Local gal looks up.
SUMMARY
I write summaries for people who need to marshal their time and attention.
What we see when we zoom in and zoom out
Living under a death-seeking government
The power—and the limits—of seeking a smaller scale
The need to look up, to remember what we are within
An exercise for receiving news of suffering, and choosing to stay or change your course
In a hilly, built-up city like Providence, you can’t see very far at a time unless you’re at the head of one of the few straight streets or on one of the hilltops. On a cool fall day in 2024, my friend Charlotte’s birthday, she and I and her friend Ally climbed Neutaconkanut Hill, a park near the city line where you can look out and down to the east through a gap in the trees—a longish view, until the ground starts to rise again.
It’s the beginning of a teaching semester, so my students and I are talking about zooming in and zooming out: when to do these and why, the effects they have on the story you’re telling. Zoom in to show what, out to show why. Zoom in to demonstrate that what you’re attending to, like the shape of a patch of lichen or a message of freedom carved into a railing, is worth attention. Zoom out to explain how that’s true.
My students sometimes long aloud for topics where there’s nothing to explain, where the significance and the stakes are so obvious you’d have to be an asshole to ignore them. But no story is asshole-proof. The family of one of the pilots killed in the plane and helicopter crash over the Potomac refused to release her name because they worried she’d be the target of public Republican mockery, Members of Congress refuse to make a public case against the people whose choices led to her death—and who are seeking many deaths more. At a rally in Providence I saw a homemade sign that read, “Trans healthcare saves lives. 5 years on T - Going for 50 more.” Empty vials from the signmaker’s hormone replacement therapy were attached to the sign in a clear plastic box. It brought tears to my eyes, thinking of the story outside the sign, the life before and the life after. There are people, in and out of government, who would see this beautiful sign and its beautiful maker and react with disgust—calculated or unexamined—and with gleeful violence.
People living in the US right now who are not in gleeful-violence mode are confronted with a scale problem. Zoom out, and you see systemic attacks and attacks on systems, a two-party country where one is out for blood and the other apparently (and with a few exceptions) out to lunch. Your panicked gaze may sweep even further out, taking in the curve of the earth, people prevented from coming and going, changes in who wins and who loses; you may believe that you are seeing through time, the oceans choking, the land turning to dust.
That is the vision that moved me to start the Climate Anxiety Counseling booth, just about eleven years ago now. Responding to climate and environmental damage often, in my experience, means creating an artificial horizon and dropping your gaze to it fast. Stop that power station. Plant up this wetland. Block the sale of a water utility. Help people get their weatherization rebates. You’re not unaware of the context, the why, but it’s not where your attention is. Even large and grand plans like the Green New Deal (and the slightly less grand Inflation Reduction Act) narrowed their view, and in doing so, left stranded some of the same people that always get stranded: poor people, Indigenous people, Black people and people of color. But some degree of narrowment—some tightening of scale and scope—is required in order to have something to act on. “Solving climate change” is meaningless. That’s what I believed, and it’s how I’ve gone about my work.
Now I’m looking up from the city budget fight and the texts with scared and angry friends, the emails to secure raffle prizes for the AMOR fundraiser and the snow I shoveled with a bunch of people on Election Day, asking myself: Is “stopping fascism” meaningless? Or is it my tiny actions that lack meaning, that dissolve in the escalating flood of malicious nonsense? Now that there are so many more ways for things to get worse fast, do I need to change my scale?
Pilots use an artificial horizon as one tool to stay in the air—specifically, to make sure that they’re aware of any change in angle that they’re making, since the instrument measures the angle of the aircraft with regard to the actual horizon. This is useful when they can’t see the real horizon (because of weather) or when seeing the real horizon won’t help—won’t give enough information about whether the plane is tilting in a way it shouldn’t be, because the scale is off.
The official name for an artificial horizon is an attitude indicator and I wish I were making that up. It nags me as I trundle along, doing the little things that are within my reach, keeping myself level and en route and mostly cheerful. And beyond me—beyond the reach of my hand—the vast, accelerating theft of lives.
I’ve read here and there that part of the reason Trumpian fascism appeals to so many people is that it offers a compelling vision (often of gleeful violence), that the Democrats (as in the national party) have not offered a compelling vision, that to get people to move en masse against the Trump regime the left needs to offer a compelling vision. A big, sweeping look at the world—-the change, and all the things that have to change to make the change. Toni Cade Bambara wrote (I’m paraphrasing) that if oppressed peoples seeking liberation could imagine the world they wanted, they weren’t going deeply enough or thinking big enough, because a world that was truly free was unimaginable in a world so far from freedom. Although less oppressed than many, I actually can’t envision anything right now—certainly not as a beautiful goal. The things I’m doing take a lot of work, attention, time and care; they also stop so short. If I had a more bountiful vision, would I take a bigger risk?
If I looked up, what would I see?
I would see a true sight, even though it’s the least detailed, of what’s at stake, and has been for years, long before I came along: the lives that make up life, sustained by small actions that can’t be seen at this great scale, swept by large winds.
Without the ability to guide myself by the little horizon, I nosedive. But I also need to zoom out to the big horizon, the real one, because the artificial one is for one or two people at a time. The big horizon is the one that we can see together, the one that appears different depending on where we’re standing—our position in place, in hierarchy, in history—but nevertheless holds us all. The artificial horizon is within the real horizon. I’m not above the world and all its endings. I am within it, with you.
As for what you’ll see if you look up: you may see that it’s time to keep doing what you’re doing, and you may see that it’s time to change. Here is a practice that Anne Kosseff-Jones and I made together for figuring out what you want to do right now, anytime a new right now appears. Use it when you witness fresh evidence of an atrocity or injustice—not a call to action, but a piece of information where your pathway to action is not known, not clear, or not available to you, because of the time and effort you’re already putting in to fight (or survive) an atrocity or injustice, or to build something better.
QUESTION: Do you want to keep doing what you’re doing, or do you want to switch?
PRACTICE (in two parts)
WHEN IT’S NOT POSSIBLE TO STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING:
Allow your reaction to the terrible information to fill you up like a glass of water.
Picture your body as transparent, and feel the cold of the water pouring into you from your feet to your head.
Then picture the water draining away, feeling warmth return from your head to your feet.
Do this as many times as you need.
WHEN IT BECOMES POSSIBLE TO BRIEFLY STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING:
Change your position or location if you can—go to a room or outdoor spot that’s not where you received the terrible information, and where you won’t be interrupted for about 5 minutes. If you have to stay where you are, ask for quiet and not to be disturbed for that length of time.
Recall to yourself one of the things you’re already giving your time and effort to fighting, surviving, or building.
Put on a song that you like, and for the duration of that song, or for the time it takes to make and brew a cup of tea, or for 5 minutes by the timer on your phone if you don’t like tea and find music distracting (or cannot hear it)…
Make some small contribution to the thing you’re already working on. Extend an invitation, do a tiny bit of research, draft a note, make a small donation… If your survival is your current work, do some small thing for you: take a sip of water, pet an animal…
Allow the importance of the thing you’re fighting or building, and the reality of your efforts, to fill you up like a glass of water. This water may be cool or warm, whatever best expresses satisfaction and pride, from your feet to your head.
Ask yourself—openly, genuinely, not meanly—if you want to work on the new thing instead. Don’t try to answer this right away.
I wrote a book, LESSONS FROM THE CLIMATE ANXIETY COUNSELING BOOTH: HOW TO LIVE WITH CARE AND PURPOSE IN AN ENDANGERED WORLD (Hachette Go, 2024). This newsletter holds the ways that what's in it has branched out: new reflections, events and workshops, unresolved questions, further reading, ways to connect and act. I'm glad to be here on earth with you.