Author: gracesmuggler

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

-Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994.

The first images from the James Webb Space Telescope were released yesterday. They’re incredible.

“Secede into the care for one another”

The Mad Farmer, Flying the Flag of Rough Branch, Secedes from the Union
by Wendell Berry

From the union of power and money
From the union of power and secrecy,
From the union of government and science,
From the union of government and art,
From the union of science and money,
From the union of genius and war,
From the union of outer space and inner vacuity,
The Mad Farmer walks quietly away.

There is only one of him, but he goes.
He returns to the small country he calls home,
His own nation small enough to walk across.
He goes shadowy into the local woods,
And brightly into the local meadows and croplands.
He goes to the care of neighbors,
He goes into the care of neighbors.
He goes to the potluck supper, a dish
From each house for the hunger of every house.
He goes into the quiet of early mornings
Of days when he is not going anywhere.

Calling his neighbors together in to the sanctity
Of their lives separate and together
In the one life of the commonwealth and home,
In their own nation small enough for a story
Or song to travel across in an hour, he cries:

Come all ye conservatives and liberals
Who want to conserve the good things and be free,
Come away from the merchants of big answers,
Whose hands are metalled with power;
From the union of anywhere and everywhere
By the purchase of everything from everybody at the lowest price
And the sale of anything to anybody at the highest price;
From the union of work and debt, work and despair;
From the wage-slavery of the helplessly well-employed.

From the union of self-gratification and self-annihilation,
Secede into the care for one another
And for the good gifts of Heaven and Earth.

Come into the life of the body, the one body
Granted to you in all the history of time.
Come into the body’s economy, its daily work,
And its replenishment at mealtimes and at night.
Come into the body’s thanksgiving, when it knows
And acknowledges itself a living soul.
Come into the dance of the community, joined
In a circle, hand in hand, the dance of the eternal
Love of women and men for one another
And of neighbors and friends for one another.

Always disappearing, always returning,
Calling his neighbors to return, to think again
Of the care of flocks and herds, of gardens
And fields, of woodlots and forests and the uncut groves,
Calling them separately and together, calling and calling,
He goes forever toward the long restful evening
And the croak of the night heron over the river at dark.

— Wendell Berry

I’m not a catastrophizer. I don’t expect or believe that doom or danger is around every corner, or even one big corner. I don’t believe that harm is inevitable or that we are powerless. I say these things, both because that’s true to who and how I am (and want to be) and also because I’m going to talk about something difficult today. It’s okay to skip this one if this is challenging topic for you.

With increasing regularity, I wonder if the United States is not long for this world as a nation, at least, in its present form. And without losing our minds in fear (if possible) I think we need to make some preparations in the direction of this possibility.

Why do I believe this is possible?

– We’ve already had an armed insurrection.

– We have people putting themselves in state electoral positions so they can be “a watchdog for voter fraud” — i.e. throw out votes or overturn an election outright.

– We have a Supreme Court, far out of step with the majority of the American public that is not only giving nods to rolling back additional rights, but taking up a case in the next cycle that will determine whether state legislatures can set their own election rules for federal elections without any limits from their state constitutions or state courts. Amidst these outcomes, legislatures could set up their rules so that they do not have to follow the popular vote in their states — rules outright to that effect, or perhaps a set of rules that will lead to that outcome inevitably in a systematically rigged way. The Supreme Court will release their ruling on this in the summer of 2023, one year from now and one year before the 2024 election.

– Militias with white supremacist ideology are training for armed combat. This may be the last thing in my list, but it is among the most dangerous. This is not alarmism. This is happening. It’s happening in my state, in fact. It is happening in a number of places around the country. Two of the groups most active in the January 6 insurrection were the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. They are still organizing. Others are likely doing the same. We need to know about these two groups and others.

About all of these things, I want to share an article I read last week in The Washington Post: ‘They Are Preparing for War’: An expert on civil wars discusses where political extremists are taking this country.

How do I think we need to prepare?

I think about this regularly, though without falling into it headlong or immersing myself in it constantly. (More about that in a moment). I don’t have a list here in the same way I made one above. But I think we need to have plans for these: What would you want to do, and how, if 1) an election were overturned outright, or 2) an insurgency suddenly emerged?

And then here is where I’m really going with all of this:

How would you want to care for yourself, your loved ones, and your neighbors in those situations? What would that look like?

And

How can we start enacting those forms of care right now? Not only so we’re prepared, but so we have the best chance possible to turn this around and avoid these worst outcomes?

We have to enact care. We have to listen to one another and make sure that physical, emotional, social, and psychosocial needs are met. We can do this right now. It matters. We are not powerless. Apart from anything our government does or does not do, we can turn toward one another and take care of each other.

And that’s where my subject line comes from — Probable. It’s not my word for likely disaster. It’s my word for the fact that I think my community members would care for each other and me. It’s a word for the fact that we are fully capable of enacting that. And it’s my word for the realization that we can participate in connecting people with one another so that they have places to land with help.

I think about all of this regularly. As I shared, I’m not falling into it headlong or immersing myself in it constantly. I still enjoy my life. I find things to delight in. I share community space with others. I’m even sleeping well at night. And as someone who used to have chronic insomnia years ago, this is a big deal.

But I think we need to prepare. I think this is real, and I think we need to prepare.

That’s why I write this.

–Renee Roederer

– Photography by Renee Roederer

On one level, we have no idea what we’re doing.
None of us does.
We don’t know fully what will happen.
We don’t know fully what we want.
We don’t know fully who we are.

But on another level, we do know what we’re doing.
We can craft much of what will happen.
We can craft much of what we want.
We can craft much of who we are.

Or to put it another way, we might quote Mary Oliver,
“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.”

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

–Renee Roederer

Both of these quotes come from Mary Oliver’s poem, Wild Geese.

A sweet way to start your morning.

All of the things that sustain us and comfort us in times of challenge started out as small actions,

— go to an event, only to meet someone who will become a life long friend,
— introduce two people, only for them to initiate a major project together later,
— have a conversation, only for it to shift your direction,
— step into that identity/role a little more, only to discover there’s a whole community waiting for you.

And so much more.

And if so much of this can happen unintentionally, what could be possible if we act on these kinds of things intentionally?

Plant tiny seeds today and in the near future that will surprise us with sustenance and comfort months and years down the line.

–Renee Roederer

This morning, I’d love to link you to this piece by Ben Johnston-Krase, entitled,

The Tablespoon

“But you know what people are asking? Am I alive? Beyond the striving, the earning, the hammering away… In the midst of a life that feels rushed, disconnected, overscheduled… am I – are we – really alive? I believe people are asking those questions, maybe now more than ever.”

Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.

Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides the will of evil.

*Thanks to my friend, Patrick, for sharing this quote with me.