Why the Wilds

Right now, I’m sitting in a big house on the coast of Maine. The breeze is coming off the water, and when the tide goes out again, I’m planning to kayak out to say hello to the seals on the nearby rocks.

And, in the meantime, I’m checking the news and seeing nothing good. Charlottesville is happening—I’ve just read about a car plowing into the crowd of KKK, Neo-Nazis, and their counter demonstrators, showing up for equality. One person has died, and more are injured, and it’s only mid afternoon.

Yesterday, the news was full of the President talking about using fire and fury and something even worse against North Korea.

And that this was, again, the hottest year on record. And refugees are still dying to leave their homes, and unwelcome on more and more shores.

The news, my dear, is as bad as I’ve ever known, and this is not the first time I’ve thought so. The weather is hot, the planet is crowded, resources are scarce, and we are all so frightfully on edge that damages that cannot be undone will be, are being, done.

What place, then, do words about seals and terns, stars and pine martens have? The more I know, the more frequently it feels like treason to still love wilderness, to still use the privileges of my skin and geography and lineage and education and bank accounts to go places, to watch for tides and scramble up mountains. Sometimes I worry that caring about the natural world and ecosystems and wilderness is very much rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic—if humanity does itself in with race wars or nuclear explosions or anthropogenic catastrophe, how much will the golden slant of sunset or the relationship between blackflies and blueberries or the calming transcendence of being a wild place matter?

I sure as shit don’t think we need a Wilderness Matters movement. Unless the bears and toads and birches are going to start rioting against the rank injustice of how they’ve been treated by humans, that’s just comparing sunlight and humans—as false a dichotomy as pro-life and pro-choice. Personally, I’m both. I’m for all of it. Sunlight and humans, life and choice, nature and culture, town and country, women and men, white and black and all the shades and variances between all of the supposed end points of spectrums.

A renewed appreciation and commitment to all the things is what I get from being out in the world. The scope and scale of the world will blow your mind—we operate so far from mere binaries and three-dimensionality. Recently an old friend and I hiked in the White Mountains. We passed through three major ecosystems and innumerable microhabitats. We’ve hiked the same trail together several times in the fourteen years of our friendship, and each have hiked it other times, with other friends. Our conversation was thick with their names, with stories and catching up have to tell, with the revelations and inanities that accompany any good hike. In one breath, we talked about the alpine plant community and the ways in which media is improving at portrayals of brown women. We hiked a busy trail on a beautiful summer Saturday and the trail was thick with other folks, all out for something like the same reasons we were, all passing over the same roots and stones with different stories and words and histories. All in the same place, yet each hike was distinct to the hiker.

And that’s just the human aspect. The mountain avens—subalpine flowers with a bright yellow buttercupish flower and leaves like spiky strawberry leaves—experienced the same day however flowers do. Maybe that’s just taking in sunlight and nutrients to pump out buds and blooms and fruit and propagate their species as best they can. Maybe plants do more than that, feel more, but even if not, that’s a remarkable amount of life happening in a little patch of the world.

The water rushing by the trail—frigid at the waterfall we stopped to swim in—all of that gushing and glugging along has little bits of life in it as well. And the rocks that the water runs over, that we clamber over—I draw some line at geologic sentience, but still, glaciers passed over those same stones before we ever did and snow sits on top of it every winter, waiting to hatch the mountains anew each spring. There are layers there.

I know, we all know, that human activities are changing the world, the ph of snow and ocean, the climate that ecosystems evolve with, the creation of trails, the pollution of water and air. And yet, I get great, humbling pleasure out of the reality that the mountains and the sea do not care about humanity. If I have a god, it is the ways in which I don’t matter to the rocks and the sea. The world means the world to me, and it doesn’t know or care what I do.

In the Scientific and Industrial Evolutions, there was an idea that God was nothing but a watchmaker, and that if the world could be picked apart and explored and investigated from the largest cogs to the smallest bolt and screw, the world could be known and Man (never Woman—we were busy with herb gardens and healing and raising babies) would be equal to the Divine.

This, I think, is horseshit. Even if I can think of all the cogs and wheels and layers and threads and fantastical tapestry of a single moment of my hike on that busy trail, if I can contemplate the lives of the seals and seabirds and tidal creatures and plants that I have been kayaking out to each morning while I housesit, my head and heart start to explode. If I add in the lives of all the people on the trails, the summer people owners of the moored boats and summer cottages, the people who live here always and maintain the docks and lobster buoys that I see as I sit as the lone human among twenty seals—well. The world is too big and beautiful to be understood taken apart like a simple watch.

I know enough to know I do not know a damn thing. That variety of ignorance brings me the greatest joy, allows me the space to fall in love with the world and all that it holds. Maybe there is something primal out there that rips a few layers of protection off my eyes, off my heart, but I come back from wilder places more able to see the complexities of life where humans live. And that helps, enormously, when reading the news and trying to figure out how to be in a fraught world.

Pine martens will not stop racism. Knowing the constellations will not erase the American caste system. Watching a seal dive will not calm the political discourse. The smell of salt water, of balsam fir will not stop nuclear proliferation.

What the wilds may do is open your eyes to the world so that you may better participate in the wider world. 

Standing Rock

(Image from JustSeeds.org)

I’m not in Standing Rock, North Dakota. I’m not planting my feet on the ground that contains my ancestors, placing my flesh and blood between the land and our culture’s insatiable lust for oil and the incomprehensible power of profit. I haven’t been arrested, held in a jail cell or a dog kennel. I haven’t screamed at the law enforcement of collected states and departments and representatives of governments and corporations.

And I have been wondering why I’m not there. I know these things matter. I do not want oil to spill into any landscape, upon the bones of any ancestors, into the waterways of the living, into the endocrine systems of the unborn generations. I do not want the dangerous patterns of our consumptive lives to continue unchecked, unchanged. I want the sovereignty and dignity of Native peoples—in North Dakota and across the globe—to be upheld and broadened, not beaten down further and ignored yet again. Colonialism, white supremacy and capitalism—all of these forces have pushed peoples out of homelands and towards the marginal land and seascapes that are now most at risk from the climate change brought about by lifestyles less grounded and intentional that many that were displaced. I don’t treasure an image of indigenous peoples as noble savages—that lack of nuance and excess of Romanticisms covers up far more interesting realities and prevents humans from seeing each other with empathy, and as the hot messes of contradictions we all are. However, I do believe that there are societies that have much more sustainable values than the majority white, post-Industrial Western Capitalist one that destroys landscapes to find the oil that, when burnt in power plants and refineries and gas tanks, destroys the air, the water, the seasons, the planet.

I’m still here in New England, though, not in the Dakotas. I daydream about these actions, these times of solidarity when bodies come together to block pipelines and trucks, but I never go. I stay here because I need to pay my rent, feed my dog, repay my student loans, tend to my family, because my life is here and I feel enough binding me here that I can’t imagine going without creating more, or maybe just different, burdens. Am I just making lazy and selfish excuses to stay comfortable? Do I not believe enough? I wonder these things in the middle of the night sometimes. If I really cared so passionately about climate change, about being in solidarity with a cause I believe in, wouldn’t I be there, linking arms and marching and standing and holding firm despite the consequences, rather than going to the grocery store or making mundane appointments for my car inspection or looking at the container ships come into port and knowing that their oily effluent is mingling in the sea with my father’s remains, and I am standing on the beach, throwing a tennis ball for my dog.

If I really wanted the present and the future to be brighter, better, cleaner and kinder than the patterns of the past, shouldn’t I, shouldn’t we all, be out on parade and picket lines?

I don’t know. It simply isn’t practical—if everyone is arrested, who bails us all out, makes soup for everyone, takes care of the young and the elderly, installs solar panels, plants gardens, negotiates climate and human rights agreements. I admire those who are putting their lives on hold and on the line to stop pollution from crossing national boundaries and poisoning the land and water and sanctity of the place. Similarly, I admire the people who labor through zoning board meetings, who figure out how to live off the grid, who temper their egos enough to carpool or take an inconvenient bus, who raise kind children who love vegetables, who run for office with integrity and practical idealism, everyone who does the thousand quieter jobs that transitioning away from fossil fuels truly require.

And it is not the same to do this small work. I was sitting in my apartment, prepping for a job interview by researching grant writing and best practices for sustainability in higher education, while watching friends on Facebook check in at Standing Rock. And I wanted us all to be there, for real. To be all together, fists high and smiles wide, walking into the fray and saying, firmly, that this dirty way with pipelines and trampling lives and beliefs for profit and out of a lack of imagination of how to implement a cleaner world will no longer be. I wanted the drama and the Romance and the certain solidarity of such direct action.

Because doing the quiet necessary work is hard. Not in the way that having red raw marks on your wrists from zip-tie handcuffs or being violently intimidated or beaten by law enforcement or being a civil disobedience felon or living in a protest camp is hard—and I do believe those are hard things that people chose to do—but because you have to get up every day and find a balance of practical action while navigating life.  It is hard, it is not glamorous—movie stars and Bill McKibben and Terry Tempest Williams and Wendell Berry are not going to join you in signing up for a CSA or doing an energy audit of your home or going to a meeting of the water board—but it is perhaps as vitally important.

Which is what I’ll keep telling myself, as I do what work of the world as I can in Maine, while it remains Facebook official that I’m in North Dakota. 

The Powerful Play

(from NASA.gov, and while I have questions about exploring other worlds when we aren't treating this one and all the life on it with respect, it is still a beautiful picture.)

Sometimes, like today, when the sun is shining and I have yet to hear any truly horrible news for the day, it begins to seem that we are going to win. We, to me, are the loose collective of people working across all continents and disciplines to make the world a better and cleaner and more just place for all living things. Some of us are working in offices, filing papers and lawsuits against unjust entities and laws. Some of us are artists, stretching the materials of this world into shapes and sounds and stories that make other believe in our wildest imaginings of better. Some are teachers, are builders and farmers and activists and researchers and scientists and mentors and all the wide range of hues that it takes to sustain and build this necessary revolution that we hope and hunger and act for.

Too often when we speak of doing enough, of doing all that we can, there is a thread of guilt weaving it all together, that more must be done on both the individual level and the global level. Somehow, between dire news reports and a culture of multi-tasking absurdity, there is a pervasive sense that we must each be passionately able and willing to chain ourselves to a coal mine, participate in the somewhat damaged political system we could still salvage, march in the streets for racial justice, procure food from local sources that do no harm, see the world, maintain loving and supportive relationships, remain financially solvent and constantly informed on the issues of the world, and keep the carbon footprint of a sparrow. Trying to balance all of those pieces will make a person crazy. I regularly worry that I am not hitting the right balance between all the things I try to and would love to do. And I know that I am not the only one who feels stymied in resisting, in being part of a revolution, in living the life I believe possible.

My real worry is this: that some bright day I’ll wake up and the world will be better, that the need and chance to resist and revolt and rebuild will have passed, a new era dawned, and the further shore will have been reached and I will have not done what I most wanted to. That Walt Whitman’s powerful play will have gone on and I will have not contributed my verse. It is not the contribution itself that matters as much, I think, as the personal act of contributing to this amorphous revolution for a better way of life on Earth for the planet and all people. The revolution will happen without me, of course, but out of love and celebration for all that is at stake, I do not want to let my verse go unsung.

I spend a lot of time thinking about Mary Oliver’s question of what I plan to do with my one wild and precious life. Again, I know I am not alone in this—my life is full of brilliant people trying to find the best home for their gifts and love of the world and to live the lives we want and believe in. Sometimes it seems like there is a divide in how we each live—that one can either live change on a large or small scale. In the large scale are the standard-bearers and martyrs and the public figures who we all follow, who’s words and example drive a great deal of inspiration and change. They act and speak for causes that live deep in the hearts of many, and become the names and faces of change and resistance and revolution.

And then there are the people who cannot attend marches because they have to tend their loved ones, who cannot afford to get arrested for civil disobedience because of the responsibilities they bear to others. Or the people who are beautifully suited for the rigors of research, or who delight in the arcane details of law and policy and find ways to weave justice back into our world’s systems. Or people who shun the spotlight but can grow anything on a patch of land. Or who repair bicycles or run thrift stores or wait tables in the cafés where revolutionaries plot their deeds. Or people who are able to shift out of the structures and shoulds of the mainstream world and go off the grid.

There are so many right answers of how to live. Our verses, and we all have them, come in as many tunes and lengths as we like. The important thing is to listen, hard and close, for your own. I believe that we all know, intuitively, the difference between what is right, authentic, and true, and what is not. Perhaps delivering your verse—in whatever form—to the world will make a splash, perhaps everyone will stop and see the fury and love behind your contribution, and this will be the pivot that turns the world in that direction. More likely, the world will absorb your verse as gently as a rising tide. It will matter most to yourself what you said or did, what the action clarified in your soul, and what truths you now know as well as your bones.

The reasons that we are winning, will win, are because more and more people of the seven billion of us are contributing our verses. The play becomes more powerful, and goes on in a different direction than had no one lived in faith and action of a better world. The world needs your verse exactly as desperately, as sweetly, as you hunger to contribute it—whatever form it takes.

International Women's Day: On Prom-Posals and A Time for Outrage

For my recent birthday, some dear friends gave me a t-shirt celebrating Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. As you can see, it is fire-engine red and amazing.

I wore it the morning after my birthday to clean up the minor wreckage of a good dinner party. This sartorial choice wasn’t a statement open to some post-umpteenth-wave of Feminism ironic interpretation along the lines of, "we’re now so evolved as society in terms of gender equality and identity, a lady such as myself can freely choose to do the duties of a repressed housewife, even while wearing the garb of revolutionary propaganda." That is silly bullshit that I hope you read in a funny snooty parody voice. 

I was thus garbed because I wanted to wear my new shirt, the kitchen was littered with dirty dishes and I don’t much like living in filth, and it was my mess to clean up.

I find even the ghost of an idea that we’re in a post-Feminist society absurd.

We aren’t.

As an example of how I fear we’re backsliding as Feminists in important and emotional ways, working at the high school, I keep overhearing clusters of boys worrying about how to pull off a good “prom-posal,” which is apparently now a thing. I hear girls giggling about how they hope they’ll be asked. One boy is making a daily series of riddles and clues for his date—presumably him actually asking her to prom is the treasure. Another is planning to buy red roses for everyone in his math class, have them one by one present the roses to his girlfriend—also in math class—and then he would come in last and give her a white rose and ask her to prom.

Prom is not my issue here—if teenagers want to get gussied up and dance and canoodle and have healthy consensual sex lives, more power to them. Similarly, I am 100% on board with Romance—although I’m guessing that these kids haven’t learned yet that Romance is not really rose petals and pink hearts and proms, but someone bringing you Gatorade in the middle of the night when you have a violent stomach flu, or waiting up for your bus until dawn, or putting tennis balls on your walker and salt on the icy steps, or any of the other millions of ways that people demonstrate their actual, practical, messy love for each other.

In fairness, I didn’t go to my high school prom and so have no frame of reference on this allegedly all-important aspect of high school life in America. Aside from being painfully—almost snobbishly—shy, I had a track meet the next day and, while I was a lackadaisical athlete, that was a simple excuse to avoid what I at seventeen suspected would be a lot of fuss over nothing. The school dances that I had attended always ended up with me in the bathroom with one upset friend or another, dealing with some mismatch of expectations and reality. No matter how many teen-age rom-coms I watched, I suspected that real prom wouldn’t be much different than past dances, and having my mum make me a beautiful dress just to hang out in a fancier bathroom somehow didn’t appeal.

So, really, I’m not one to talk about proms per se. But, my issue with the prom-posal situation is that is seems both horribly stressful and indicative of trends that cauterize teenage girls as passive Princesses in need of asking, with the expectation that they will be asked and in a certain way, or they are not correct. Flipping that, this script for life requires that teenage boys are the actors, the one who gets to make the choice of what lady to ask, who pick the cast and create the lines. Ladies should just sit around and wait with absurd culturally engrained expectations to be asked to the dance, to life. Dudes should steel up against any fears of rejection, but remain emotionally open and Romantic, and pick a lady by doing something traditional but unique, memorable but not super weird. To culturally pressurize these traditional gender roles at young and emotionally fragile ages seems cruel and, therefore, against the Feminist agenda I believe in.

At the same time, I am mentoring a trio of high school students in a Feminism seminar this spring. We are compiling a list of readings and videos and music to study and explore. We’ve got Emmaline Pankhurst and Ida B. Wells and bell hooks and Betty Friedan and Wonder Woman and videos of 100 years of beauty in Black-American, White-American, and Iranian culture and more all set up and ready to go.

These students already know so much more than I did at their age about Feminist history and literature. On the other hand, I grew up with red and yellow and blue Legos and no Disney princesses. They are at once reading Angela Davis, and expecting rose petaled prom-posals.

Their emotional dichotomy seems different and somewhat more dire, to me, than cleaning the kitchen while wearing my Betty Friedan t-shirt. Or the common challenge of hating the Patriarchy and loving men.

If we read and know these things, but do not articulate them through our lives, does it matter?

Stéphane Hessel was part of the French Resistance in WWII and spent his long life working to resist various threats to human life and dignity. In his small and effective book, Indignez-Vous!: A Time for Outrage, he wrote about how, when he was young and resisting Nazis, it was almost easy because the enemy was so clear cut. Now, with globalization, instant communications, climate change, mass-marketing, and all the rest, the outrage is still easy, but knowing where to direct one’s indignation and action is more nebulous.

Last summer, someone asked me if I could give some examples of sexism and gender inequality still happening in this world. Similar to and as a part of Hessel’s nebulous enemies to be resisted, I feel that sexism is so subliminally and systemically omnipresent that it took me a minute to catch my breath and form words.

Sexism is everywhere and Feminism needs everyone—women, men, and those who have yet to make up their minds, as Lola says in Kinky Boots.

How we respond to this need depends on how we each get up every morning, what we put on and how we are in the world, what we ask for and what we expect from each other every day. Never mind International Women’s Day, it’s always Human Day.

Snow Days!

(Taken February 9, 2013, but it looks a lot like this today too)

There is a lot of snow around my house. I will hold off, for now, in singing its praises, because I understand that for many people, these storms are nothing but a giant pain in the ass, lower back, frostbite, and morale departments.

Everyone, it seems, has some complaint about the snow. The most valid, I think, are related not to the sudden emergency of a snowstorm—everyone seems able to rise to the occasion of travel bans and parking regulations and necessary shoveling with remarkably sweet cranky-Yankee stoicism—but to the problems of living with the longer term effects of big snows.

It is hard to get around on snowy roads, hard for cars and buses and bicycles and pedestrians alike. Watching the subways and buses of the MBTA in Boston cave under so much snow is deeply worrying. Ditto seeing commuter car traffic slow to a crawl and school buses stymied in their routes. Everything slows down, and while I generally relax into and enjoy the extra time and largely readjust my life to accommodate the weather, I am both rare in the choice and lucky in the ability to do so.

The absurd quantity of snow and the lack of places to store it all is a simple tangible reality, and it dramatically changes the board we’re playing Life on. Why, then, are so many people clinging to the same route and routine they would in July or April, and expect nothing to have changed? Some of the most basic facts of our environment and habitat have altered—enormously, immediately, and drastically—in the last three weeks.

A common sensible reaction, I think, would be to alter our actions and habits in response. As a culture, we have enormously and irrevocably altered the climate, but we still, now or ever, cannot control weather. Continuing to commute and work and live as if the weather doesn’t—cannot—touch us is foolish. Nature always wins.

I have a deep respect for and fascination with large natural forces. I like to be out in storms, in mountains, beside the ocean, anywhere I can be reminded that I am small and powerless, and ought to do more and better to live humbly in the face of all that is greater than myself. I find it exhilarating, and comforting.

With that in mind, I relish the lack of control that comes with a big snowstorm. The snowdays, the travel-bans, the seeming constant shoveling of snowbanks taller than myself, all of this is a good reminder that I am not, and cannot reasonably be expected to be, in control. It’s like body surfing on the biggest waves—the same excitement, the same sense of not knowing when your feet will next touch. It is a little frightening, of course, but better to just relax and enjoy the ride than fight the tide. There is a freedom in being beyond of your own control.

Where the sweetness of a storm breaks down is the belief that has ossified into reality that, despite any and all environmental factors, the economy must continue unbroken. This winter, for the first time in my almost thirty-three years, I have a job that still pays me if work is canceled for “inclement weather.” If this were not the case, I would have stomach-churning anxiety about the number of snowdays—going unpaid for even a day rattles a thin budget in the worst, most bullying and powerless way possible. I know that fact in a way, like survivors of the 1930s, that I will never forget. I think about this sick feeling of worry and fear while seeing reports of MBTA commuters being stuck on trains, hearing about friends who spend an hour driving two miles through the city, talking to the other folks waiting for a bus in the snowstorms.

The only people who are out are those who feel that they have to be there. And no one, except for those who clear our roads and keep the rest of us safe, truly needs to be out. Will the world survive if Dunkin Donuts don’t operate for a few days? If corporations and businesses and firms send everyone home? For the most part, we would be absolutely fine if these hours were spent not at work or in transit, but home and among the people we love and labor for in the first place. Further, that so many people now are asked to work from home is a more subtle form of economic aggression. It is an invasion of privacy, a forced erasure of the thin but necessary barrier between personal and public. To me, if a person chooses to work from home, that’s fine. But, when an office demands that a person work from home, that is the Economy marching into one’s sanctuary, pulling the Eminent Domain card and planting its flag. It is abominably rude.

There has been talk about how these storms show how close our infrastructure is to collapsing due to weather events. With the climate ever changing and ever more erratic, I think this is a good warning to heed and act on the lessons of. We are, again, very good in emergencies—the statewide travel bans are like the snowstorms themselves in terms of the beautiful ability to be taken out of control. Where we flail is in dealing with chronic troubles. The storms themselves are not the problem. It is the clean up, recovery, and learning to be flexibly prepared. Climate change, for example, is a one time crisis, but a chronic challenge.

To me, what I see as truly both hastening climate change and breaking the infrastructure is the economy that demands these dangerous patterns of obsessive work and consumption. There are places for snow and time to move it and melt it, if we could alter our habits and expectations, if we could slow down without financial ruin and personal anxiety, if we could learn flexibility, humility, and patience.

Alongside repairing trains and buses, we must fix our economy so that people do not have to risk life and limb to keep a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and respect in their workplaces.  Our current system is cruel, bullying people into dangerous situations and invading their homes. And we are, too often, hamstrung and terrified by finances or so stuck in this rut of obeying the economy and job market at all costs that we forget how to respond with anything other than grumbling compliance.

When it storms and our geographies shrink, and we’re all required by nature to chuck out the to-do lists and day planners, I find it becomes clearer what we do and do not need to survive and be happy. That, I believe, is at the heart of the infrastructure that must be repaired. There are other ways if we will make them. The work of making a new way is, largely, like shoveling out your driveway. And, usually, a neighbor will help, or at least there is the camaraderie of shoveling together.

I want these changes now and sooner, but if it takes a few more beautiful snowstorms until we learn to humbly shift our priorities and work together on different ways of being in the world, I’ll also be delighted.

I’m heading out to shovel now—anyone need a hand digging out?

Eggplants and Old Books

(Photo from First Root Farm!)

It is strange to work with teenagers. They need so much attention, but also so much independence to come into their own. In my work at the middle and high school libraries, I spend a lot of time walking the balance between being invisible and being present at a moments notice. It is, very much, like being a catcher in a field of rye—just in the right place and time when they need to be caught before some lousy cliff or something.

Students who last year came to me with their anxieties and fears about graduating, about the injustices of the world beyond high school, who I laughed with, gave tissues to when their dream school rejected them, I do not know where any of them have landed.

This, I believe, is largely how it ought to be. I think of my students as sweetly as I think of the eggplants and peppers I labored over on the farm last summer. We pulled out weeds, harvested fruits, sold the food, tilled over and replanted another crop. Each thing was what it was, needing what it needed from us, giving what it gave, until its time and season passed and another one began. I loved the product, but was not particularly attached to any single fruit, and always enjoyed the process over the outcome.

In all that I have read and learned and tried to absorb Koanic lessons of non-attachment and being present and mindfulness, nothing compares with the certain knowledge of relative insignificance learned by mentoring students and nurturing vegetables.

We—the students and I, the vegetables and I, anyone and anything on earth—are only together for a brief stage of each other’s journeys. It’s very freeing, and calls into question all sorts of other thoughts on permanence.

One of my main tasks in the libraries lately has been weeding obsolete books from the collection. As a writer, I try to not think too much that I am casually chucking out someone’s passionate life work, just because no one has read it in twenty or thirty years. I try to not think of the drafts, of the late nights writing, of the doubt and despair and revisions and rejections that go into making a book out of an idea. I get Robert Frost in my head, reminding me that “nothing gold can stay,” and that makes it much easier to let go.

We are not an archive—the idea is to be able to further students’ research in concert with the academic curriculum. And so, to make space for what is topical and relevant and useful, we discard and donate pounds and pounds of books. There is nothing quite like recycling “authoritative” texts to remind oneself that time and tide wait for no one, etc.

Besides, in the emptiness of the shelves, in the magic of biology that lets a new crop grow, in a curious student encountering the world, there is so much potential.

Everything that lives needs to grow and change and evolve—knowledge, libraries, humans, love, eggplants, all of it. My usual instinct is to hold on to everything—and I have tried this in so many ways and times and places—and this inability to let go clutters everything up, my heart, my bookshelves, my sweater drawer, and so on. Letting go, even a little, creates wonderful spaces for unknown possibilities.

Cultivating these ideas of being present in the moment, not becoming too attached to or defined by the transient, making space for new knowledge and passions, etc. all of this is only the tip of a very large iceberg in how to be happier, kinder, more ethical, sustainable and all the other good qualities I believe that we sorely need to go forward in a new year in an unceasingly challenged world.

Scrunched up under the root of the world’s various angers and sorrows—climate change, human rights, economic inequity, religious violence, and all the many places where these horrors bleed into one—is a sense of insufficiency. Someone, somewhere, at the heart of all of this feels that they do not have enough of something vital, and so the hoarding of resources and power begins and cracks the world into billions of haves and have-nots.

In the release of letting go of objects and expectations, fears and anticipations, I find that I am able to pare my life ever better down to what is necessary and sufficient, to be present and involved in the activities and relationships that are fruitful and valuable. It feels self-contained and openly mobile, rather than needy and stagnant and sad. I try to be like this, rather than chase what is not or focus on a dearth, rather than a well-loved glut. The act of letting go is an active choice for what you retain, what you possess. At the least, this focus on the positive of having, rather on the negative of lacking, is a good place start.

At the most, it may make a world of difference.