By Kate Kiefer
On a sunny spring day in the place now known as Death Valley, on land stolen from the Timbisha Shoshone, I sat on an irrigated green lawn and sobbed. My tears would not stop, my weeping would not quiet – despite the silent demands of vacationing golfers in khaki shorts who stared me down with growling discomfort. I was young, dirty, and making a scene, and I didn’t care.
It was March 20, 2003. Missiles were striking Baghdad.
My traveling partners and I had spent three days hiking a canyon, a place we had slipped into as though in secret. It was the quietest place I’d ever been. Cradled within those cliff walls, I felt an inner peace I hadn’t known since childhood. I watched evening primroses delicately bloom as I cooked dinner, saw the sunset paint the canyon walls with bands of saturated light. We slept on the open ground at night, watching the tiny pipistrelle bats flutter out like butterflies each evening, eventually disappearing in an overwhelming backdrop of stars.
Then we emerged from the womb of the canyon to a world on fire. We were driving to find water when we heard the news on the radio. Stunned, we pulled over in what we soon realized was a resort. Three grungy kids wavered out of the car to find a sparkling green golf course, with sprinklers blasting. In the middle of the driest desert on the continent. Overfed golfers zipped around in golf carts with expressions of boredom and American flag lapel pins perfectly in place. Hummers and SUVs idled in the morning heat. Here we stood in a false oasis pumping water away from the mesquite trees that had fed generations of Timbisha Shoshone. Everything shining and sparkling and stinking and sucking the lifeblood out of our rivers, our land, our mother, out of other nations we were enslaving or spattering with missiles. A different sort of bomb went off in me, one that had lain dormant for far too long, and I stepped out of the car and collapsed into a flood of grief and anger. I wept for hours.
This was over ten years ago now, and I can still remember the expressions of horrified confusion on the faces of the vacationers at the resort. The way they tried to pretend I wasn’t there, avoiding walking past me, turning their heads in embarrassment. And I am struck by this strange and awful fact – they were more upset by my honest expression of emotion than by our country’s initiation of an unjust war.
For most of my life I held the belief that many emotions were wrong and should not be felt at all, that some were ugly and should not be shown in public. I was told to ‘think positive,’ to find the ‘good’ in every situation, and when I voiced my fears over the survival of our planet, like many of you I was criticized for my ‘negative thinking.’ At worst, I was told to seek professional help. And like many of you, I believed that because I was female, I was ‘crazy’ by nature and that my ‘out-of-control’ feelings were disruptive. Even as I became involved in activism, I felt that I had to navigate away from my emotional reality, to be stoic, strict, and steadfast – something impossible for me to attain. As a child of patriarchal culture, I associated my emotion with weakness.
Like one in four women in America, I was advised to medicate myself away from my uncomfortable and powerful emotions. I took antidepressants, anxiety medications, birth control pills, followed the direction of countless professionals who spent their days regulating young women into ‘manageable’ places. Even so, I would sink into my feelings only to emerge with a embarrassment, feeling I had made a mess of things by not ‘keeping it together.’ In hindsight, I am startled that my utterly appropriate response to a great atrocity was considered pathological.
The day in the desert, I felt no shame for my tears, and nobody was trying to stop me. I was ashamed for my country and for civilization itself, and I knew I had a right to feel. I knew I must feel, if I were to call myself human. But every day in these years since, I know I am still holding back, trying to keep my heart from tearing at the seams. So many times I have let myself become numb. I want to get through the day, do my work, feed my children…and yet the heaviness is always there, because the truth is still the same.
What I am coming to realize, though, is that we have to face the awful truth down to its marrow, we have to have our hearts pierced if we are to succeed – it is the first step in unbelieving the lies we have been told, and told ourselves, all our lives. As Derrick Jensen has said, “For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.”
“Like the layers of an onion,” he writes, “under the first lie is another, and under that another, and they all make you cry.”
The truth is a doorway to grief and rage, but we must cross the threshold, because otherwise this planet won’t stand a fighting chance. When I look into my heart, yes, the despair is there. I know it seems bleak, I know there aren’t words within me to explain this to my tiny children. I know we’ve all been had, and now we have to face the enormous task of undoing civilization as we know it, of giving up on the future as we’ve been told to expect it. The losses our world is enduring are enormously painful and there will be more to come.
It is time, and long past time, that we allow our hearts to open, to break, over what is being done to our world. We must acknowledge the depth of loss that is occurring around us, and with it must come the cascade of emotion. This will be uncomfortable for most of us, as this culture has invested much in teaching us to harden ourselves, in keeping us from loving this planet enough to weep for it. But it is time to feel without apology, and to let this spur us into action. Once we experience this grief and fury, how can we walk away?
We can, as Terry Tempest Williams urges, start by “taking our anger and turning it into sacred rage. It is a personal and collective gesture of resistance and insistence.”
This movement calls us to face reality, the awful reality that the culture we live in is destroying our only home. We remove the blindfold and face mass extinctions of species occurring each day, the genocides of indigenous peoples, the poisoning of our air and water and bodies, the rape of land by industrial agriculture. We know this is real, it is happening around us, we have been complicit. And we cannot let this truth send us ducking into mechanical numbness. How can a movement to save our planet succeed if we cannot keep awake and alive the parts of us that passionately love rivers, mountains, bats and bison?
It is part of our cultural sickness to distract ourselves away from what we feel for our earth, both our deep love and bitter sorrow. We have all done it. I stand guilty as charged. And so many are afraid to educate themselves about the ecocide in progress, simply because they are afraid of how the truth is going to make them feel. But it is much worse to ignore the monster when it is right outside the window.
Lierre Keith has said, “Reality is an avalanche of grief right now. Maybe we could call it Peak Grief…But I’m asking each of you to take your heart out of cold storage. I know you put it there for safe keeping. I know. But there is no safety on a planet being murdered.”
The powers that be are very much invested in our emotional disconnection. We are much less of a threat to them when our hearts are out of reach. We live in a culture that not only makes us crazy, but hands out mind-dulling prescriptions and addictions for its own preservation. It keeps us distracted, while reality slips past us. As long as we stay numb, we feel no impetus to rise up. In trusting ‘professionals’ instead of ourselves, we are held down. In being embarrassed to feel and speak our feelings to each other, we are prevented from reaching out and joining together.
We must walk away from the cold comfort this culture has offered us, and wake up once again to our own hearts. We can’t do this alone, not without deep connection to the earth and each other, not without the fullness of our spirits. So as we lay siege upon the forces killing the planet, let us hold true to our love for all that is living, for this earth, for our friends and families. May we never forget that our hearts are our strength. Our grief gives us compassion. Our love gives us courage. Our joy gives us spark. Our anger gives us fire. Our sorrow gives us empathy. Our connection gives us commitment. May we take up these strengths like reins, and for our earth’s sake, carry onward.
References
- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jerry-cope/exclusive-terry-tempest-w_b_928555.html
- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/16/women-and-prescription-drug-use_n_1098023.html
- http://mojavedesert.net/timbisha-shoshone/
- Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words, 2000, Context Books. Republished 2004 by Chelsea Green Publishing Company
- Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe, 2002 New York: Context Books. Republished 2004 by Chelsea Green Publishing Company
Thank you. This rings like a bell.
For me, too, this really resonates. Thanks for writing. They call us “HSPs” (Hyper-Sensitive Personality). In general I find that means we’ve got our eyes wide open. We’re the little kids that can’t help but notice that the emperor is naked, and humankind has doomed itself to eventual extinction.
This is really powerful. Thank you Kate! Wow.
thank you for sharing your wisdom and open heart – this is such a powerful time for us to realize and wake up to the power of our emotions – we have been taught out of them as you say and now we are re discovering them – allowing them and discovering through them the way forward – thank you for your willingness to open a path
What a beautifully expressed, thought provoking piece of work. I really love what you have to say and that your saying it. Thank you.
What a wonderful piece. Powerful and palpable.
Great piece. Thank you for writing it.
We all showed up in a culture that had a message: Buy! Now we imagine (as the corporate NGO’s tell us) that we can alter our lifestyles and drive a Prius and save the planet. My sister uses re-usable grocery bags. She’s a paid up member of the Sierra Club; and she likes her granddaughter. Good luck on selling her and the millions of entitled Americans, Canadians, Europeans and the billions who aspire living just like us, that we need to live on $2.00 a day. The State doesn’t care if we protest but they’re waiting for any type of uprising. The resources that they put into shutting down Occupy was intended to let everyone know that the state will stop at nothing to maintain status quo. Most of those middle class marchers had never confronted the state. Most ran home to watch Oprah and sign on-line petitions.
Wow, thank you Kate, this essay shimmers. I hope it travels far!
Sustainable activism must eradicate apathy at the root – apathy towards our emotions and our primordial traumas, as well as apathy towards “Middle class marchers” and anyone else who is in a different locale in their awareness. A true radical has a compassionate, and thus, impactful presence with all beings. Even as ecological and social catastrophes play out, and even in urban institutional environments and asphalt parking lots, we have the opportunity to master a focus on what has Heart, and Meaning (which are the basic components of first nation healing ceremony and the Navajo Beauty Way, and a human capacity anyone can cultivate).
True radicalism knows that the greatest enemy is within – and once we we flip that switch, we relearn love, and compassion. And this brings lots more energy for community education, organizing, and action.
The song of the earth is in the beat of our hearts, the pulse in the rivers of our veins, the elements of our bones, the water of our blood. We can learn to walk in peace and act from a loving heart. The Beauty Way of the Navajo and many other indigenous peoples – or peak states psychology, or the flow of inner silence and expansive peace, that is our birthright. regardless of circumstances. While fully engaging.
My grief shows up about once every few months and I am asked to attend and feel it. It can be a small thing – like a dead owl hit by a car and lying beside the road, or something larger, like seeing more land being paved over with shopping malls and high rise office buildings. I, too, have experienced the bewilderment and awkwardness of others, who often try to comfort me with “look at the glass half full, look at all the good things going on….” and more. I’ve learned to retreat into my bathtub to honor and feel until it passes and I am able to go on. You are not alone.