Time to stay

I’m writing this as the worst of the heat dies down but the drought well and truly sets in. France is now in the biggest and most severe drought ever recorded and although the whole country is affected, the greatest difference between what was and what is is in the region where I live, the centre-west of France. The forest is dying. Parts of the Loire River have dried up. The rivers near me, the huge Creuse and the Vienne, the smaller deeper Gartempe, smell like rotting waterweed and are choked with slime and only centimetres deep in places. For several days last week the moon rose blood red and I couldn’t see clearly to the end of the garden, as smoke from fires 350km to the south drifted around us. I don’t know where we are going but I know that wherever you are right now, it’s time to be there, now.

Further afield, the Danube river is down so low that a mammoth skeleton was left exposed. A mammoth. From the ice age.

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My father, insomuch as he participated in raising my sisters and brother and I, brought us up as quasi-animists/atheists. He taught us that nature is divine, and wrote about his beliefs in long, boring, didactic essays which he would print out and give to me*. He barely practiced what he preached, and was then thrown out of his community and reverted instantly to being the vindictive sin-obsessed Catholic he always was, talking about stoning and beheading his own children for reviling their father, about the lack of honour his children were showing him, and about being damned. Predictable. But also amusing when he would write us thunderous emails full of damnation which I think were supposed to strike terror into our hearts but instead simply made us laugh.

But both through his attention and through his neglect, I grew up being held by nature. Escaping from his house and the people in it, and hiding in the forest for much of my childhood, walking for kilometres through the Australian wilderness, I never once felt fear. My only fear was being seen by people, having to make myself visible, talk to them, be interrogated by them. I did feel sometimes as though I had no right to be in certain places - I do not like the large waterhole in a certain bend of the river across the dirt road from the land I grew up on, and I absolutely do not like the bottom of the enormous waterfall, where the mighty Ellenborough river tips over the Bulga Plateau and down into the valley below. But oh how I love the valley.

In my head, my most peaceful memories are always being alone in the forest. In my head, the end of my life will be spent alone in the forest, and I do still hope there will be a forest. As a child, if I heard people approaching wherever I was, I would hide. I would practise swimming for distances underwater so I could leave the swimming hole for another part of the river around the bend, where I couldn’t be seen, gliding silently through the water like a small crocodile, I became adept at lying down in the tall grass and remaining incredibly still. This brought its own gifts. Small animals would emerge, tiny skinks, insects would crawl over me and I learnt not to flinch, and then the little birds would come, and by and by the larger birds. By the river, if you sit quiet and still long enough, platypuses sometimes surface, and snakes will come sliding out. I have never felt fear of snakes, and I grew up in a region with several species of the most poisonous snakes on the planet. What I feel is respect. Snakes like me, they slide into my discarded clothes when I go swimming, they lie in my path, they swim with me. I speak to them, telling them I am not here to interrupt their concentrated, deliberate, careful lives, I ask them to leave, and if they feel like it, they do. Or I sit naked and observant until such time as they have had enough of my clothing, which is how the snake asks me to wait.

Here in France, nothing is wild. You can’t ever get lost here, all the land belongs to someone, and there is always someone watching. But it’s still the same earth. It took me a long time to see this. I was very hostile to European nature when I first arrived, because it is tame, because there is not very much of it, because the plants here I know only as noxious weeds in Australia, or as water-hungry pointless additions to wealthy peoples’ gardens. It was only after years of being here that I began to see them for themselves, and it took me even longer to begin to relate to them.

Last year, in a moment of deep sadness, I smoked some stuff and drank some wine and went into the garden to cry privately. I was looking at the enormous amount of work I needed to do, need to do, and wondering once again how it is that I am so alone and so far away from where I grew up. I had my hand on the trunk of the quince tree and all at once I felt it soothing me, the same way the hundreds-of-years-old trees in the cloud rainforest where I grew up used to soothe me. Stay, it said, stay and care for what is in your hand. I stood for an hour there, absolutely still, as I used to in the forest, and I could feel the bark and my hand becoming the same, growing into each other, and I could feel the roots beneath my feet, and the branches above my head, and then the energy in my body began to flow out and join with the roots and up with the branches and I could feel myself extending below the ground and into the air and I became once again filled with the absolute peace I knew as a child only in the forest, moving through and into and merging with everything around me, not ever sure where one substance ended and my substance began. Finally the dog came out and found me and fitted his muzzle exactly into my other hand and the three of us, dog, human with a dog’s face in her hand, tree, stood there together, not moving, for an age.

Since that evening my despair has lifted, and with every passing day I am once again moving into the connection that is most important to me. I could sit in my large ruined garden all day. It is full of burnt weeds at the moment, but amongst the weeds I can sit and watch the insects and butterflies and the birds, and begin to learn their cultures and their societies as I once knew the habits of the insect and bird and animal people in the bush around me back home.

The flowers in these pictures are all grown from seed. They are the only small part of the garden I am keeping watered at the moment, using the water I save from the kitchen sink. I put down shallow large saucers of water for the birds, which flock continuously. This small part of the garden is for me like a blessing. I see it continuously throughout the day. The way these flowers bloom, the colours, the beauty, the bees and birds that have come back just because of this small patch of garden, the way everything responds to the least care with an extraordinary exuberance, giving back far more than is given, fills me always with awe and with hope. It is just a flower bed in a small ruined courtyard, surrounded, out of the photos, by building rubble and weedy baked earth. It is not a thousands-of-years-old forest on top of a mountain range full of deep valleys and tumbling waterfalls and crevices and enormous black glossy boulders veined with marble, anchored by the roots of massive moss-covered trees, and full of iridescent, darting, scuttling, flying, crawling movement everywhere. And yet it is the same. It’s the same.

It rained earlier for the first time in weeks, but already the heat is climbing again. France is catastrophic. Europe is catastrophic. Canada is catastrophic. Parts of the US are catastrophic. If you are not deeply worried and apprehensive and sad right now, you are disconnected. But despair?

I don’t think people who are grown adults have the time or the privilege to feel despair right now. I know that the younger adults do, because my daughter is a younger adult, and she says she deals with it by shutting down. She doesn’t have the mechanisms to hold this, and by this I mean the absolute catastrophe that has only just now become apparent to some people that we’ve been warned of for decades but that our politicians and many people in our own societies have ignored.

I have people coming into my inbox and telling me their despair, wanting me to hold it for them, and at first I tried, and now I just can’t. I want to slap them. We are in a major extinction event. It is terrifying, but no more and no less terrifying than Indigenous people all over the world have lived through, are living through, for the past 600 years. Armageddon already came to so many Indigenous people in so many ways, and yet they are still here, still doing what is necessary, still in deep community with each other, in communion with the Earth, and in consultation with their ancestors and with their descendants. To be in despair right now tells the world that you are a consumer, and that the product you like is not currently available. Despair in English comes from the French word désespoir - the word hope is espoir, so despair is to be without hope. I refuse utterly to be without hope.

The only way despair is useful is if it motivates you.

Despair is an indicator that you are disconnected from community, We need community. We need not only to be in community with other people but with all living things. We need also to be in community with our ancestors, those that came before us, whom we learn from. We don’t just learn from their good deeds - for most white people we need to be learning from their mistakes, their blindnesses and their beliefs which were largely antithetical to life at large and which have brought us to where we are now. We need to acknowledge and thank our ancestors for their teachings, and then we need to see ourselves as part of a whole ecology of time and love and energy and let those teachings flow through us and transform us so that we can transform for our descendants and transmute those teachings, so that we can hold our children and our young people, so that we can rejoin the world.

If this all sounds too whack, it’s not. I am not advocating a wellness retreat where we all concentrate on our own thoughts and prioritise ourselves and protect our peace so to speak. But the revolution will not be televised. Take your grief and your fear and your anger and move it through you and out into the world, just like water and light and sap moves through an ecosystem. Find community and grow roots and branches. Donate energy. Donate money, which is simply another form of energy. Plant trees. Hold people. Hold spaces. Reach across generations, especially if you are my age or older, now is the time to trust younger people and help them. They are facing their future too and they have far more at stake. Turn away from all the harm and simply refuse to acknowledge it. See it, clock it, and then refuse it. This is not the same as not seeing it. It means being active in refusing it. An example is refusing AI whenever and wherever possible. Refuse anything that works with AI. Refuse to listen to, work with, or reward in any way people who use AI. This is what I mean by refusal. Refuse.

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Over and over again at the moment I keep thinking of the scene in the original Bladerunner where the replicant Roy Batty is about to come to the end of his android life, having learnt how to be human, which, in a nutshell, means how to love deeply, -and having lost everything he loves. It is a deeply moving scene to me, and his speech, given by the late great actor Rutger Hauer (who 12yo me had an enormous crush on), seems to speak to something many of us feel right now.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

I feel like we are on the verge of being able to say the same thing to our descendants.

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. The coral reefs of the Great Barrier Reef in all their colours. A valley full of cicadas so loud it echoed and bounced off the pulsating greenness of the trees. I’ve seen a million iridescent Christmas beetles scintillating in huge gum trees with pure white trunks. I’ve swum in channels where the sweet river meets the salty sea on a moonless night as the stars reflect in the water and phosphorus fire plays and breaks across every movement, dolphins arcing out in the bay in ethereal light, lobsters streaming cold green fire as they stalk amongst the rocks. I’ve watched stingrays jump and flip in their mating dances and waves break in heavy silver, so full of fish that they glitter and shine like chainmail. I’ve sat in a valley whilst thousands of butterflies rose around me on vectors, dancing to pheromones that are on a level I cannot even imagine, and I’ve walked a wadi in a desert after the rains came down, where clouds drifted at ground level and the acacia trees threw their perfume around the rock walls and hummed with wild bees. I’ve seen a snake slide down a hillside in the distance with the sun catching its scales, turning it into a moving sinuous line of sunlight as it made its way down amongst the bracken. I’ve slept under the stars in the desert and watched as meteors traversed the sky in showers whilst the planets moved in their courtly clockwork dances, cold and distant and yet warm and loved and named individually in every single human language since the beginning of our time here on this jewel of a planet. I’ve talked to black cockatoos and had them talk back to me. And here I have seen swallows in the evenings, I’ve seen the strange elliptical quantum shapes of clouds of starlings across the bare winter fields, felt the air vibrate with sound as swans fly overhead, and watched zinnia seeds grow from nothing to exuberant delighted beauty.

But the last thing Roy Batty said is time to die. No. I will instead put a different, equally well-known quote at the end of my version of the Bladerunner speech, from the wonderful Arundhati Roy

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

These past four weeks of extreme heat in France have distilled something in me. Moving slowly, sweating profusely, through the sauna-days, through the oven that is my atelier, not able to work properly, or eat, or sleep, I seem to have sweated my way into clarity about where I am and what to do, and I wonder if other people are feeling the shift too, from despair and disconnection into connected action and wholeness. I really hope you are. Wherever you are, you need to stay there now and move from where you understand.

We do not have time for despair. Grief, anger and fear are all facets of energy. We are all here together. Find your roots and your branches and move however imperfectly away from purchasing your way through this one life and towards creating a new ecosystem for all of us, one which includes all of us, all living things, all our people, all our cultures, all of us.

I want to finally just share a post I came across on Instagram recently. It moves me deeply. It is here. Stuart James is an Indigenous North American man, and in the video, he is singing to a buffalo. There is a large carpark between hm and the animal, and the constant sounds of cars accompany his song. The buffalo, across the carpark, standing against an empty green plain, sways as it listens. An Indigenous man, singing to his Indigenous kin, from across the damage that the West has inflicted on our earth. And the kin is there, listening. Animals have cultures and societes and histories and cultural memory. So do birds and trees and insects and rocks and the very land we stand on, from which we are not separate. All of it knows who loves, and it knows who harms, it knows who reciprocates and who steals and loots. The earth knows who belongs where. All the money in the world cannot buy the connection that the man singing has to the animal he is singing to, and all the damage done and being done still cannot erase the trust. This video is devastating on several levels, but also still the hope, the espoir, is there. Those connections are still there. They are the most important things we have, by far. Beyond all the trash and money and horror, they are the only things we have, and they are everything. They are why we are here. Stop moving and root yourself down and branch up and find your connections.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Substack has just announced it will allow AI data-scraping to be conducted on all newsletters on this platform. I never use AI for anything. I will never use AI for anything. AI is for losers and the talentless and lazy. I have not spent most of my life learning how to be a writer to have my work fed to a piece-of-shit software owned by billionaires whose only aim is to strip us of our humanity and sell it back to us at a price whilst using all our fresh water to do so. I am working out where to go, and will let you know when I have made a decision.

*Sometimes I feel I might also do this. Sometimes I don’t publish things for ages because they sound to me like my father, which is horrifying. He will no doubt be stalking me through the ethernet, more than likely with my mother’s help, even though he hates her and said hideous things about her behind her back. They are the weirdest double comedy act ever.

It’s interesting to note that the EU has very strong cyber-stalking laws, far stronger than Australia’s, which I am protected by because I am a resident but they apply to people outside of the EU if those people are stalking an EU citizen or resident. I have a whole dossier of their communications stretching back years, which make very interesting reading, especially when you consider why my father now lives in Adelaide and not in the house he built himself. If the people in question read this, they are welcome to add to that dossier. Y’all take care now.

To everyone else, thanks for being here xx