Several folks really appreciated this infographic we made about the causes of wildfires… so I’m sending it out to this list. Feel free to share it if you also find it useful!
The work of becoming a good ancestor is no small task.
Nor is the immensity of aging in a society that is built on property systems and dispossession/alienation/atomization and constant movement and the many forms of difficulty of adult children living with their aging parents. even as technology enables us to prolong lifespans, neither the young nor the old receive enough support for the process of entering and exiting this world.
My friends' question was prompted by my sharing about my mother's recent fall. Her accident landed her in the hospital with multiple bone fractures: she is now in an acute care rehab facility.
She's getting what's considered to be good care: lots of physical therapy by therapists whom she trusts (and she definitely has high standards), meds and food delivered on time and somewhat regular bathing. She has good health insurance. In a moment of a lot of vulnerability, she is safe. She has a community of friends, spiritual companions, and some family who can and are making regular visits. They bring her books and flowers and tell her stories and pick up the mail. She is expected to be able to recover her ability to walk and go home. She is very fortunate.
And it still totally sucks. For two weeks, she has barely had any fresh air. Or sunshine. So much of what makes her life worthwhile - her garden, her kitchen, her neighbors, her control over her time and her meals, and when she is quiet and when she sees people - is not there. Her normal strategies for self-regulating and reducing her own anxiety are much harder for her to access from the sterile nature of a noisy rehab center with 4 people in a room.
I come from a family with a lot of experience of chronic physical illness and mental illness. So we know something about hospitals and the medical-industrial complex.
I know that whether we are dealing with human health or ecological health, we are working with both the body that needs support, and the human institutions and bureaucracy, often based on colonial mindsets that are wrapped around those bodies, often in the name of their care.
Amidst this combination of ecological and human dis-ease, I wonder.
Not just how to care for my mom as she continues to age, but how can we create eco-spiritual communities of care for all of life. Where we recognize that healing requires fresh air - for both the patients and those family members and professionals providing care. Where we can incorporate the natural world into our circles of care for one another, especially when those circles of care are held by church communities. aesthetics matter.
There are also big questions about what it means for my generation to age well. Amidst wildfires and smoke and the many ruptures of the precious gift of life that we have been given.
It can be overwhelming.
So I am grateful for the practice of remembering and reenchanting.
The practice of working with big, often overwhelming histories. Of vast timelines and ancestors and troubling histories. Of knowing that institutional time frames and timelines are only one way of relating to bodies and to time-space. Of my own ability, strengthened through the practice of ReMembering and ReEnchanting, to work with (engage, alter, change, see openings, navigate, step away from, pause, interrupt) stories - including institutional narratives.
To work with the mess and the muck and the uncertainty, and to let myself mutter: that form of communication when ideas are not yet fully articulated, where it is ok to wonder and wander and be uncertain and change your mind and to meander around and between, because the words are not yet clear, because the answers are not yet clear.
After my friend and I had tea, kvetched and moaned, and went down different pathways of different kinds of possibilities, we went out to the lake behind her home, jumped in the kayaks, and let ourselves float. The lake is not as healthy as it could be (though far better than many lakes). Neither was the air. We didn't stay on the water for long, but for even those few moments, amidst the many layers of dis-ease of our world, I could feel that web of interconnectivity that I often find myself turning to non-English languages to try to describe. Words like, ‘samanvaya’. A kind of harmony.
Out on the water....
