Tag: Death

An Honest Fairy Tale Retold

negativegeography8 Comments

Linda

This is an honest fairy tale. But it’s not a true story, for who can know the fathomless truth of anyone? It’s about my sister, who died recently.

In this tale the child is led deeper into the enchanted forest. A bewitched forest.

And the more frightened she became the farther she fled into the foggy interior of the woods. There she made her stand, a brave and lonely thing, and built her refuge and her prison.

Or course, these enchanted forests are invisible to others. You can walk around in broad daylight and nobody would know you are lost. As the saying goes, you never see the forest for the trees.

So the child couldn’t tell anyone where she was. I’m here, she would cry. Can’t you hear me?Read More »

Extinction and Responsibility: Why Climate Disaster Might Heal Us Even As it Kills Us

negativegeography9 Comments

earth

This appeared on Counterpunch.

Alice O’keeffe: “Even if we can’t escape its consequences, it is not too late to escape the mindset that brought us here.”

If climate disaster has left us with no future do we still feel responsible to the earth that outlives us? Or do we say “who cares?”

If we say “who cares?” then our sense of responsibility was never anything more than a moral rule, a business deal of sorts, where we agreed to behave honorably as long as we were allowed to project our egos into future generations. But I think real empathy for a world without us is still possible, and I think it matters in some way that can’t be calculated on a strictly transactional basis.

The possibility of near-term extinction is new, but the underlying dilemma this presents is as old as the Big Bang, or older. Death is death. It comes to the individual as surely as it comes to the species, the planet, and the exploding universe itself. What’s different now is only this onrushing inability to avoid facing this fact. And I think this is a good thing, because it forces a confrontation with the many reductive delusions that have limited our creative participation in the world, which is our responsibility to something more than ourselves. The chief among these limitations has been a strict and too literal image of who we are, an identity that keeps us trapped in a solipsistic circle.Read More »

Death’s Good Intentions

negativegeography3 Comments

Friendships are Parallel Universes

Almost a year ago, one of my truest friends died. Pat Styer. I never met her in person. It didn’t matter. We spoke the same fundamental language. It wasn’t about agreeing or disagreeing. It was about playing catch with a perspective that few in my circle at that time seemed to find worth picking up. What she said broadened my own vocabulary. And whatever I said, she received without distortion. It was as if we were learning something that could only be discovered between us.

I think every relationship (whether with a human or a dog or a cat) gives rise to someone new between us, creates a context of understanding that will never be duplicated with another. We move between parallel worlds. Each infinite, but limited to our mutual contexts.Read More »