzard kin and breathing balsam air. We are to them, and to everything in the air, and everything that has been stolen. All matter leads to the ocean, oceans to oceans. We are all ghosts, and that is my exquisite grief.
I have just sent my pictures to the non-profit. We’ll see how it goes.
Seasonalight 
You must be logged in to post a comment.