Singing the World Back to Life

Animal shelters are emptying. Baby chicks are sold out. Online seed companies' websites are crashing, and delivery is delayed because everyone is planting a garden, including me. I'm still eating from last year's garden, created almost as an afterthought because it was so late in the season, but things are only now going to seed, and it's blowing my mind: chard, beets, carrots, kale, cilantro, arugula, parsley and purple broccoli. How is such casual abundance even possible?

I am simultaneously distracted yet focused. Pulled outdoors and singing to everything. Moving, moving, can't sit still. Feeling so wildly embodied, aware of sensations of unexpected physical strength and well-being even amidst so much illness. Weepy. Exhausted. Restless. Sometimes at night I have to talk myself down: In this moment, I am safe in my body, safe in my bed, safe in this house, safe in my life. Repeat, until I fall asleep.

In my heart I feel the steady undertow of the book I am writing. As it stretches before me in all its daunting oddness, questions pour over me: Will I succeed in imbuing it with the energy required to deliver its message? Will it move people? Will it heal my family and beyond my family? The truth is, I can't not write it. But am I kidding myself that it might matter? That I can get it done in time to meet the moment? And, if I'm not writing to change the world, or at least to nourish it, or if it's too late, or misses the mark, who am I writing for besides myself, and how selfish is that? Inevitably, the writing is an elaborate prayer, an offering with Earth as the main character. This is the best I can manage. My father used to say, All you can do is the best you can do. More than this you can't ask. I hoped that was true then, and I hope it's true now.

One of the things I am writing about is lions - another keystone species on the brink. The loss of keystones can trigger a 'trophic cascade' - the catastrophic die-off of all the animals, plants, insects, birds, forests and waterways that depend on the keystone, leading to the collapse of an entire eco-biome: a collapse that ripples both inward and outward, nonstop. If I sing to the lions as I write, will the love reach them? Will they be sustained? With the exception of most indigenous people and a handful of artists and gardeners, we humans have become the opposite of keystone. What would the word be for that? Fools, I suppose.

Like many indigenous elders, Grandmother Lore, an elder of Australian aboriginal descent, says we are living in a prophesied time that their sacred elders have been quietly preparing for. She says that many of the songlines have died due to uranium mining and other human destruction. That story has ended. That dreaming has ended. It cannot be redone. It cannot be retold. I feel the truth of her words and my heart is heavy. And yet... We are witnessing the rapid resurgence of the natural world now that humans are quiet. We cannot help but recognize the invitation to play our part in the restoration. We can sing up the land again, says Grandmother Lore. Sing yourselves up! In your relationship with Mother Earth, in the environment where you are. Mother Earth will hear and feel it and come alive in the place in which you live... Creation began with a note, she reminds us. We were all sung into existence... Wherever we are in the world, we're all part of the new dreaming, the co-creation of the new. The ancient lore is coming back in a new way. I am excited to hear this because I have been singing so much, without knowing that it might be of use to anyone other than myself. Singing to the sprouts appearing in the vegetable garden; to the opening flowers, to the worms and the breaching whales, as well as the miracle of running water and a nearby grocery store, is one of the things that calms the ache in my heart. Though I sing without certainty, I send my voice to nourish Creation. When my focus is strong - usually because I am overcome with sorrow, I can see lines of melody arcing out of me.

I do my best to be kind, even when pulling up weeds. And, yes, even when dealing with snails. The snails: there they are again. Sometimes I forget the difference between a boundary and a battle, and sometimes it's hard to tell. The snails and I have an uneasy detente, though we both sometimes violate the ceasefire. They because they are hungry snails. Me because I am an impatient gardener. I confess to rolling a heavy clay chimenea to a new location and gratefully letting it crush the gigantic snails clinging to its sides, where they wait for the moist darkness of night to go marauding in the chard. Other snails get tossed gently over the fence into the cypress tree loam. Still others I transport beyond the gate, into the nasturtiums. I speak to them, but I cannot bring myself to sing. It would be hypocrisy.

The snails and the nasturtiums seem to have an agreement: the snails won't eat the nasturtium leaves (too peppery, I imagine) and in exchange they get to go along for the ride as the rapidly growing vines take over everything. A bit like humans, I must admit. I probably should get a couple of ducks to eat the snails, which would still be killing, only more ecologically. But I won't get ducks because I'm already struggling to care for the garden and the worms, the bees and my beloveds and the writing as well as myself.

 Now we come to the part about having to pull up the nasturtiums, which are so exuberant that they smother everything in their wake. I, too, am often careless in my exuberance. A few days ago, while pulling weeds, I accidentally snapped off a huge foxglove spike that was about to bloom. After a string of expletives, I burst into tears. Now, I am lying in bed, crying again, because there's just so much death right now, and even though I know that death is what makes life possible, it pains me to participate. I wrestle with these things. I'm human. And, like most of us, I have once again broken what I was trying to protect. That seems to be how I - we - learn.

And now the whole world is broken, and soon we'll find out what we have and have not learned. We will continue to experience the changes of our own making along with those we did not choose. When we speak of our longing for transformation, for justice and restoration, we will also learn whether we're willing to do whatever it takes to embrace what we say we want.