In Memoriam: Rosemary Radford Ruether

Yet another of my great feminist and spiritual teachers has died.  Rosemary Radford Ruether, ecofeminist Catholic theologian, died on May 21st.  Her work challenged my thinking and gave me new understandings and perspectives. She was a prolific writer, authoring hundreds of articles and 36 books, and was the quintessential scholar and historian of world religions and ecofeminist theologies. A scholar of the scholastics, she examined three strains of Western thought: 1) the Hebraic tradition; 2) Platonic-Greek; and 3) Pauline-Augustinian in all their complexities to develop an understanding of the nature of Western thought and its implications for the domination of women, nature, and colonized others. As she described her own approach, she drew out the contradictions and complexities in these theologies, careful “to see both negative and positive aspects . . . and to be skeptical of exclusivist views on either side” (Women and Redemption, 222).  Her thought and writing were ever-expanding, and always striving “to see the dominant system of patriarchy, including its racism, classism, and colonialism, in critical perspective,” and to put herself “in places where in solidarity with its victims, I can see it from its underside” (Women and Redemption, 222). To this end, she brought together the ecofeminist theologies of women from around the globe, particularly the global south.[i] Her thought also grew to include critiques of militarism and corporate globalization.  Needless to say, I cannot begin to encompass all of her contributions here.  So, I will focus on the ways her thought has most deeply influenced and inspired my own.

I first encountered Ruether’s thought in the piece excerpted from her Sexism and God-Talk in Plaskow and Christ’s Weaving the Visions, in which she not only challenged the assumption of the male divine, but also argued that “male monotheism reinforces the social hierarchy of patriarchal rule, . . . [and] “begins to split reality into a dualism of transcendent Spirit (mind, ego) and inferior and dependent physical nature . . . whereas the male is seen essentially as the image of the male transcendent ego of God, woman is seen as the image of the lower material nature. . . .Gender becomes a primary symbol for the dualism of transcendence and immanence, spirit and matter” ( 251-252).  In a few sentences, she laid out the basic premise of the ecofeminist theological critique of Western thought.

In this piece, Ruether provided evidence of the many ways that the Bible itself challenges male monotheism, showing how Yahwism appropriates the goddess Asherah of its conquered peoples, incorporating female images of God -- God as mother and as woman in travail, particularly when describing the compassionate and loving aspects of the divine, as in the Hebrew word of compassion and mercy, rechem, meaning womb.  She also explored the wisdom tradition of the logos of Sophia, the paired images for God as male and female in the parables, and notions of Yahweh as the god of liberation from bondage.

Two points Ruether made in this piece had a particularly profound impact on my understanding.  The first is her discussion of the proscription of idolatry.  This proscription precludes any representation of the divine – pictorial or verbal – no images of God as the old man with the white beard and no verbal depictions of God as male or as Father.  What a profound and liberating recognition that was for me.

The other was Ruether’s critique of Christianity’s reliance on the divine as parental.  This model, she claimed, depicts God as a “neurotic parent who doesn’t want us to grow up,” in which the gravest sin against God is to become morally autonomous and responsible, creating “spiritual infantilism as a virtue” (160).  Her discussion of God as parent would always facilitate discussions with students about their issues with imaging God as a parent, when their experiences with their own parents were negative, dominating, or abusive.

Finally, in this piece she laid out the foundation of the ecofeminist theology that would underscore all of her subsequent work: “Feminist theology must fundamentally reject this dualism of nature and spirit” (161).  In the original work, Sexism and God-Talk, Ruether developed her ecofeminist theology, questioning the hierarchy of human over nonhuman nature as well as other structures of social domination, declaring the God/ess as the “primal Matrix, the ground of being . . . Spirit and matter are not dichotomized but are the inside and outside of the same thing” (Sexism, 85).

In the postscript to Sexism and God-Talk, Ruether offered a powerful analysis of the ways this dualism, in which “woman/body/nature” are regarded as inferior to “man/spirit/culture,” contributes to the subjugation of women.  The first of the three levels of subjugation of women  -- “the subjugation of her womb, of access to her body” -- seems particularly pertinent given the increasing curtailing of women’s reproductive freedom in this country.  Inscribed in ancient laws that continue to influence Western consciousness and law is the idea that women’s bodies and their offspring belong first to their fathers and then their husbands.  She cited Catholic church doctrine that birth is shameful, and that only through a second birth of baptism, administered by male priests, is “the filth of mother’s birth remedied” (260). But the following in particular still seems the perspective of many of the new anti-choice legislation arising in state after state: “Woman is taught that the worst of sins, the worst of crimes, is to deflect the male seed from its intended course in her womb. This is more sinful than rape, (emphasis mine), for the rape of a woman does not interfere with the purposes of the seed, while contraception wastes the precious seed and defeats its high purposes. . . . She must obediently accept the effects of these holy male acts upon her body, must not seek to control their effects, must not become a conscious decision maker about the destiny of her own body” (261).  It is this deep-seated, long-held belief that I believe is the true intention, even if subconscious, of those who would seek to restrict women’s reproductive autonomy.

The second level of women’s subjugation, exploited labor, has modified a bit since Ruether first wrote this forty years ago, but it is still the case that “black women, brown women, immigrant women toil silently in the background” (262), and for most women, the double day of paid employment and unpaid labor of tending children and households continues.

The third level, the rape of the earth and its peoples, has if anything increased. As she wrote, “The labor of dominated bodies, dominated peoples. . . provides the tools through which the earth is despoiled and left desolate. Through the raped bodies the earth is raped. Those who enjoy the goods distance themselves from the destruction” (263). The destruction of the Amazon rainforest to supply beef to distant consumers; the mining of the earth of African nations to supply gold, diamonds, and platinum to bejewel the bodies of the wealthy and leisured; the routing of oil pipelines through Native American reservations and ceded territories and the drilling of tar sands oil causing death and destruction to the indigenous populations and the earth so that the developed world can continue to burn fossil fuels to drive and fly and live in heated comfort – these are just some of the ways this subjugation plays out every day.

Yet, forty years ago, Ruether was hopeful for a metanoia – a true change of heart and consciousness – in which we would reject this dualism and instead live in right relation with each other and the earth.  Nevertheless, writing just a few years later, she would forewarn of the reality we are living today, urging that “we must effect this metanoia quickly . . . By 2030 CE it may be too late, or at least too late to save much of the life-capacity of the biosphere that could be saved now. Instead, we will find ourselves operating on the other side of global catastrophes, with much narrower options” (Gaia, 86).

In Ruether’s later work, she would incorporate her understandings of the new physics into her rejection of dualism, describing the matrix as “the dancing energy. . . .of the interconnections of the whole universe” (Gaia, 248).  She also proposed her key concept of “biophilic mutuality” – that all life energies have a desire to be in relationship with each other, and that the deep ontological structures that underlie this propensity are what she considered to be God. “God is not a ‘being’ removed from creation; . . . God is the source of being that underlies creation and grounds its nature and future potential for continual transformative renewal in biophilic mutuality” (Women and Redemption, 223.)

She believed in the deep interdependency and kinship of all beings, envisioning the good society of “communities of celebration and resistance,” in which true metanoia is practiced, replacing “the death system” with a “joy in the goodness of life” where we become good listeners of each other’s stories, and “take the time to sit under trees, look at water, and at the sky . . . and get back in touch with the living earth” (Gaia, 268-270).

Ruether’s thoughts on our ephemeral existence seem an appropriate benediction on her extraordinary life and work: “Then, like bread tossed on the water, we can be confident that our creative work will be nourishing to the community of life, even as we relinquish our small self back into the great Self. Our final gesture, as we surrender ourself in the Matrix of life, then can become a prayer of ultimate trust: ‘Mother, into your hands I commend my spirit. Use me as you will in your infinite creativity’” (Gaia, 253).

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Notes

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Gaia & God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing.  San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.

  ______. Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization, and World Religions.  Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Pub., Inc., 2005.

______. “Sexism and God-Language,” in Plaskow, Judith and Carol P. Christ, eds. Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989: 151-162.

 ______. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. 10th Anniversary ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1983, 1993.    

______, ed. Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996.

______. Women and Redemption: A Theological History. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1998. 

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[i] See particularly Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion; Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization, and World Religions; and Women and Redemption: A Theological History.  

Tree Huggers

Standing around us we see all the Trees. The Earth has many families of Trees who each have their own instructions and uses. Some provide shelter and shade, others fruit and beauty and many useful gifts. The Maple is the leader of the trees, to recognize its gift of sugar when the People need it most. Many peoples of the world recognize a Tree as a symbol of peace and strength. With one mind we greet and thank the Tree life. Now our minds are one.                             - the Onondaga “Words That Come Before All Else”[i]

For over forty years, the maple in our front yard has given us gifts of shelter and shade in the summer, and of great beauty in its gold and bronze fall leaves and winter bare branches. This year, however, was the first we tapped its gift of sugar, and it was generous. It felt a little wrong to rob the tree of a bit of its lifeblood, but the friend who gave us some of her extra taps reminded me that the indigenous people of this land having been tapping the trees here for millennia.  Knowing the wisdom of the honorable harvest – not taking the first or last or more than we need – the trees continue to thrive.  As Ronnie Chilton of the White Earth Land Recovery Project said, “You can cut a tree [down] once and get some money, but if you make syrup every year,  . . . you will get food, a sweet taste, you will smell Spring, and you will get food for your soul” (LaDuke, 132).

As the days warm, the sap begins the magical process of flowing up the trunk of the tree.  We waited with anticipation as the plastic bags hung on the taps filled each day with sap – gallons and gallons from just five taps.  It takes all those gallons to make a small portion of syrup.  Robin Wall Kimmerer recounts the Anishanaabe tale of Nanabozho, who in his walk through the world, was dismayed to discover people taking the gifts of the Creator for granted -- lying beneath maple trees with their mouths open to catch the sweet syrup, without ceremony or care.  In response, Nanabozho poured water into the trees to dilute the syrup, so that now the sap flows like water with only a trace of sweetness, “to remind the people both of possibility and responsibility. And so it is that it takes forty gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup” (63).  And so it does.  When the day came, we boiled all day and well into the night, but in the end we were richly rewarded with two and a half quarts of syrup, enough to last us all year and to share.

Two of the maples we tapped are tree huggers.  Begun as two trees standing beside each other, they eventually embraced, grew together and became one, and several years later branched out into their individual growth once again.  Ignoring Kahlil Gibran’s thoughts on marriage --

 …let there be spaces in your togetherness, . . .

 Stand together yet not too near together. . .

For the  . . .oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow (15-16)  

 -- the maples have found a way to grow together and apart, in each other’s shade and sun, thriving. We have much to learn from them, as Susan Griffin describes so well:

 The way we stand, you can see we have grown up this way together, out of the same soil, with the same rains, leaning in the same way toward the sun. See how we lean together in the same direction. How the dead limbs of one of us rest in the branches of another.  How those branches have grown around the limbs. How the two are inseparable.   . . . the way we stand, each alone, yet none of us separable . . .  (220-221).

 I’ve encountered so many tree huggers in the forest, and each time am thrilled and delighted by the ways in which they embrace and swirl, entangling their lives with each other’s in a dance of life and limb.  They know how to lean on each other, supporting each other through the worst of the winds, and sharing the sunshine. They seem to draw strength and sustenance from each other, and as we know from Suzanne Simard’s work, indeed they do, nourishing each other, their roots undoubtedly entangled even more than their trunks and branches – an extended family of trees entwined in the soil underneath.[ii]  

Tree huggers.  It’s become a derogatory label flung at environmentalists by those who find our actions to preserve the earth to be frivolous at best, destructive to the extractive economy at worst.  Yet it’s a term I proudly embrace, just as the trees embrace each other.  It has a venerable heritage.  Its roots go back nearly three hundred years to 1730 when Amrita Devi led a movement of the Bishnoi community in Rajasthan, India, to save their sacred khejiri trees by encircling and embracing them. Soldiers, whom the maharaja had ordered to cut the trees for wood to build his palace, simply cut through the bodies of those trying to protect the trees. In all, soldiers killed 363 people that day. When the maharaja learned of what had happened, he ordered that none of the trees near the village ever be cut.  The trees, as well as a plaque in honor of the Chipko (meaning “to hug” in Hindi) women and men, stand there to this very day. 

The Chipko women

Their efforts inspired the contemporary Chipko movement, begun in the 1970s as women of a Himalayan region of India also embraced trees, risking their lives to protect the trees from being cut for commercial gain. As ecofeminist Vandana Shiva said of the Chipko women, the actions of “ordinary women . . . have provided local leadership through extraordinary strength. It is the invisible strength of women like them that is the source of the staying power of Chipko – a movement whose activities in its two decades of evolution have been extended from embracing trees to embracing living mountains and living waters” (Shiva and Mies, 246-247). The Chipko movement spread throughout India and has inspired tree huggers around the world – from those who have sat in the redwoods to those like Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Matthai, who founded the Green Belt movement in Kenya, in which thousands of women planted millions of trees.

Hartwick Pines

My mother early on taught us the sacredness of trees, undoubtedly inspiring my tree hugging.  The large white pine next to our house was a great climbing tree, the branches perfectly spaced to enable us to climb high into the treetop. My brother and I spent many happy hours climbing it.  We’d come in covered in sap, much to my mother’s dismay.  Her concern was not so much about the intractability of the sap, or even the fact that her young children had been climbing so high, but rather about the fact that we’d been climbing the white pine again -- a tree she held with great reverence – a delicate tree that may have been injured by our climb. She would often tell us of how, after a day of canoeing the Au Sable, she and her campers would bed down for the night in Michigan’s Hartwick Pines, reveling in the sweet smell of the pines and the soft pine needle beds.   

Of all the trees in our yard, my favorite was the dogwood.  My parents had moved it from their old house to their new one, for they, too, cherished it, and placed it directly in front of the large picture window in our living room.  It was striking in its beauty, its symmetry, its delicate four-petaled flower so distinct from the blossoms on all the other flowering trees.  It is dogwoods I’ve missed the most since moving north where it is too cold for them to grow, but I get glimpses of them in the bunchberry that blooms here in springtime, low to the ground where they are warmed by the heat radiating from the earth.

My mother also instilled in me a love of the north woods – the towering beech with its smooth grey bark; the hemlock gracing the forest, its elegant branches extending protection to the creatures living within and below; the arborvitae – “tree of life” she would always say – with its sacred healing; the paper birch – its white branches striking against the deep blue skies. 

I’ve come to name the birches that fill the woods behind my home -- the “Mother Tree,” bowed in the shape of a pregnant woman’s belly, that also forms a lap where I can sit and rest; “Wild By Nature,” a clump that began as three, then became four, just as my music group by that name had; the “Tree of Life,” a massive clump birch that was a tree of hope for me in the years I doubted my survival.   

I’ve been privileged to have lived a life surrounded by trees, but others are not so fortunate. Millions, mostly poor and people of color, live in urban heat islands where no trees grow.  These heat islands exist primarily in areas redlined in the 1930s, a practice which prevented people of color from getting loans in more desirable neighborhoods of tree-lined streets, resulting in their concentration in the often-treeless neighborhoods considered less desirable. Housing disparities have resulted in health disparities, as those living in these islands suffer poorer health outcomes. In addition to heatstroke itself, extreme heat compromises cardiovascular, kidney, and respiratory disease, and creates higher levels of ground-level ozone pollution, lowering air quality. What’s more, those living in treeless neighborhoods are denied the simple pleasures and therapeutic and restorative benefits of living among trees.

 Several years ago, a massive windstorm toppled nearly a third of the trees in the woods behind our home, and I have mourned the devastation to the forest.  Nevertheless, recently we had a tall red pine next to our house taken down, fearing the damage it might cause if it fell in another windstorm.  I couldn’t watch as the limbs were chopped, the trunk topped, and the tree ground into woodchips -- and have grieved its loss.  This spring I’ll plant fruit trees where the pine had stood, cherries and plums that will brighten the spring with blossoms that will mature into brilliant red fruit, gifts of sustenance both for us and the birds. I’ve planted many trees since moving to my home – spruces, pines, junipers, apples, and a maple or two.  I can hardly think of a more satisfying activity than planting trees -- a bequest to the earth of replenishing humus, to the air of carbon dioxide, to the birds, squirrels, deer, and other forest creatures of food and shelter.   

In the Onondaga “Words That Come Before All Else,” the first expression of gratitude is given to the Earth, “for she gives us everything that we need for life” (Kimmerer, 108). In honoring the Anishnaabe code of reciprocity, for which I have deep respect, being a tree hugger — doing everything in our power to protect, nourish, and restore the earth — is the least we can do in return for all the earth does for us.[iii]

In summer, maple leaves make more sugar than they can use immediately, so the sap begins flowing down the trunk, back to the roots.  The sugar is stored, as Kimmerer notes, “in the original ‘root cellar,’” and then rises again the following spring.  She continues, “The syrup we pour over pancakes on a winter morning is summer sunshine flowing in golden streams” (69).  In reciprocity for this gift, Kimmerer planted daffodils around the base of her maple trees.  I love this idea.  I’ve planted hundreds of daffodils in my garden and hillside, but next fall, in a small gesture of reciprocity, I will plant daffodils around the base of the maples, in reciprocity and gratitude for their gift of summer sunshine in a jar.

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 Notes

Gibran, Kahlil. The Prophet.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

Griffin, Susan. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. New York: Harper & Row, 1978.

Historically redlined neighborhoods are warmer than others in the Twin Cities (sahanjournal.com)

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.      Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2013.

LaDuke, Winona.  All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. Cambridge: South End Press, 1999.        

Maathai, Wangari. Unbowed: A Memoir. New York: Anchor Books, 2007.   

Mies, Maria & Vandana Shiva. Ecofeminism. Halifax, Nova Scotia. Fernwood Publications and London: Zed Books, 1993.

Minneapolis Urban Tree Canopy (UTC) (arcgis.com)        

Race and Housing Series: Urban Heat Islands (tchabitat.org)

Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. London: Zed Books, 1989.

Urban Heat Islands and Equity – GreenLaw (pace.edu)     

[i] Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2013.

[i] Simard, Suzanne. Finding The Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Knopf, 2021.

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 [i] Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2013.

[ii] Simard, Suzanne. Finding The Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Knopf, 2021.

[iii] For those in the Duluth area wanting to contribute to efforts to protect and restore Duluth’s trees, you can join the Duluth Parks and Rec ReLeafing Project.  reLEAF Duluth (duluthmn.gov)

Interbeing

“Every life bears in some way on every other.”

                                                   - Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones

This line from Susan Griffin’s profound investigation into the ways our lives are interwoven through war has been echoing in my mind frequently in recent days.  Perhaps this has been prompted by the upcoming anniversary of my heart transplant – that day on which another’s life, and death, bore so intimately on mine, and continues to.  Living with my life so intertwined with another’s has brought an expanded awareness of how my life, my choices, my actions bear on the lives of others.

This truth echoes throughout ancient wisdom traditions -- in the indigenous recognition that all our relations -- animals, plants, water, earth, stone -- are kin; in the African concept of Ubuntu -- “I am because we are;” in the Buddhist precept of interdependent co-arising. We know this in our every breath through the reciprocal exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between all plant and animal life on this planet. It is in the very nature of the universe – in the immediate effect of one particle upon another; in the way that being observed changes an electron wave into a particle; and in the way the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can create a cyclone to arise on the other side of the earth.[i]  It is in the symbiotic relation of trees and mycorrhizal fungi, and of trees to each other – in the ways fir and birch grow together, reliant on the fungi to facilitate the mutual exchange of nutrients, of carbon and water through the network of roots, and of how the mother tree nurtures the young saplings at her feet.[ii] These truths of the interrelatedness of everything on earth, in the universe, in the cosmos, I know in a very embodied way.

Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (affectionately known as “Thay,” meaning “teacher”) beautifully described this Buddhist principle of interdependent co-arising, which he called simply “interbeing”:

“If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. . . .

We cannot point out one thing that is not here—time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper.  . . . ‘To be’ is to inter-be. We cannot just be by ourselves alone. We have to inter-be with every other thing” (Peace, 95-96) .

What a wondrous world this is, that we dwell in everything and all things dwell in us.  Our lives, our thoughts, our actions manifest in the lives of all beings. This comes with great blessings, and great responsibilities.  As Thay went on to observe, the affluence of some is made of the poverty of others, the foods grown for Western markets are made of the malnutrition of those whose gardens were plowed under for cash crops, the power and security of First World Nations is made of the death and displacement of thousands. His is a reminder that, “we are responsible for everything that happens around us” (Peace, 98).

Every time I drive my car, I am responsible for the burning of more fossil fuels, contributing to climate change, polluting the air and the soil. It weighs on me. Even as I testified and wrote letters and marched and contributed to stopping the Line 3 pipeline that would bring tar sands oil through pristine wild rice lakes, in my driving my car I am also the one profiting in corporate offices, siting the pipeline, violating treaty rights, fracking the earth, destroying the boreal forests and all the beings who dwell within it.  We inter-are. 

By the same token, every time I plant a tree, I help to take more carbon out of the atmosphere and increase oxygenation; every time I pick up litter on the beach, I reduce a bit of microplastic pollution, perhaps save the life of a bird or a fish. I’d like to think that when I treat another with kindness, it ripples onto others. In the years I was teaching, I would take the students in my Women and Spirituality class to visit our local Benedictine retreat center, where the director, Sister Lois, would engage us all in the Buddhist practice of lovingkindness.  Each time she would introduce this practice by saying, “We are sending out energy with our thoughts all of the time, so let it be positive, loving energy.”  At the very least, practicing metta meditations may go a ways towards creating a kinder, more loving world. Even our thoughts bear in some way on every other.

Anyone who has ever carried a child within her body knows intimately the nature of interbeing, as everything we eat and drink becomes the body and blood of our growing child. The air we breathe, the music we listen to, our anxieties and our calm all affect them. These choices are not ours alone. The quality of that air and water and the very ground beneath our feet are impacted by decisions of governments and corporate executives of decades ago and today -- such as choices to allow or prohibit lead in paint and water pipelines or the dispersion of mercury from coal-burning smokestacks, or deciding the locations of toxic waste dumps.[iii] Would that we all acted with keen awareness that we inter-are.

Those who work the land in small scale ways, in intimate touch with the land itself, know well the way soil, water, sun, animals, seeds, plants, microbes, labor, and food inter-be. As bell hooks wrote when reflecting growing up in rural Kentucky, “Living in the agrarian South, working on the land, growing food . . . I was ever mindful of an alternative to the capitalist system that destroyed nature’s abundance. In that world I learned experientially the concept of interbeing” (Belonging, 118-119). On a visit to a local organic farm, I was moved by the reverence with which the farmer held the sacred soil in his hands as he recounted the years of love and labor that had gone into creating the ideal soil structure in which to grow his crops. The first CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) in this region, this farm exemplifies the ways the community of people and land and crops together co-create and inter-are.

The pandemic has heightened our awareness of our interbeing, of how quickly the air I exhale becomes the air you inhale, perhaps carrying with it the minute organism that may steal that very breath from us.  It may only take a few seconds of air exchange to change our lives forever. Yet, the very thing that has made us so acutely aware of the intertwining of our very breath has also isolated us from each other – keeping families apart; precluding weddings, funerals, and graduation ceremonies; closing schools, churches, concert halls, theatres, restaurants, workplaces, community centers – places where we once gathered together.

The keen awareness of interbeing that is one of the many gifts of my transplant increased the importance for me to show up – to be there for others – whether to comfort or console; to celebrate or mourn; to be with others in their birthing and their dying, their struggles and their triumphs; to dance, to march, to be in ceremony, to support, listen, learn, testify, witness, accompany, create community. Yet because of the immunosuppressant medications I must take to prevent my body from rejecting this precious organ, the very heart that is a daily reminder to me of the interweaving of all of our lives now requires me to sequester myself.  It is too dangerous to be much out in the world. Another transplant recipient recently posted that one of the most difficult parts of the pandemic for her has been the way it has curtailed the many ways she was of service to her community. This has filled me with angst as well – not being able to show up for Line 3 protests to offer the ways of healing for which I trained, for friends in the hospital or who have lost loved ones, for my son’s concerts, for funerals and weddings, for family, for friends, and to welcome new babies born into this world.

We are eager, longing to be together again. Yet, as the rest of the world is coming out of isolation, the millions of us who are immunocompromised must of necessity withdraw even farther as the world now becomes even more dangerous for us.[iv] To be able to rejoin the world, we need the world to join us. Just as twenty-eight years ago my life was made possible by the generosity of a stranger, so now do the lives of those of us who have few defenses against the viruses and plagues of the world depend on the generosity and good will of strangers -- others with whom we share the very air we breathe, with whom our lives inter-are.

In the words of poet Marge Piercy:

 “ it starts when you care
to act, . .
it starts when you say We
and know you who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.”   - The Low Road

I am grateful beyond measure for all that the generosity of a stranger’s bereaved family has given me – the blessings of this life, the years with family and friends, the beauty of the world, and this wisdom of inter-being.  Yet, we are not “strangers.”  Bound together heart to heart, we are deeply kin, as we always have been, as we are with all beings.

The beginning. . .

My heart donor, Jodi.

20+ years later

Ultimately, the wisdom of interbeing is that “our being is not limited to what is inside the boundary of our skin. It is much more immense . . . There is no phenomenon on earth that does not concern us. . .. We have to look deeply at things in order to see” (Peace, 104.)

May we learn to look deeply.  

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Notes

Griffin, Susan. A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War.  New York: Anchor Books, 1992.

Hanh, Thich Nhat. Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. New York: Bantam, 1992.

hooks, bell. Belonging: A Culture of Place. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Piercy, Marge. The Moon Is Always Female. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.

Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Knopf, 2021.

Steingraber, Sandra. Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood. New York: Berkeley Books, 2001.

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[i] Bohm’s theorem; the observer effect; chaos theory.

[ii] Botanist Suzanne Simard’s work on this, demonstrating what indigenous peoples have always known, has finally found recognition in the scientific community.  See her Finding the Mother Tree.

[iii] For a detailed examination of the effects of toxins on fetal development, see Sandra Steingraber’s Having Faith.

[iv] For several perspectives on this see:

Back to Normal? Many Immunocompromised People Feel Left Behind as U.S. Lifts Pandemic Measures | Democracy Now!

Covid-19: For the clinically extremely vulnerable, life hasn’t returned to normal | The BMJ

The Pandemic Isn’t Over for Immunocompromised People - The Atlantic

Vulnerable to Covid, High-Risk Americans Feel Left Behind - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

'We're doing everything we can to survive.' As US pushes to a pre-Covid reality, high-risk and disabled Americans feel forgotten - CNN