Flowering

Yesterday I was browsing in a new independent bookstore in Denver and picked up Hope in the Dark, by Rebecca Solnit, only to realize that I already owned it — both the collection of essays, and the coupling of circumstances. It’s a condition and remedy one returns to again and again — a pairing for the ages.

Our despair in a moment that seemed unsurpassed in its wrongness in 2004 when Solnit’s insightful, incisive book about living with uncertainty was first published feels almost quaint when buried beneath the rubble of horrors surrounding us today. A lot of people are talking about hope as a radical act in the face of our current global and national circumstances -- and this is an important and sustaining idea for us to hold, both individually and collectively.

I learned recently that plants flower when under stress: stress-induced flowering is the plant’s attempt to reproduce itself before it potentially succumbs to drought, lack of nutrients, or other adverse conditions. This is a call to action -- but not the Musk / MAGA-backed mandate to indenture women to have babies, despite living on a planet and in a country that supports and honors neither. On the contrary: this is a call to action for a different kind of stress-induced flowering, a more figurative kind of life-generation. It is a reminder that life persists and sometimes even thrives when conditions are sub-optimal. Intense pressure and heat under the Earth’s surface create diamonds, the prismatic rocks we use to symbolize love and commitment (and in some cases, ownership). A grain of sand in an oyster yields a pearl. . . .and on and on. As a therapist, naturally I am a believer in the triumph of the human spirit over suffering and misfortune. There are countless stories of remarkable people who overcame hardship — or, one could argue, whose hardship shaped their development into the extraordinary beings they became. Americans love this shit. . . perhaps because it is our origin story as a country formed (or land overtaken) by immigrants in search of a better life.

The wisdom of nature is the greatest source of truth — particularly in the distinct absence of anyone resembling a leader in the national political arena. This is among the reasons that an army of sociopaths are determined to pillage the Earth until they all - god willing - jet off to Mars to pursue eternal death-life, which may be their unique destiny, and the most of which they are capable. Among the many reasons that dogs are our best friends: dogs embody unconditional love and irrepressible joy — whether they have three legs or busted up hearts or aching hips. Much of nature’s genius exists outside of humanity.

The non-human parts of nature contain all the metaphors we need to understand right action. . . and the lens through which we can understand our own condition as persistent, self-sabotaging, brilliant, horrific little mammals crawling around the Earth for an instant, drinking coffee and browsing at books we already own about the contradictions we contain.