Literature of Restoration Website Going Live on Earth Day, April 22, 2023!
“We are called to reimagine and revision language and literature as dynamic ecotones, and ecosystems supporting all life. Restore, revision and piece together the broken, burned shards of once vital histories, dare to know what we know, to see and understand with our hands and feet what is irrefutable, to listen to the ancestors and the future, to the dreams and the signs, old syllables and unborn orations, birdsong, whale song and howl, the glorious and tormented recitations of wind, water, light and earth, to bring together a luminous grammar of connection so that through such shared conversations and our own emergent literature and culture, we make ourselves places to live that can survive these times.”
Language shapes culture. Stories reveal the world and teach us how to live. Because we face global extinction, a new literature is required for these times, a literature that puts relationship and connection at its center rather than conflict and possessions. Literature of Restoration is grounded in alliance and reciprocity, guided by Mystery, ancestors and the not-yet-born. It is a way of sensing, seeing and listening that requires a fresh understanding of our responsibility as writers in these times. Literature of Restoration seeks to heal our relationship with the Natural World and its beyond-human inhabitants such that, together, we create a culture of connection that sustains a viable future for all Life.
For the past year and a half, I have been working with my dear friend and writing teacher, Deena Metzger, and her wizardess assistant, Annie Licata, to create a website for Literature of Restoration. The site contains an array of work: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, MindWalks, photographs and spoken-word recordings. The website will be live on Earth Day, this coming Saturday, April 22, 2023!
Literature of Restoration is a path to wholeness. It speaks the missing stories; it names the fragments whose absence has diminished the world; it bears witness to the particulars of earthly and human unraveling and repair, and recognizes the inextricable link between them.
Literature of Restoration requires a sea-change of the soul. Learning to write from a place of authentic alignment with Earth is a journey that breaks your heart, bends your mind, and takes over your life, as it must, in order to write from a transformed identity. Not a strategy or technique. Not a 'style' of writing, but a becoming of the whole person whose magnetic center is aligned with beyond-human beings and realms for the sake of the future. Literature of Restoration arises naturally out of our anguish, and a deep knowing that restoration is possible because Life seeks to regenerate and thrive. That's the magnetic pull that compels us to transform ourselves and, therefore, to seek the form(s) and voice(s) that (re)shape our writing in order to change both process and outcome.
Several of the writers whose work appears on the site have been writing together, and with Deena Metzger, for many years. In fundamental ways, we have made - are making, a journey together, companions in the mysteries that have undone and remade us. In the process, we have found rigorous solace in Literature of Restoration.
Together, we searched for guidance: at first, when it came, it was so unexpected, so searingly clear, that it took us down. It was an initiation. We were being reconfigured. This is what is required to restore the broken world. We must shift from being human-centered to being Earth-centered, and from individual to relational identity. To accomplish this, we must apprentice ourselves to the Natural World. We must train our gaze on unseen realms. Literature of Restoration is a reckoning that makes space for the magic exiled by modernity.
Over the years, we listened as stories and insights poured through us into the circle. Earth and ancestors came in unmistakable ways, as if they had convened us, waiting patiently across lifetimes for us to recognize the patterns and learn to speak them. Again and again, dreams came and signs appeared, along with ancestors, elementals, animals and plants, to train us in relational listening and the courtesies of alliance. We had to empty ourselves. We had to become the vessel in which to cook the sacred meal.
Looking back, I can say that Earth and the ancestors have been reborn through us. They recognized our longing for images and insights, for essential stories and ways to tell them that traverse the chasm between wonder and brutality.
Nature’s language is mutuality. Her processes are circular, spiral, fractal, and holographic, because complexity is communal. Ever-changing and continuous. That, too, is one of the lessons of this Literature: it requires a circle because restoration cannot be accomplished alone. Listening is a form of reciprocity. Service to reconnection makes for a beautiful life. Writing as devotion requires everything. Though the world seems more precarious than ever, what is intact has grown stronger. More visible. Literature of Restoration illuminates the threads of reweaving. We are its scribes.
My personal journey toward this way of writing arises primarily from writing the book I've been working on. As many of you know, it's a family memoir that began as a cage of questions. Human history and individual stories alone could not unlock it. In desperation, I widened the net, trying to understand the larger context within which inexplicable behavior made sense. I started reading about the ecology of Eastern Europe, where my family came from, and the ecology of all the places they touched. As I read about forests and rivers, lions and whales, weather and ocean and Israel, I saw something else: the stories of humans are the stories of how we have dismantled the Natural World and all the many ways that dismantling has distorted us. Earth wears the scars of our whims on her skin. Our destructions have been carved into Her bones. Yet, even as the decimation accelerates, Earth’s wisdom endures and Her ways of healing are revealed. The book has become a home for the questions, and, in the telling, family and Earth are reunited.
You will find several of my pieces on the website. There are MindWalks adapted from this blog and chapters excerpted from my book, including River of Kin, which was offered here a few weeks ago. It is also available at Dark Matter: Women Witnessing and at Writer's Radio where it appears in both written and recorded form. I am also deeply honored that most of the photos on the LoR site are part of my contribution.
