Page 149 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

Even as she undergoes treatment after treatment, Saulitis never loses her focus on the

Earth holding her. "Each morning, I walk my altered body down the hill to the wetlands,

through a dark spruce forest, listening...if the coastal spruce forest has a voice, this is it,

varied thrush calls sketching an acoustic self-portrait of the landscape...how did I ever

grasp time and home without these markers?...The same bird, over and over, year after

year, its song pinning me more tightly to this landscape, thousands of miles away from

my birthplace, and I'm more greedy than ever for it."

Because we live in a time and culture that hastens not only our own deaths (through

cancer) but the extinction of so many other species, we are honor-bound to learn from

what Saulitis offers. It may be that only if we can open our eyes and our hearts fully to

the painful realities of our time can we find a way forward.

What I want is for Eva Saulitis' book to spark the transformation of a culture dissociated

from the Earth, and from the fact that we have permitted poisoning of our earth. And

recognition that that poisoning is resulting in an ever-increasing human suffering and

death through cancer. I want to know that even though her body has been returned to

the Earth, Saulitis’ words on the page will help each one of us engage in the struggle to

move our culture away from warring on its own bodies. Some of that work will be

educational, some political, but we are called to stand up and speak out as protectors of

life.

"Death may be the wildest thing of all, the least tamed or known phenomenon our

consciousness has to reckon with. I don't yet—might not ever—understand how to meet

it. I stumble toward it in the dusky conifer light." In Becoming Earth, we are privileged to

walk beside her.