breathing grief

“It’s a sign of the blessed fact that we are connected to other living things. We feel their pain, whether we witness it directly or read about it on the news.” - Courtney Martin

I woke this morning with a cough, a headache, and shortness of breath. It’s like trying to breathe through a pinched straw. All of this is because of forests that are burning thousands of miles away. I mentally drop myself into those woods and witness the creatures losing their homes, the trees that are millennia old going down, the cold streams clogged with ash and debris.

What descends is grief. Heavy and sooty, it sits on my chest, presses on my heart and asks me to stop.

This not being able to breathe reminds me so much of Covid. The way these invisible things — particles now, aerosols then (remember the colorful diagrams showing how aerosols moved between members of a choir, infecting those around the sick singer in ripples?) are so present in our lives, pulling and pushing us big lugs who think we’re so clever, think we’re in control. The invisible forces heed us to slow down, to pause, to shift gears.

Nuisances—yes. Apocalyptic forerunners—perhaps. But if nothing else, let them be reminders that everything is invisibly connected. That we all need more space to pause and seek beauty, to care for ourselves and others.

In a recent podcast with Ezra Klein about AI—he’s on a rip-roll on this topic, by the way—I was really struck by something he said. To paraphrase, our adoption of AI is indicative of how our culture values productivity above all else. We know we could get to the same or similar answers as AI, but all those little 1’s and 0’s can cycle through the possibilities so much faster. What could take us days or weeks arrives in seconds. Since most of us are squeezed by expectations set by schools and workplaces, systems that are focused on a linear, ladder-like system in which we’re expected to always progress, we cannot pause.

In fact, we don’t even know how. A common reaction to the pandemic was the anxiety that people unaccustomed to getting off the treadmill experienced. Being in silence. Being in non-doing. These are mighty challenges for many.

The beauty in non-doing is that you notice more. Your senses open up to the sounds of birds, the tastes of foods, the tactileness of our world. It’s not surprising that birding and baking became favorite pastimes in 2020.

Similarly, the pleasures involved in the things AI can now do for us include working through multiple drafts of writing that help us to figure out what we really believe or getting lost in rabbit holes of side information when researching a topic so that we’re suddenly turned on to something we didn’t even realize we were longing to know.

When I look at the maps of the Canadian wildfires and my own weather app’s notification that my local air quality is at 234, so many questions light up in me about the topography of northern Canada, how many people live there, how does the wind work, what effect does humidity play in air quality, who and when and how did that air quality number become a thing anyway and what other previously unknown environmental measurements will become a thing in the near future??? From there, I move into existential questions that I can’t ask of any search engine—should my kids have kids, and is our need for economic growth worth the life of the animals caught in this blaze, and if a woman in the middle of the U.S. dies of a heart attack triggered by smoke from a blaze in northern Canada that was caused by a series of corporate-backed financially motivated decisions who is responsible?

All of this sits on my upper chest. The heaviness of grief. And it reminds me that I am alive. I am here to see beauty. To be with other living creatures. Because grief is how we connect to others. Grief is what we experience when part of our web is lost.

Maybe be less productive. Care less about where you’re going and more about right now. Get lost and find wonder in the strangeness instead of anxiety. Don’t ask for an immediate answer but be curious about what emerges.

Here’s an example of emergence: When a group of people here in Iowa City started meeting a year ago to talk about how to transition our community to a post-carbon future, we had to mightily resist the urge to make lists and set an agenda. We’re a group of doers and this mindset is ingrained in us. Instead, we just showed up and talked. We heard about each other’s lives and what is on our hearts. We shared stories about growing up and favorite meals.. We swapped articles and podcasts. And we waited for something to emerge.

What bubbled up was the Repair Cafe we put on last spring. Thirty volunteers showed up to help fix items brought in by more than 50 people. Human connections were made. Things stayed out of the landfill. New skills were learned.

I’m not sure any of this would have happened if we’d rushed right in — certainly not with the same depth and pleasure. While producing the event was a celebratory “win”, it was the getting there that spun the web that is now vitally important to each of us involved.

We have another strand connecting us to this place, more people who will make a ‘hot dish’, in Midwestern parlance, if and when we’re in need, more people who can assure us that we are not crazy when we say we can’t breathe, when we say we’re in grief over an imagined rodent trying to burrow into the formerly moss-covered floor of a Canadian forest. We are witnessed and witness of each other’s hearts — which is utterly beyond AI.