Lean Into Discomfort
In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, ecologist Robin Kimmerer shares a memory from an Oregon rainforest. With her back to an old cedar, her hands in the moss, she becomes “damp and chilled” by a sudden rain. She’s allured by the “thought of warmth,” the promise of dry clothes and tea, but ultimately decides to stay beneath the cedar a bit longer.
“There is no substitute for standing in the rain to waken every sense — senses that are muted within four walls, where my attention would be on me instead of all that is more than me,” she writes. “I don’t want to be a bystander to rain, passive and protected. I want to be a part of the downpour.”
I read this passage in the warmth of four walls. If you’re like me, you’ve spent much of this new year glued to the news. You may have been outraged by the images of last week’s violent insurrection at the US Capitol, at the lies of a president performing his ungraceful exit and a major political party dragging its feet in choosing justice over self-aggrandizement. Like me, you may also be struggling to reconcile the hate underlying this moment with your affection for a country where this hate proliferates. You’ve heard politicians, including the president-elect, say lines like “this isn’t who we are,” but that line is only a sedative — a way to abdicate ourselves from the hate and racism inherent in our nation’s past and present.
This is who we are, but it doesn’t have to be. The real question is: How do we change? How do we restore bonds between us — and between us and nature — that have been broken by our own legacy of hate and prejudices? It may start with affection, which Wendell Berry says leads “to authentic hope,” but Kimmerer reminds us, via the poet Franz Dolp, that “to love a place is not enough. We must find ways to heal it.”
If I take anything from Kimmerer’s moment in Oregon, it’s that healing will require a certain degree of discomfort. A “damp and chilled” kind of discomfort, like wet socks in a mossy forest. It’s an active exposure, being soaked by the rain — refusing “the loneliness of being dry in a wet world.”
Isn't it time we left our four walls and became a part of the downpour?
Austin Price
Contributing Editor, Earth Island Journal
Photo of Oregon forest: Scott Griggs
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