What the darkness carried
On August 21, 2017, amidst the scattered crowds sitting on the banks of the Willamette River in a state park an hour outside Portland, Oregon, a hush settled across the morning. Then the darkness came — not gradually like dusk, but a rapidly enveloping nightfall sweeping across the landscape, bringing with it an unexpected cold wind. For the next two minutes, the stars reappeared. The birds went silent, then erupted. And in that interval, perhaps every human being on those riverbanks forgot, completely, what worries had been on their minds.
This is what it feels like when the boundary between the cosmic and the personal dissolves. As with the many magical moments in our lives, we are sometimes left wondering how to sustain the feelings of awe they evoke, before the rhythms of daily life overtake the fleeting experiences.
Yet these moments also open onto something harder to face. How do we build our individual and collective capacities to protect a world which is at once precious and simultaneously imperiled? How might we even internalize and hold on to the experiences we most cherish, as armor of protection and source of comfort, to be summoned and deployed in more disruptive and threatening moments?
This is a question for each of us individually, and collectively as a society. In my school days, a history teacher gave us an assignment to research the day that we were born. Back in those days, microfiche provided state-of-the-art informational retrieval. The day I was born, in the twelfth month of the year, was apparently not an earth-shattering day, as reported in world news; my report was mundane at best. Yet, the series of world news that would follow in the decades ahead, has imprinted in my mind’s eye both the sacred and the profane.
I did not grow up in the same town as my parents, who in turn did not grow up in the same nation-state as each other. To my knowledge, this is also true of at least my maternal grandparents. Thus, for me, the lack of rootedness, and hyperpresence of mobility, is at the heart of my unconscious memories. Their choices — to stay or to leave, each made for the betterment of those who would follow — became my inheritance: health, sustenance, and a life lived mostly in beautiful, safe places, with the freedom to choose where to belong. My adulthood has meant a series of choices for which rootedness is an endeavor, while mobility and rootlessness serve as inheritances, left behind yet not wholly unresolved.
Mine is one story among eight billion now living. Together our story spanning across seven continents is as divergent as our human lives, which have inordinately shaped the fates of the vast oceans, majestic mountains and valleys, and countless trees, insects and animals. It is indisputable that humans have left an imprint, for better and for worse. Throughout history, nature and culture have been intertwined, conjuring arts and sciences, alongside beauty and inspiration. And even before our modern era, other worlds beyond have been imagined and inhabited, from centuries old literature to present day, state-sponsored and investor-backed technological adventuring.
At the same time, the human and natural worlds have also collided. Climate disruption, nuclear threat, species extinction, civil and world war, mass migration, famine — these phenomena have been felt at the level of the city, the neighborhood, the family, the individual. Beauty and catastrophe are not opposites. They are the same world, seen from different moments.
The world is both precious and imperiled. I increasingly live each day holding both truths.