Seeing Is Belonging
“All knowledge is local, all truth is partial.
No truth can make another truth untrue.
All knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge...
Once you have seen the larger pattern,
you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.”
The radioactive waters newly released from Fukushima are on their way here, to the northern California coast where I live. I belong to this place, so I belong to the water in all its diluted toxicity and undiluted beauty. I can worry and mourn from shore, but the seals and whales and summer pelicans cannot. No one asked their permission - or mine.
We may not feel the effects right now, or not for awhile: we'll know when we know, and by then it'll be too late to make a different choice. Likewise the effects of the airborne toxins of the damaged reactors of Chernobyl. Since we're all downwinders, we will inhale whatever arrives on the late summer wind: radiation, wildfire smoke, GMO's, and all the obfuscating bullshit of politics and media.
This is the particulate matter of profit culture, the nanoparticles of Western thinking that would have us believe that putting distance and barriers between things protects us; that dilution is a functional response to poison, chemical and ideological. Likewise the blood-soaked chaos that lives in the headlines. It's a shell game, designed to distract us. Don't worry! Go shopping!
Multiplying disasters arrive on the tide each day. It's overwhelming. At every turn, the same question: how to respond in a meaningful way? Sometimes, the answer to an impossible question arrives unexpectedly. I have been reading about the hydrology of the Nile river; about its sources and its swamps. It's part of the research I'm doing for my book. As a result, this past weekend, I saw something that changed everything.
As I considered the veined waterways that converge to become the Nile that we recognize, and pored over maps of the African continent, an image appeared, unbidden: the equatorial bulge cantilevered over the continent's long legs reminds me of a pregnant belly where west Africa juts into the warm, tropical Atlantic, with its waters the color of liquid sky. Her glorious belly gowned in forest, Her watery edges caressed by mangroves. In the jungle, a chorus of frogs at twilight. People smile in welcome, despite how hard life can be. Fireflies appear, their blinking conversation a Morse code of light and dark, as the rain-laden winds of west Africa's rainforest blow east to the highlands of Ethiopia and what's left of the forests of Burundi and Rwanda. That's where the Nile is born, in the rain from west Africa that slakes east Africa's thirst. Water pours into the soil and beneath the soil; it gathers in torrents that rush toward Lake Victoria, Lake Tana and the infinite pools and swamps that hydrate the body of the Mother. In the vast wetlands of the Sudd of South Sudan, it lingers in an astonishment of papyrus and seasonal grasses.
In those swamps, migrating birds arrive by the millions to nest and rest, as they commute between Africa, Asia, Europe and beyond, some as far as remnant polar ice. Insects, too, appear in exuberant billions to feed them. Detrivores feast on decaying roots as water dissolves soft stone to conjure rich mineral sludge into life-giving sediment that the water carries north, flanked by desert, until it reaches the Nile delta at the Mediterranean Sea.
Forests and wetlands hold carbon in the soil. They cool the planet. They are home to countless Selves. Dense forests beckon rain. As the sun warms the canopy, the air beneath remains dank and cool. Trees sip water through the straws of their roots; it rises up trunks to flow along branches into capillaries in leaves that release it to air that returns it as rain. It is a continuous cycle, a current of convection that sucks moist air from the sea into the care of trees and returns it to the wind to become rain somewhere else, even if the forest is far inland. This loop of convection is called the Biotic Pump. This is why, without forests there is drought.
Deforestation in west Africa is occurring at a dizzying pace. Timber concessions mean quick money for poor countries, especially those with governments that are weak and corrupt. Equatorial Africa is rife with instability. North and west of the Sudd wetlands are Darfur and oil fields. Sudan is in chaos. If completed, the Jonglei Canal will drain the wetlands altogether, to make its water available for irrigation. To the east, Ethiopia has begun filling the massive GERD dam, choking off much of the downstream water supply. In addition to its precarious politics, the region is also seismically unstable.
Then we have the recent spate of coups in Burkina Faso, Niger, and Sudan, the instability in Liberia, Guinea and Mali; the build-up of militias in the Islamist State of the Greater Sahara; the wobbles in both Congos, Angola, and Chad, and farther east in Burundi, Ethiopia and Eritrea. All spell trouble ahead. What will happen if trees and governments fall but rain does not? Hundreds of millions of people and animals and water and soil will be - are being - dismantled.
The failure to recognize larger patterns has created the global threats we face. The hydrology of the Nile is a teaching: its overarching, unified reality renders regional politics not only obsolete but dangerous. Focusing on national and personal advantage blinds us to hydrological truth: most of Earth's rivers have been dammed and are severely compromised, as are the flood plains, deltas, and forests they rely on. Countries that share the world's major rivers are living the same, precarious story as the one unfolding along the Nile, whether we recognize it or not. The question insists, with increasing urgency: how to respond in a meaningful way?
A few years ago, in the West Bank, we visited a Palestinian farm. To get there, we had to park far away, and climb over the rubble of people’s homes and the bodies of trees to get there. An entire orchard laden with ripe apricots had been bulldozed by the Israeli army the day before harvest. On the chain link fence was a banner: We refuse to be enemies.
We, too, can refuse to be separate from our kin in other lands, in this land, in any land. We can refuse to separate river and forest, ocean and humans and wind. Once we recognize the inextricable wholeness that includes us, our identity shifts because it must: we ourselves are part of a living, composite truth that is both local and global, and spacious enough to hold the particular truths of each Self that makes the world. It is an abiding truth that lives in the rain, and the dearth of rain. A truth that changes us. When we change, our reality changes.
We refuse to be enemies. We choose connection.
We refuse to be fragmented. We choose wholeness.
We ourselves are a unified landscape within a unified landscape.
