There was a brown-gray haze cloaking the city skyline, and the sun was rising red when I went up to our roof deck early this morning to do my morning journaling. I had already seen on my weather app that the air quality was “Unhealthy,” but I decided to go up anyway. After all, all I was going to do was sit and write. Nothing strenuous.
But when I saw with my own eyes what “unhealthy” air quality looks like, I thought, “I can’t be up here today.” Much as I love to start my day outside. Much as I enjoy being surrounded by the flowers that are blooming spectacularly right now in the pots lining the deck.
So I gathered up my journal and my pot of tea and was just about to go back inside when I noticed the chimney swifts flying overhead.
“They have no place to go,” I thought. No indoors they can retreat to. No N-95 masks they can don. They have to endure the smoke that is pouring down from the wildfires in Canada. They live their lives completely vulnerable to what we humans do or don’t do in response to the climate emergency.
Watching them, I wondered: If air quality like this can cause respiratory illnesses in humans, what does it do to the tiny lungs and body of a bird?
That’s when I decided not to leave. I decided for that one hour to set aside my privilege as a human with a house and have myself breathe the air that all the other creatures have to breathe day in and day out.
Our Human-Centricity
The news is filled with reports about the over four hundred wildfires burning in Canada right now, and they all focus solely on the air-quality risk to humans, which in itself tells us all we need to know about what has led to this climate crisis.
Our human-centricity has been our unique form of ignorance, and it has overshadowed by far any fantastical misinformation that has ever flown across the internet. This idea that we exist as a separate and superior species, exempted from what befalls the rest of life on Earth, is the lie to end all lies.
And I mean that literally. It is the lie that has brought us to this moment of reckoning when are being forced to abandon our illusions and accept that we exist, and always have, interwoven into a vast and intricate web of life.
Opening to Other Ways of Knowing
Every morning before I begin my journaling, I read a poem by Mary Oliver. I cycle through her books poem by poem, year after year. Today’s poem was “The Dipper.”
In it, Oliver shares an experience she’d had fifty years before while in Colorado. She was beside a river, and there she encountered a bird she’d heard about called a dipper.
In her desire to take in the essence of his language-less song, she found she had to “bend forward” into his frame of mind. The experience changed her forever.
. . . since that hour I have lived
simply,
in the joy of the body as full and clear
as falling water; the pleasures of the mind
like a dark bird dipping in and out, tasting and singing.
It made me wonder how I might be changed if I could bend forward into the frames of mind of our kindred species. What wisdom would open up within me? How would the encounter transform my mind? What fierce and loving lengths would I go to to protect the chimney swift overhead who just wants to feel its body dipping and swooping in the clear air of a cool June morning?
Like what you read?
Patricia,
This entry really wrenched at my heart in a couple of ways.
Firstly, just the continued air quality that has permeated our land-both locally and across the entire northeast coast of the US & blessed Canada.
Secondly, your act of witnessing to the birds and all living creatures and plants that breathe and need clean air to live.
I have been feeling rather thoughtful these past two days in particular – as I administer my Albuterol inhaler 3x a day right now to enable me to breathe without wheezing or coughing – ruminating on just how it feels like Mother Earth – Gaia – is wheezing and exuding toxins in order to cleanse and strengthen. The last two days have almost felt like we are closer & closer to losing her. At our own hands. On overwhelming sense of grief, remorse and guilt has crept to the surface of my heart in waves.
Thank you for sharing your experience, your witness, and perspective on the present state of things….
May we continue to expand the good – the AWAKENING to the immediate urgency to each do whatever we can to turn our toxic behaviors around, once and for all….
🙏💔
With love & hope,
Holly
As I begin my day here in Bigfork, I am deeply grateful for the clear sky air in this NW corner of Montana. I focus on the return of this goodness to your region, filled with blessings for all…namaste
🙏🏻❤️🕉❤️🙏🏻
Thank you for this. So much congruence. I have just started a congregation of Wild Church. We are Kindred of the Wild. We meet outside surrounded by the woods and meadows of my 20 acres in Cheyney PA. The main segment of the gathering is mindfully wandering and sitting, paying attention to the more than human beings that share this space with us for 35-45 minutes. Then we return for a time of sharing. We have so much to learn.