An essay of sorts

That I wrote in my class. I’m proud of it and the ideas I was able to verbalize. on the topic of Braiding Sweetgrass, a wonderful book on the intersection of indigenous knowledge and science.

Joy is Pain

To be Human is to stand tall as a tree
Great oak of swirling rustling life
Carrying the prints and mud splats of smaller ones
Traveling down pink ridges of gut flora
Sentience that brings me to life
Rushing pooling vessels
Hurdling with busybodies
Nodules of life
They carry and crawl and swim through my bones
To be human is to be a shelter
A home to others
Just as the scurrying fluff hurdles through notches of ancient wood
Feeding, nourishing, birthing
I give great jumbles of slick thick oils and sustenance and fuel
They return to me with gifts of vicarious lifesource
Rocking my heart and shaking my limbs
To be human is to writhe with anger and spit and fury
Human is hurt and pain and agony
We are rage
And the violence that destroys
It crushes and burdens
With those massive limbs of inter
Interconnecting intergenerational internal fire
An ever expanding tumbling wave of trauma and hurt
To be human means nothing and everything
It means destruction and creation
Birth and death
Gentle sweet loving care
And horrendous happenings of loss and grief
To be human is to be the world
To be human is to feel that gentle touch of skin to skin, wood, grass, dew, light
To never feel at all
A void of absolute empty
And a deep ocean of teeming life and swooning colors
To be human is to straddle a line of understanding and curiosity
Forever slipping and sliding
Knowing that once you feel as if you’ve learned it all
You have lost the greatest gift

We all need to learn that pain is inevitable. That destruction, disconnection, suffering, stress, hardship, and all of these challenging trials of life are exactly that— life. And despite her incredible talents in prose and acceptance, in poetic interpretation and in bridging schools of thought and worlds of ideology, Kimmerer has much to learn about the undeniable, and inescapable fact that the universe will always carry chaos and pain, destruction and trauma, hardship and hurt. And in this same regard, so will humans, so will nature, and so will the world at large. 

“I worry who will get to the crossroads [of destruction versus creation] first, who will make the choices for us all…I pray we have not already passed the fork in the road” Kimmerer 371. This idea that there is a final destination, a finite ending or beginning, where all will either collapse or continue, perfectly encapsulates the larger message in Kimmerer’s views on human-ness and life. She speaks as if there is a line drawn in the sand of life- on one side, total destruction, and on the other, complete peace and healing- and we have the option to choose one. Yet, life is a constant flow of death and birth, pain and joy, hurt and health. There is no line, but a flow, a circle, a dance around the cycles of life. Deeper still, she perpetuates a construct of rigidity and reductionism that borders on the hypocritical as she points at others doing the same thing- reducing love to chemicals, or connection to survival. Just as she reduces our future to an end or a continuance.

I am reminded of a story I read and greatly enjoyed, titled The Humans, written by Matt Haig. It’s one of those books that you learn more from than you ever imagined a novel could teach. A man dies spiritually and emotionally,  and his mind taken over by an alien from a distant planet. The alien has quite a distaste and hatred for life on earth, his own planet was a constant ebbing, flowing purple, always pleasant and comfortable, with no rain, no pain, and no suffering . In the end, he breaches the orders of his government and decides to stay on Earth, for despite the everyday pain and suffering of human life, joy and happiness and love came with it. And he realizes the two are intrinsically twined and forever linked. In this sense, human life will forever have a balance of trauma-hurt-destruction and joy-love-creation. 

Kimmerer is incredibly talented in her ability to describe the pointed horrors and vast beauties of our world. She tries mightily to understand all sides of each story, to pointing out the siren calls of division and reductionism; she seems to adopt a mindset of curiosity and childlike awe that addresses her own ignorance, a mindset that aspects of our culture, such as science, often dismiss and label. Yet, in her tenacious journey to cast aside judgement and bring together the seemingly opposite facets of science and indigenous knowledge, an ideology much needed and often dismissed, she lacks in her acceptance of the inevitable dichotomy of life, the contrasts and chasms inside us as humans. She points out,“It came to me once again that restoring a habitat, no matter how well intentioned, produces casualties. We set ourselves up as arbiters of what is good when often our standards of goodness are driven by narrow interests, by what we want” Kimmerer 92. I can appreciate her acknowledgement that restoration of health often brings pain or death, yet she misses the larger point; that to restore, to heal, and to recover, one must also weaken, harm, and damage. Restoration does not simply bring about casualties: they are one in the same. To recover is to damage. To heal is to hurt. This is not just a part of life, but life itself. For what is more human than failing while you grow? Breaking while you rebuild? 

Again we find Kimmerer linking two acts of human-ness, one of apathy, the other of passion and wonder, yet failing to bridge them, to call them one in the same. For example, as Kimmerer and her friends race to save salamanders from untimely deaths under car wheels, she concerns herself with the thought that, “if cars scarcely brake for Homo Sapiens, what hope can we hold for Ambystoma Maculata…?” Kimmerer 348. Then, after a night of connection, passion, anger, and the preservation of the amphibian’s lives, she writes, “We get to be there, to witness this amazing rite…to enter into a relationship with other beings…to clear my name for one night…” Kimmerer 358.  Does she not see that to have one she must have the other? To carry the gift of saving a life, of holding a tender body safe from mashing wheels, to experience the relief and self-compassion she talks of, there must also be that horror, rage, and powerlessness of watching others take a life, of rolling those wheels over the bodies of salamanders. For without those cars driving all night, without those apathetic drivers, she would not be able to ‘clear her name,’ to “witness this amazing rite,” to enter into a relationship, at least not nearly at the same intensity or passion with which she did in this story.

So let us embrace and comfort those parts of us that abhor and run from pain. Let us remind ourselves that pain holds joy and calm holds chaos. Let us remember that there likely will never be a single decision, turning point, or crossroads between destruction and ongoing creation. Life will never hold pure peace and joy, but a beautiful amalgamation of hurting and loving. 

Kimmerer’s book is much more than just a learning experience- it is a remembering experience, a memory of childhood, before we became disconnected from ourselves, from nature, from our Mother Earth. Before we were taught to be seperate.