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/