Let's Dream Up a New World
While driving up to our family cabin in the Sierras last week, we chanced upon a rare sight — a flock of hundreds, or maybe over a thousand, starlings wheeling, darting, swooping through the dusky sky in tight, fluid formations. We pulled over to the side of the highway and watched the murmuration until the last of the birds settled into the trees below for the night, feeling blessed to have witnessed such wonder in the waning days of such an incredibly difficult year.
Later that night, we read about how the starlings achieve such perfect synchrony in flight — by matching the direction and speed of the nearest seven or so neighbors and thus, optimizing “the balance between group cohesiveness and individual effort."
There’s a lesson in there for us, I thought, about community and caring for each other and our own selves. The next morning, I found the perfect articulation of that lesson in the words of Barry Lopez — explorer and master storyteller who passed away on December 25 after a prolonged battle with cancer.
“If we can’t take care of each other, there’s really nothing to take care of,” he had said in a 2019 interview with the Journal. “I mean yes, we want to control the amount of CO2 in the air. Yes, we want to dismantle dams. Yes, we want to get plastic out of the ocean. Yes, we want recycling. But there’s no point in doing all that unless we take care of each other at the same time… We have to find a way to love each other and care for each other so that when any one of us goes down, we will either have the strength to get back up and shake it off, or others, who are our friends, will lift us back up.”
On this first day of 2021, my wish for all us is that we learn to be more loving and more compassionate towards each other and our living world. “All of this has to be dreamed again,” Lopez said, in reference to finding a way forward to a resilient world.
So be it. Let us dream up a new world together then.
Love,
Maureen Nandini Mitra
Editor, Earth Island Journal
Photo by: Sue Cro
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