Poetics of Repair: Being Earth, Being Water closed on April 22 at the Augusta Savage Gallery, but videos of each workshop can be viewed in the online gallery. I’m filled with gratitude for everyone who joined me in co-creating this space of contemplating climate catastrophe. And I’m thrilled to announce the installation will be hosted by the Local Access for Valley Arts (LAVA) Center in Greenfield.
I introduced each workshop with a call for renaming what is happening right now from “climate change”—sort of innocuous-sounding words lacking urgency—to the more accurately descriptive words, “climate catastrophe.” What is happening now is catastrophe—catastrophic loss of life, loss of our beloved places, catastrophic destruction of homes and displacement of millions of climate refugees. The world needs our collective attention; yet many of us in the less vulnerable places of Turtle Island are trying to avert our eyes, to shield ourselves from experiencing “climate trauma,” as ecopsychologist, Ziwha Woodbury calls it. Many authors of essays in All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis speak into this wall of resistance and denial of what is really happening, the denial that keeps us from collective awakening to our interbeing with our Earth and each other, two-legged, four-legged, winged and rooted. The Poetics of Repair project creates spaces for public expression of feelings that climate catastrophe arouses, for grieving in community, feeling anxiety and distress together. Along with the many ecojustice warriors in All We Can Save and on the frontlines of climate justice, Woodbury proposes that climate trauma is triggering or exacerbating other forms of collective trauma, specifically cultural traumas such as colonialism, genocide and ecocide.
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel talks about these forms of oppression as “a distortion of our true nature.” I want to link Manuel’s teachings on oppression to the question of what is needed to awaken to climate catastrophe.
Oppression disconnects us from the earth and from each other. Awakening from the distortion of oppression begins with tenderness: we recognize our own wounded tenderness, which develops into the tenderness of vulnerability and culminates in the tenderness that comes with heartfelt and authentic liberation. That first experience with tenderness is a cry from deep within our own nature it compels us to seek out a connection to the Earth and each other.
—Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender
Woodbury believes that connecting personal trauma to collective trauma and climate trauma—”making climate trauma personal”— has the potential to unleash the transformative, mass movement needed for climate trauma “recovery.” I am not sure “recovery” from climate trauma is possible; but I do think reparative work is necessary—reparations for Black and Indigenous people displaced from their sacred places, and repairing the intergenerational violence of white supremacy—if we are to heal and move collective trauma to collective action.
In my workshops, I share practices of deep listening, poetics and paperfolding, and story circle to create spaces for us to seek the “tenderness that comes with authentic liberation.” It will take a lot of practice to undo the intersecting forms of oppression imposed on us, forms of oppression that, when internalized, become knives cutting us apart from our own bodies and selves. The presencing practices and critical making practices that have sustained me have evolved over a lifetime of co-learning and study. I offer them with the hopes that you will also find refuge in these practices.
Welcome to Poetics of Repair at the LAVA Center. I invite you to join me in May and June on the continuing journey of awakening to climate catastrophe. Come inside and sit with the cranes, canoes, and horseshoe crabs; write or make some paper creatures, or just sit with your feelings. If you wish to contribute to the installation, you can leave what you write or make below this sign, and I will integrate them when I visit. I will offer a live and virtual workshop on May 15, 2:00-5:00pm EST, with the first hour for paperfolding lessons, and the second half for guided meditation, poetry reading and writing.
Cranes, canoes and butterflies on the left contributed by community participants.
Installation in progress at LAVA. Mica Lin-Alves on the left, assisting JuPong on the right.