Firespike

Part of what being true to myself means, is that I spend long periods of time by myself. I love being around people almost as much as I love being among trees and butterflies, but relationships are complicated for me. I think this is simply down to being highly sensitive, and having some complicated family dynamics growing up. With practice and inquiry about myself and human nature, I am learning not to repress but to develop and test my intuition, and it gives me information that I would not otherwise be privy to. Still, relationships remain complicated. Not bad, not scary, not unfulfilling, just complicated.

The murder of George Floyd and the protests and conversations it sparked have allowed me to continue educating myself on power and oppression, and its manifestations. Moving to Louisiana has been enlightening in so many ways, and continues to teach me a lot. One lesson is that so much of racism, sexism and power over manifests in subtle ways in the form of gaslighting. This is insidious because to even call something out can lead to one’s experience being denied, to being called crazy, unreasonable, too sensitive, too angry, reading too much into it. Microaggressions can be so unconscious and automatic the person delivering them might not admit to themselves their presence, and the insecurity, trauma and shame behind them. I am no expert by any means. I am learning about my own strengths and limitations. I know that sometimes even admitting you are behaving in a dominating or abusive way doesn’t mean you stop those behaviors, just as seeing your powerlessness and learned victimhood doesn’t automatically lead to empowerment. It takes work, and I believe that while on a collective level these identities ossify into a reality of systemic inequality, on a personal level these are not fixed identities we have but we can oscillate between ‘aggressor’ and ‘victim’ many times during the day. I have no data to back up my claims, just my personal experience, which reveals to me that disowning the identities is not enough; it is the pattern of relationship one needs to heal. Don’t get me wrong, dis-identification is important, but it can lead to a false sense of complacency, if not seen through all the way to a bio-psychological change. Re-training the body-mind to react in other ways, particularly in response to one’s own thoughts and other people’s words and body language, takes effort. Each of us must take up their own work without shame and with honest intention – we must do what works, not just what sounds ‘right’.

In the absence of some cataclysmic mental event like a nervous breakdown which would break down the psychological mechanism referred to as ego, something which most of us probably won’t experience in our lives, I settle for forgetting myself awhile by relaxing in my backyard or some other somewhat quiet, green space. Engaging in light inquiry with the thoughts that come up usually reveals that there is no solid basis behind most thoughts, particularly the self-referential ones that want me (or others) to take credit or blame for things. Then there are memories and projections of the future, daydreams, sexual fantasies, desires and fears. All these can oftentimes be useful, occasionally comforting, and sometimes wonderful but they are at best incomplete and at worst devastating. Not to mention, they are mostly after-the-fact rationalizations created to explain away an inexplicable reality, or to claim for consciousness a decision formulated in the unconscious.

I do not mean to denigrate the mind, because there is a quality of mind which does weave stories which can be very valuable, particularly if several people sit in circle to share their stories. These stories are spoken in the language of the unconscious, steeped in metaphor and symbolism. Ironically, when we don’t engage in this work consciously, we lose our way. The language of the unconscious is our primary language, and though we might have forgotten this, the politicians, the advertising industry and the mass media have not. They have weaponized our own psyches against us.

The other day a friend asked me: “Can you sit with difficult emotions?” Oh, if only. Rage is a particularly difficult one for me, I said. And I have frequent bouts of depression that come and go like clouds. I can’t always stop them in their tracks with the sheer burning force of attention, and sometimes I act on them, regretfully. But I am learning to understand and relate to them in a nonjudgmental way. In these past few years I have been utterly surprised to find that there is usually a story behind emotions, physical pain and disease. Of course it makes complete sense, and it is increasingly backed by evidence from different fields, but most of us were not taught to relate our emotional and physical pain to our familial, societal and environmental context. We were taught to internalize everything and see it not as a message, but as something wrong with our body or with ourselves. Context might not be everything, but it includes everything and, as such, should be taken into consideration when we are trying to understand anything.

I write a lot about nature, but I harbor no illusion as to what nature actually is, as I sit here typing from the safety and comfort of my home. From a human perspective, nature is, en fin, deadly. Even the air you breathe is slowly killing you. Your body slowly wears away with the passage of time. We all rest in the certain, reliable arms of death no matter who we are, what we have or what we have accomplished. When I worked briefly in the Bornean rainforest, I was amazed by the constant palpable invasion on my body, as if the forest didn’t care about my claims of individuality and separation, as if it wanted to reach out and reclaim me. If I sat on a log too long I became ground zero for mosquitoes and other biting insects, and ants started crawling up my trousers. When my leg would not stop itching for weeks and a little trail of red appeared up my shin, I was both awed and disgusted when someone explained to me it was hookworm. With every discomfort I endured, the forest was teaching me a lesson. I had visions of being enwrapped by pythons and strangling figs, my flesh consumed by detritivores of all sizes and taxa, my corpse becoming fertile soil for mycorrhizae and tree roots. I went to the jungle as a zoologist, and left as an animal.

We all know being an animal is not a theory, particularly those of us who are painfully reminded of it every month, when the waves of hormones wash over and through us like the ebbing-flowing tides, bringing evidence of our connection to life in the form of blood and endometrial tissue. If you’ve ever had infections that required strong antibiotics, you might have felt that Walt Whitman’s “I contain multitudes” stopped being philosophical, as far as your gut bacteria were concerned. In any case, so much of life is pain and discomfort, and non-existence is a horrible thought for most of us. I understand the fear. It’s a primal fear, and I want to acknowledge it. I don’t want to pretend it is easy to face one’s death, because I am incredibly afraid of death, and I don’t very much trust people who tell me they are not. What I try to express in my writing is that when death is given its rightful place, it becomes less threatening, generative even. One doesn’t need a religious, spiritual or philosophical system to cope with fear of death. One can just stop seeing oneself as the end-all be all of life, fallaciously thinking of oneself as the top of the hierarchy in a non-linear system which is greater than the sum of its parts. Place and life will remind one of this truth consistently, and then not only is death properly placed, but everything including oneself becomes properly placed, and the anxiety of control eases from us and we can get on with whatever it is we need to.

It seems that the work of realization of unity-in-relationship is incomplete without the external side of the equation where the body-mind interfaces with the world. This action in the world can look like anything. Sometimes it looks like silence, physical distance and self-isolation. Sometimes it looks like a re-claiming, a taking up of a responsibility among the collective, speaking up, calling out, running for congress, planting a seed, checking up on someone. When nobody seems to care, and when nothing seems to work, sometimes this expression flies in the face of social niceties and even human law. Sometimes the expression can offend and shock and anger. That’s what the interface looks like, that’s the response when spark meets oxygen in the presence of oil.

I often wonder at my neighbors’ well-manicured lawns and gardens, and at my inability, even in this, to abide. As of late, my yard has been overrun by chamberbitter and webworms, and my attempt to plant flowers has resulted in a hole-poked, dangly-leaved, withered patch of yellowing mess. I am afraid to use chemicals because I do not want to harm or drive away the spiders, snakes, pollinators and toads that live here. Part of me doesn’t trust the directions for ‘safe use’ on the back of the container; I still remember my ob/gyn’s dry reply when I said I no longer wanted to be on the pill after almost a decade, because I was concerned about the side effects on my body and on the fish swimming in hormone-polluted waters. I can’t keep up with the new growth I need to prune and the edges I need to trim. It’s not some sort of moral high ground I hold- I just don’t trust my vision of life to be what’s best for everyone. As an immigrant, it’s an inner tension between my suspicion of the local civilized aesthetics that demands a fear response from me, and a legitimate sense of survival that requires a certain conformity to local ways of life. Growing up we had to deal with different pressures and challenges; leaf-footed bugs, termites and flash flooding were not among them, but I am familiar with being accosted by older men in my neighborhood. Living on a dry Mediterranean island, before the desalination plants we could only water the plants on certain days a week, and have 3-minute showers. I have never been in the eyewall of a hurricane, but I store extra batteries, canned food and water just in case. While I know every road in my hometown, I don’t drive anywhere in Baton Rouge without my GPS on. I wear a mask, wash my hands and keep my distance. On my most alienated days, I look in the mirror and see curly hair as unruly and as silent as the little patch of land outside the window. I have learned to say “Yes ma’am” and “Yes, sir”, but my habit to not shy away from taboo topics and wear bright red Converse shoes has stayed with me. Through conflict and collaboration, through stress, crisis and learning, we all find ways to adapt. What does this mean for yourself and others at this moment in time?

Forgive me for writing so disjointedly. I am writing in step with the times. If there is a connective theme to this post, I trust you to find it. I, too, finally feel in my body the fires that have been burning in Minnessota, in Portland, in Wisconsin, in Australia, in Northern California and in many other parts of our globe. Even in my little home country of Cyprus there are fires burning that have not really stopped burning for millennia. I no longer see anger as something unnatural or bad. It’s just there, wild being wild, the system functioning according to the way the elements in the system behave, and the feedback loops that are present. Like fire, anger is sometimes destructive beyond compare, and sometimes life-giving and essential. Who is responsible for the fires? Who is responsible?

Who knows what the future will be like?

When we first moved into the house five years ago, we planted a firespike we picked up at a plant sale. For years, it struggled in the cold winters, dying back with the frost and growing anew in springtime. Though it is not a native plant, and has had a hard time in the yard, I’ve always liked its broad-leaved greenery, and mulched and watered it. It has finally bloomed this year, its little blazing red flowers lighting up the green of the yard. For the first time, hummingbirds have started visiting us without the bribe of sugary liquid in plastic containers. Their rapid flutters echo in my heart chambers. Relationships are complicated, but life responds to life.