How the hour of freedom is brought into time.
SUMMARY
I write summaries for people who have to carefully marshal their effort or attention.
I’ve got a few events coming up for Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth: 5/8, 5/15, and 6/1.
Diane Exavier and Sabrina Imbler and I talked about practice, failure, relinquishment, and how teens’ eyes move differently than adults’
The hour of freedom and the Promised Land aren’t what you might expect—we can and do remake them, revisit them, lose them and find them
Some thoughts on student action, divestment, and fear
(I also talked with Victoria Muharsky at Green Builder Media about fearing loss, loving land, and rent stabilization (the video at the bottom has the good stuff))
EVENTS
5/1, 12pm, Brown University Bookstore, 244 Thayer St, Providence: With Emily Hipchen and Elizabeth Rush. Snacks available.
5/15, 7:30pm (doors at 7), Lost Bag, Providence: With Feli(cita), Kylie Gellatly, Chris Lee and John-Francis Quiñonez. Costs $10 if you have it, but no one will be turned away.
6/1, time TBD, Symposium Books, 240 Westminster St, Providence: With Tarshire Battle of Roots2Empower (we’ll be raising money for their work).
Diane Exavier, who speaks into chapters 3 and 8 of Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth, had another conversation with me. This time, it also included Sabrina Imbler of Defector, and here are the topics that kept coming up: practice, failure, rehearsal, relinquishing innocence and perfection, doing things multiple times to get them more right and understanding that that means being wrong. We went back over this ground together, changing and being changed in small ways, as our longer and closer relationships—the ones that choose us and the ones that trap us—change us more largely and cumulatively. Change that lasts is just one damn attempt after another.
We are all changing, whether we like it or not. Not, as Joanna Russ once wrote, in the twinkling of an eye, but through being dragged, revised, and altered by each other. The menaces waved at faculty who support student protests buffet me one way; the courage of the students themselves drags me another; my knowledge of the suffering inflicted by governments and militaries upon people may shove me forward or suck me down.
In the twinkling of an eye, we will all be changed. We will all be free. I don’t believe that there’s an hour coming when all who live in that time will be free and stay free, from that day forward. I don’t believe that the promised land is a place, either—my sister put this into words at our family’s seder, that the “land” where freedom and care are possible is actually a condition of freedom and care that people who desire it work to renew, repeatedly attempt, in the face of attempts to destroy it by restoring domination and exploitation.
Without believing in the hour of freedom and the Promised Land, I do feel that we can all know freedom, even briefly, and that we can nourish the strands of freedom matted together with the unfree parts of our days.
Diane Exavier is a poet and theatermaker of this kind of freedom: exuberance, laughter and riot weave and burst through the unfree elements of her work and her life, sometimes messily and painfully. Alive and dead, nourishing and malevolent, breaking down or functioning for good or ill: I think of the mat of roots and wires in the ground of a built-up place. On a recent cleanup day at Morley Field, the sole green area in a dense working-class neighborhood in Pawtucket, I pulled about 40 pounds of party lights out of the riverbank, mixed in with soil and earthworms. When people say this is the only world we have, this is the only world available for them to mean that about: the lights and the worms. There is no pure motive and no place of safety.
I thought of this also when I reread The Saint of Bright Doors, a novel by Vajra Chandrasekera (whose essay “Every Throne Will Fall” I’ve shared with you before). In science fiction, you can—sort of—depict another world, but you will always depict it using pieces of the only world we have: a plague, uprisings, cults, desires, waves of colonization, love, care, helplessness, compromise. The Saint of Bright Doors is not an allegory or a comparison; it’s the way it is because the things in it are things that happen, that people make happen. They happen in different places at different times. They happen again. This can be the first time they happen to you or because of you, but don’t mistake that for the first time they’re happening anywhere.
Happening to you, happening because of you: these also are entwined like roots and wires underground. As I write this, my students have just ended a week of encampment to demand that Brown divest from companies that enable the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Students in my Writing for Activists course and I made a fear map on the board, of all the ways that fear might be moving different groups of people in this situation—not whether the fear was justified or comparable, just whether it was happening, though we did make a distinction between fear of being perceived a certain way and fear of material harm or loss.
We talked with frustration about the times this kind of student uprising has happened before, and the bad-faith learning that people with a lot to lose embrace out of fear. A Brown administrator, in a meeting that I attended as an observer, seemed to be suggesting that the university would be “teaching the wrong lesson” by dropping criminal charges for a sit-in demanding divestment earlier in the academic year. How quickly fear leaps to punish. How opportunities for repression—and resistance—recur.
The hour of freedom is brought into time each time people make a choice to be more free. I’m ashamed of myself for not joining the encampment, for allowing fear to rule me. It is haunting to feel that you may not have done all you could in a particular encounter. If that is true for you about anything—climate, conflict, work, war—take a breath, touch the earth, speak with someone who loves you, and think about what you, a person who is still alive, will do next. Treat that as this week’s practice.
SHORT READING: Diane Exavier also writes about grief and care, which are the focus of this article by Joan Meiners that mentions me and my book, as well as the great Deb Krol, who spoke into Chapter 3. Joan’s article also introduced me to the work of Chispa AZ, which includes peer and community mental health care within climate change—if you’re in/near Phoenix, get connected!
LONG READINGS: The Math of Saint Felix by Diane Exavier and The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera. Also, I think this is going to be very good and you can pre-order it now: Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood, by Anna Farro Henderson.
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.