Page 8 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II
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much more than we think we are,” Moore writes in Great Rising Tide. “We are 

exhaled by hemlocks, we are water plowed by whales, we are matter born in 

stars, we are children of deep time.” I came back larger than I’d been before, and 
I came back smiling—no longer possessed by the madness in Washington. 

“Now that my eyes opening, I feels like a fool,” Celie says towards the end of The 

Color Purple. “Next to any little scrub of bush in my yard, Mr._____’s evil sort of 

shrink.” This line kept repeating itself to me during my last days in Baja. Celie is 

referring to her abusive husband; I was filling in the blank with—well there were 
several, and you can probably guess. Can whales make evil shrink? Yes they 

can!!



“What we don’t know may yet save us,” I wrote in the editorial to the first issue of 

this journal. Thanks to the whales, I am more aware than ever of how little I 

know. In a time when the sum total of what we humans think and know can seem 
pretty dismal, such awareness is supremely comforting. I think you will find as 

you move through this issue that everything in it has been created with humble 

awareness both of the limits of conscious human knowing and of our 

interwovenness with the lives of other species. Along with Sharon English, in 

“Bio-Empathy,” all of the contributors here are aspiring ... “to reawaken to the 
field of earthly relationships in which we exist... to explore what the end of our 

separateness might feel like—and how it might happen, that beginning of deep 

reconnection, return...”




i in her essay “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin” 

in which she argues that a revisioning of “kin” and “kinship” to include non–blood 

relations and nonhumans is imperative for us now as a species. That essay has since 
grown into a book, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke 

University Press, September 2016).


ii 
They will be leading the same trip in March 2018 http://nancywindheart.com/baja- 
womens-retreat/


































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