Coming back to a writing life... Morder, "The Overstory," and why this feels urgent

My intentions to get back to my regular writing practice were derailed again over the last winter and through spring, this time by a wrenching personal experience - the dying and death of my oldest sister, one of the most profound relationships in my life. Thing about a loss like this is that there is upheaval on so many layers of one's life, and about all one can do is allow that to be what it is. What it is, is different for each of us. For me, it pretty much shut down my capacity for creative writing. I had to accept that. I had to let it be. Fighting it, pulling up a draft and staring at it helplessly, wasn't doing me any good.

It integrates. Takes time, but eventually it integrates. The context for the grief gets larger with time, the psychological room for it. The space gets bigger. This does not take anything away from the intensity, or those moments when it strikes again like a powerful ocean wave that washes over and for a moment takes everything with it. The grief can still be overwhelming, but it also begins to take on its own story, to reveal, to be comforting, to become a spiritual resource in which to rest, to find wisdom, to bond with the rest of the grieving world.

I have finally come back to the manuscript, the one that is a deeply personal account with another kind of grief that is becoming more common in our world - ecological grief. I began this story after a 2013 two-week "pilgrimage" with five Canadian companions along the Athabasca River in Alberta, from its origins at the edge of a melting glacier in Jasper National Park to the tar sands industrial site centered around the booming town of Ft. McMurray. The steadily expanding industrial region is a true "Morder" on Earth, an industrial hell, one of the largest such projects in all the world, and what is for western humans an acceptable way to support our consumer ways of life - a real-life version of Dante's Inferno.

Or, if you relate more to the Lord of the Rings reference than Dante, we have arrived at Morder (meaning, "Black Land," also "Land of Shadow), realm of the evil Sauron and his armies. Located in Morder is a volcano named Mt. Doom, where Frodo and his friends were headed to destroy the One Ring of the Dark Lord Sauron by throwing it into the crater where it had originally been forged by his Elvin-smiths (it takes 3 volumes to tell this story, so I won't even try). Arriving at Mt. Doom, Frodo was sorely tempted by the power of the ring and placed it on his finger. In that moment, he became captive to its seductive powers and unable to destroy it.

And just like Frodo, once placing the powerful ring of industrialism (an obvious Tolkien reference) and its seductive powers of addictive consumerism around our lives, we are no longer able to toss it into the fire, to destroy it, to get free of it. Despite best intentions, it has gotten hold of our very souls. We like its powers - a lot. Caught up in this seduction, we are unable to separate ourselves from what is bringing about our own doom - the power of industrialism* and what it offers to us, the seduction of ever-increasing comfort and convenience, the powerful, addictive, fossil-fueled basis for how we live, consume, work, and travel. We are hanging onto it for dear life even though we know what will happen if we do.

Once boreal forest - Alberta

By the time I finished the first draft of the Alberta story and sent it to a couple of publishers, I realized it was losing its timeliness. I didn't need to toss it out, but I did need to rewrite it. And that's the project that was disrupted by this personal loss.

Meanwhile, a lot of context had changed. That trip was before the shocking election of Donald Trump and his persistent unraveling of environmental protection laws and regulations. It was before the flood of evidence pouring in from science and research revealing how quickly our natural world was unraveling. I am a writer, speaker, workshop leader on the nexus among ecology, culture, and society. I am an organic gardener at an urban farm in the inner city of Milwaukee. As much as I have this strong background over many years regarding the impacts of the industrial growth economy on the living communities of the planet, the unraveling was happening faster and with more extreme impacts than science had predicted. It has been stunning to behold, and raised a lot of questions about what to write, why to write, with what intent or purpose.

It added urgency.

So I went back to the manuscript, read it through, found much to build upon, and started building. It will be a while before a new draft is completed. I will be working on other things, essays especially, maybe some verse. But what I believe more than ever is that creative work - the arts, poetry, music, good stories - are crucial to how we attempt to communicate our human predicament.

Poetry and other imaginative forms of story-telling feel especially important because I believe that so much of this crisis is beyond rational understanding or linear logic. What is needed from artists and writers is more creative work that breaks down the limits of our western rational minds, minds that still believe we can "understand" our way out of the crisis and come up with the technical "fix" that will save us. Metaphor, nonlinear breaks with the logical mind, stirring up our imaginations by shattering their containers, this kind of creative work can help break down the mental formations that prevent us from grasping the true nature of our predicament and how those formations cannot help us anymore. They are what caused our break with reality in the first place - the reality of living within limits in a nonlinear world that can only continue to generate and regenerate life within the reality of those limits.

Overstory's giant redwood

Right now, I am reading Richard Powers' Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, The Overstory. Now here is an example of what I mean. It is fiction. It is truth. It reveals. It hurts. It forces us to see. Maybe its success means millions of readers will get a sense of what is being lost, and what it means to be in a deep relationship with the other beings around us with whom we share this ecological fate. Like trees. Like one another.

Does it get easier or harder to keep living off industrialism when we read these things - for example, a book like this accompanied by news of the unraveling of the Amazon forest, or the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of acres of boreal forest in Alberta to make way for the tar sands industry? When comes the point where we look around us and say, "I don't want to live like this anymore?"

I write non-fiction, but I hope I can make this work compelling (creative) enough to shatter some mental formations, to help readers see that industrial/consumer society is really not like the air we breathe, though we live as if that is the case, so much our atmosphere that we hardly notice it. It just is. We swim in it. It keeps us alive. But the opposite is the case. It is not even metaphorically or psychologically like the air we breathe. It is a human-made reality that must be unmade as rapidly as possible. We cannot live without air, but we lived hundreds of thousand of years without this industrial hell-on-earth. Living with it is bringing about our demise in a matter of generations. We not only CAN live without it, we must.

Learning how to do that, learning how to live without killing life all around us, without destroying the living beings that keep this planet alive, that helps strip away the illusions (delusions) that we are a superior species that can consume life at will and survive alone on a hot dead planet - this I know is one of the reasons why I keep writing (and speaking), even though I have given up hope that it will change anything. But then, in surrendering that hope, maybe it will.

~ Margaret Swedish 

* industrialism (source: https://www.wordnik.com/words/industrialism)

• An economic and social system based on the development of large-scale industries and marked by the production of large quantities of inexpensive manufactured goods and the concentration of employment in urban factories.
• Devotion to industrial pursuits and interests; predominance of industrial interests or activity; also, the characteristics of industrial life, especially of the manufacturing industry.
• Devotion to industrial pursuits; labor; industry.