#essay land place naturewriting change unsettling

[megbits]

It’s been years since I’ve been on Tumblr, and in the meantime, I began a Substack focused on our relationship to land and place in a time of climate chaos, with a focus on land return, reparations, and questions of belonging. Hoping I can do some sharing and thinking here that fits into these themes but doesn’t quite make it into the longer Substack pieces. Here’s the lead-in essay to the 2022 recap, to give you a taste of what’s been going on over there:

“The two-year anniversary of Unsettling has come and gone with the recent holidays. Like many others who observe the winter solstice, I took that day to reflect upon what I might leave behind in the dark and what I hope to grow with the light. My own ritual tries to make the practice material, sitting in the actual dark until I am sure of what I am releasing in the old year and only then lighting a candle as I speak aloud what I wish to grow as the sun returns.

This year I sat in the dark a long, long time, trying to sense and see the themes of the year, assess personal challenges that were ready at this particular moment to be looked squarely in the face and then let go of. Only I came up empty.

Ritual can accomplish many goals. One of them is a sense of agency, the performance of intent. This gets extra play in a culture centered on individualism, with all its related focus on self-help or self-actualization. That this is the focus in my own solstice ritual may be why it took a very long time for me to accept that there were no personal demons to lay to rest just at this moment—that what would be staying in the dark had been chosen for me, and that “laying to rest” was, this year, quite literal. It felt too obvious, but the truth of it was bare and real, the memory of gathering with all of my siblings to bid farewell to one of our parents not yet a week old.

At the beginning of this year, I wrote a lot here about rivers—the harm that human industry has wrought on them, our attempts to control them, the resulting consequences on ways for living in common. On the solstice, the image of a river kept appearing to me once again. Rivers, those vast and shifting beings that channel and carry so much.

One of a river’s powers is its ability to carry the earth along with it—be it boulders moved by rapid glacial melt or the tiniest grains of sand—and then, just as importantly, to leave that earth behind. Neither the carrying nor the leaving perhaps quite fits with our sometimes narrow notions of agency. But the growth of so much life—including our own—depends on rivers as major agents of change: all those centuries of delta deposits have made much of human civilization possible. The mountains cut down and the oceans swell and all the world is fed along the way as rivers pick up and let go, pick up and let go.

No wonder rivers are classic metaphors for both change and life. There in the dark, though, I began to wonder if we aren’t overly stuck in one particular riverine analogy. I’m thinking of the classic “you never step in the same river twice,” which places us humans on the banks, separate from the water, choosing when to step in and out of the flow of change. This emphasis may not have been intentional, coming from Heraclitus, famous for thinking about flow and impermanence. Still, we end up some place quite different if we conceive of ourselves not as spectators on the shore but as rivers ourselves, receiving and carrying unexpected gifts and weights from the world, all of which we must leave behind, thereby transforming both the channel in which we flow and the objects we have borne as surely as they transform us. That we may not actively choose what we carry or when we must bid it farewell in no way diminishes neither the importance of our action nor or power as actors.

So what have we channeled this year at Unsettling? Where all did we go and where do we find ourselves now at year’s end, and what got polished or broken apart on our way? Here are some of 2022’s major themes, some planned and some pleasantly unexpected:”

Read the rest at unsettling.substack.com.