Aligning the Two Selves
Yesterday I wrote of a challenge I face: the challenge of integrating the self, of living day-to-day in a way that lessens the negative impact on the larger cultural and natural world.
This morning I came across this from Rebecca Solnit:
May our efforts in the present make a time when two women sit by the sandy shore of an ocean and contemplate what we have done to reverse the damage of the late Age of Fossil Fuels, [thinking] of how humanity put itself in harness to pull in the opposite direction, toward alignment with the plants that sequestered carbon and exhaled oxygen, toward making peace with nature after centuries of war, toward restoration, toward the stories of how it was that may stand as stories of how it could be. Toward the ways of those people who did so little harm in this era when some — especially in my own country — and the institutions they created did so much (No Straight Road Takes You There, p. 23).
Solnit is right, as she often is. Aligning the two selves involves also aligning with the natural world, “making peace with nature.”
When I couldn’t sleep last night I finished reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry. She offers advice for how we might create an economy more supportive of people and the world by paying attention to the systems of the natural world. Both Solnit and Kimmerer emphasize the importance of narratives that shape us and in that shaping have an impact on the world in which we live. There’s wisdom there, a wisdom that could indeed ground hope in a situation that seems hopeless. I’m not quite there yet, but at least I find myself hoping for hope.