Wise Words: The Presence of the Past

An irony of our technological advancement is that it has created a society that is in many ways scientifically more naïve than the preindustrial world, in which no citizen who learned physics through backbreaking work and understood climate through subsistence agriculture would have assumed that he or she was exempt from the laws of nature. The “modern” kind of magical thinking is characterized by the belief that repeating falsehoods like incantations can transform them into scientific truth. It is also yoked to a quasi-mystical faith in the free market, which, according to the prophets, will somehow allow us to live beyond our means indefinitely.

The problem, in essence, is that rates of technological progress far outstrip the rate at which human wisdom matures (in the same way that environmental changes outpace evolutionary adaptation in mass extinction events). Critic and author Leon Wieseltier contends that “every technology is used before it is completely understood. There is always a lag between an innovation and the apprehension of its consequences.” The rapid obsolescence of digital technologies and the cultural flotsam they deliver corrodes our respect for what lasts (“That was so five minutes ago”). And just as reliance on GPS navigation systems causes our capacity for spatial visualization to atrophy, the frictionless, atemporal instantaneity of digital communications weakens our grasp on the structure of time. Our “modern” idea that only Now is real is arguably delusional, while the medieval concept of “wyrd” [the power of the past upon the present] seems positively enlightened. And our blindness to the presence of the past in fact imperils our future.

(Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey, 2018, p. 164)

The Wild Nun: Foundations

I am starting slowly, from a low-to-the-ground place.

*

The future grows from the ground of the past —

The past is mother to the future, to possibility, while it holds us steadily, solidly, in the present —

It is the foundation that cannot be denied —

Only honoured and shown gratitude for the many lessons that push us onwards towards ourselves.

Tree, Merrion Square Park, Dublin, July 2005

*

If it is the journey and not the destination, then it is the longing and not the attainment.

I must tend to my longings, feed them, encourage them to grow from the ground of my being, so in turn they nourish me.

*

It’s not easy being a late-bloomer, often a complete non-bloomer, and occasionally dying right back down to the roots to spend time hidden and safe in the underworld, to get some good old composting done before the next furtive emergence.

The world is not always understanding of such changeability, of an adherence to inner seasons that cannot be tamed and forced into production on demand.

It’s not easy but I can’t be rushed. I have to take my own sweet time dancing with the invisible.

Words and images from my Instagram project @the_wild_nun

Wise Words: The Future Is Not A Promised Land

Westerners like me implicitly understand that a temporal orientation is also a spatial orientation: we face the future; the past is behind us. Indigenous Australians make temporal-spatial links too, but theirs work differently. They face the source; those who come after them are called the “behind mob.” Each generation follows along behind their ancestors, and their descendants follow along behind them. I imagine this mode of time as waves of generations; we face the source, which is where we all came from, and we follow our predecessors back to the source, leaving behind us a “new mob” or “new generation” to take over. Those behind us walk in our footsteps, as we walk in the steps of our old people …

Within this indigenous world of time, space, and generations in motion, the future is delightfully complex. On the one hand, it can be assumed to be following behind us in the form of the next generations of people, plants, animals, and others. More significantly, though, it is in the ground. The future is waiting to come forth, to be born and to live, and then to return into the source, riding the waves of generations that have kept country and all the creatures alive “forever.”

…

[The indigenous] way of thinking of the future impels us to take care of the ground right now, right where we are, because we are here, because this is our source, because our purpose in life is to bequeath life, not to unmake it. Jessie [Wirrpa] expressed such ideas as “true stories”—true accounts of the real world and our responsibilities as humans. True for humans everywhere, and true for other creatures as well …

… The profundity and simplicity of Jessie’s caring for country is, for me, an ethical claim. The future is not a promised land waiting for us to arrive, nor does it bear down on us. The future is in the ground. It is life, and it wants to come forth and flourish. The future is creation in everyday life, and like all everyday miracles, it is as fragile as it is resilient. We are members of creature communities, and our appropriate work is to honor the bequest by taking care of it so that the future can come forth. 

(Deborah Bird Rose, ‘So the Future Can Come Forth from the Ground’, in Kathleen Dean Moore & Michael P. Nelson (eds.) Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, Trinity University Press: San Antonio, Texas, 2010, pp. 155 and 157; my emphasis in bold)