Читать книгу Letters to the Earth - Группа авторов - Страница 17

It’s finally happening. We’re finally talking about climate change. It’s messy, but it’s happening. To be honest, we don’t really have the language, and that’s largely because we don’t know how to feel about it.

For decades, the dominant narrative has been that we should feel guilt. Then, there’s the dual narrative that calls for hope. Others have called for fear, or panic. I myself am on the record calling for anger.

But I don’t always feel angry, to tell the truth. In fact, sometimes I’m hopeful, sometimes I’m scared. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed, and sometimes I’m downright stubborn. (My mama would tell you that’s pretty much all the time.)

That’s because none of those emotions really get to the heart of what I truly feel. None of them are big enough. If I’m honest with myself, what I truly feel is … love.

Hear me out.

I don’t mean any simple, sappy kind of love. I don’t mean anything cute or tame. I mean living, breathing, heart-beating love. Wild love. This love is not a noun, she is an action verb. She can shoot stars into the sky. She can spark a movement. She can sustain a revolution.

I love this beautiful, mysterious, complicated planet we get to call home. The planet who had the audacity to burst with life, from her boreal crown to her icy toes at the South Pole. I love her caves and her valleys and her rivers and her oceans. I love the majesty of larger-than-life elephants and whales and rhinos and lions. I love the elegance and enigma of all the different kinds of bats – even the ones that eat other bats! I love the unapologetic sass of butterflies and hummingbirds and coral reefs and the tear-jerking aroma of flowers that bloom below the equator.

I love that night-time symphony on steamy southern nights when the frogs croak and the crickets sing and the owls hunt. I love the taste of watermelon and blackberries in the summer – the way that they ooze down the side of my face when they’ve reached perfect ripeness. I love the delicate feel of honeysuckle petals and the warm, grainy earth and dewy grass on my bare feet.

I love sitting on my mama’s back porch in Mississippi to watch ‘God do his work’ in the form of late summer thunderstorms underneath a thick blanket of humidity. I love the late summer haze when all the colours come to life and seem to throb.

And I love my mama. I love my family. I love my niece and nephew and I love that it doesn’t matter that their parents are actually my cousins and not my siblings. I love my Aunt Joyce’s laugh and my cousin Candice’s freckles and my Aunt Karen’s voice.

I love – dare I say it? – myself. And some days it’s easier to do that than others. Sometimes it feels impossible, but it’s a work in progress and I’m working on it, OK?

A love like this doesn’t live in your heart. She’s too big for that. She’s in your blood, your bones. She’s in your DNA. The places where people think racism is. She envelops you with an impenetrable armour.

When you love something, or someone, that much, of course you’re frightened when you see her under attack, and of course you’re furious at anyone or anything that would dare to harm her.

I am furious that my mother is in more and more danger every hurricane season. And I am terrified at the thought of living through my old age, when my body aches the way my mother’s does now, in an unpredictable environment with disaster at every turn. What happens when my knees don’t have enough spring left in them to run from a wildfire? What happens when I’ve lost it all in a flood, but I’m too old to work again?

But this love is strong enough to break through the terror. She is hot enough to burn through anger and turn into fury. She can shake you out of your despair and propel you to the front of the battlefield.

It’s a love that can also – even in the teeth of these most insurmountable odds – give me hope. If I’m brave enough to accept it. I’ve seen her looking back at me in the eyes of some of the bravest climate justice warriors I have ever met, and I can feel that tickling tingle of ‘maybe, just maybe, we’ll be okay’.

A love like that doesn’t seek peace, or even vengeance. She seeks justice. And she’s strong enough, ferocious enough, brave enough to burn this bitch to the ground.

Mary Annaïse Heglar