what’s needed now is to shift away from the pattern that seeks to heal the living world while still firmly parked within a domination model, which sees people as separate from ‘nature’, and therefore sees nature as thriving when left alone. to shift into the collaborative pattern that sees people as part of a greater intelligent living world, so that all of life thrives when we participate in ways that are reciprocal.
robin wall kimmerer’s ‘braiding sweetgrass*’ eloquently immerses us in this shift, speaking so clearly as she does as both a scientist and an indigenous person, observing how ecosystems thrive when tended. that these relationships evolved together. that we are needed and can be of service, in mutual thriving. this is a relief and a responsibility.
what’s needed now is to live in ways that are neither another domination-extraction model, nor a reaction to it that seeks to erase us as evil, a pox, but instead allow us to be in soft animal ** relationship with all that lives, to see ourselves as part of the ecosystem, containing ecosystems, deeply interconnected, needed.
we heal a relationship with the biome we live within when we see ourselves as part of, participating, partial, in place. when we see ourselves as alive in collaboration with all life.
it is understandable that our reaction to a colonial-industrial exploitation of life is to see ourselves in turn as destroyers of life and that the earth would be better off without us. but this is another version of that same story of separation***. we have other stories that still resist, still thrive along the margins of that dominant conqueror narrative. it is a tremendous relief to see through another prism to find that plants, soil, water, animals, all our living relationships grew up with us. we are old, yes ancient, friends, we are kith and kin. kimmerer’s science proves our mutual thriving when we step back into that relationship.
what’s needed now is to know we are needed, in a great collaboration, participating in the meeting of needs that create the conditions for life to thrive.
if we are needed, if we matter, each of us in all our diversity, what is our niche in our ecosystem? where is our nest within our community? how do we live with all the characters in our biosphere so that all of us thrive together? this is the small work, the daily work of being.
*robin wall kimmerer, ‘braiding sweetgrass’ and also see her interview ‘on being’.
**mary oliver’s wildly popular poem, ‘wild geese’
***’the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible’, charles eisenstein