Something I cannot name

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I – I hardly know, sir, just at present – at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar sternly. “Explain yourself!”

“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”

“I don’t see,” said the Caterpillar.

“I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,” Alice replied very politely, “for I can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.”

My eyes go a little watery when I consider the distance it seems I’ve traveled in four years, miles and miles of heart wanderings, mind meanderings, and foot marches. Many of the pit stops made along the way – Madagascar, the Hague, the United Nations, Congress, TIME magazine – seem a little surreal to me now, living quietly on a homestead in North Carolina. I am proud of myself though, because in recalling each of these pit stops, I am reminded that in the past four years, I have faced down some of my angriest fears, asked many of the questions that make me feel most vulnerable, and weathered some uncomfortable forms of resistance in doing these things rather publicly.

Over this distance, the essential message of my advocacy – that is to say, my life – changed several times. It is now changing again, and I know the shifting is far from finished. It is borne of a collection of recent intellectual, emotional, and spiritual encounters. I have a difficult time articulating where I think I’m headed. Language seems inadequate. I keep waiting for the inspired moment, when clarity will dawn and I can finally explain myself and explain the hunches that constitute my current rationale for decision-making. I have to frequently remind myself that though I can’t describe the full scope of the systems, correspondences, and connections that I sense, I am complete, I am sufficient in this moment. The words will come, if they need to.

I know at the very least, though I can’t describe its full profile, that I’m seeking the wisdom of the mater: the intuitive, the spontaneous, the emotive, the connotative, the mystical, the cyclical, the material, the peripheral, the lunar (which will not burn your eyes), the wet, dusky north face, the sinistr southpaw, Said’s Oriental, Beauvoir’s Other, the raw Goat milk drinkers (who don’t wipe their mouths), the unsanctioned elixir-mixers, the illiterate priestess-bards of the wilderness, joyful old folks with their wrinkled, dirty fists in the air holding militant carrots, hyper-sensitized infants hearing colors and tasting noises as I no longer can. I’m seeking that which the Industrial, alienated mind, the self-designated ontological core around which 'lesser-developed' beings orbit, has discredited as base instinct, mocked as madness, dismissed as irrationality, ignored as un-testable, maligned as evil, and scorned as simple-minded, weak, and imitative. I’m seeking the wisdom of all the beings fighting desperately to reclaim their legitimacy and their agency: that’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for it because I suspect that it will reveal, in ways more profound and complete than previous explanations I’ve been offered, why humanity turned so savagely upon the breast that nourishes us, instructions as to how to heal the innumerable (and terrifying) divisions and imbalances within and among ourselves and our neighbor species, and a picture of what my life needs to look like in order for me to be an agent of genuine reconciliation between, in broadest terms, the yin and the yang.

I haven’t come up with a slogan for what I’m seeking. I don’t know how to sell it to an Affluenza-stricken, comfort-over-conscience, machismo-obsessed audience. I haven’t figured out how to monetize it, commodify it, list deliverables for a campaign to promote it, or wrangle it into a headline, Congressional bill or UN negotiating text. I haven’t found a serious graduate program that offers a PhD in it. To be frank though, these ‘traditional’ means of delivering messages, assigning value, establishing norms, and gaining insight seem to contradict its very essence.

Though I can’t tell you what the hell it is, I feel like I’m contradicting it less than I used to (contradicting it less, I presume, is one step closer to finding it). For one, on the homestead, I feel like I’m living on a saner and healthier scale. While I still make my forays into the Industrial world through international conference calls and reading the UNFCCC negotiating text like a bedtime story, my days are extraordinarily different from those led by most of my ‘colleagues’. Victories are raising the hoop house or saving the cherry tomato plants or watching the kale babies grow. Disasters are named powdery mildew and scaly leg mites (on the chickens, not on me). Good fun is lighting the burn pile or potlucks at neighbors or going swimming in the pond. The homestead reminds me (and I hope reminds my many exhausted peers) that being an agent of change doesn’t mean sacrificing my physical, mental, and emotional health. Secondly, my fingernails have dirt under them and a lot of my pants now have grass stains on them; I’m particularly gleeful about these things. I’m using mind and body in tandem, moreover, in inauspicious ways that aren’t interesting to the media. Thirdly, I have found something – plants and the rhythm of the earth – on which I must defer to the experience of my mother and grandmothers and ancestors. We have found the common, neutral ground where we can meet, where I can be taught and they can teach, where we’re all empowered (although this common ground, right now, is on telephone, since I’m in North Carolina and they’re still in Kentucky).

Each of these things is evidence of reconciliation in some form or fashion, and each has hummed a few bars of the larger theme that I’m trying to hear. But they are only a few of many, and I suspect there are still many changes that have yet to work themselves out within the listener. So, please, hold these words here only very loosely and apply to them an ample margin of error. As Alice said, “I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly.”