Interdependence Day

Yesterday, in a shocking act of collective immolation, the Republican Congress passed what looks to be the single most devastating piece of legislation of my lifetime. Quantifying the harms is an exercise in doom-scrying I have no interest in pursuing today, a day many of us have come to reframe as Interdependence Day. If anything, the project of re-signifying this nationalistic holiday has never felt as critical as it does this year, as we weigh our response to these unfolding tragedies of our time.

The desire to circle the wagons in times of real, immanent danger is as natural as any other part of our hard-wired, human behaviors. As we do though, please let us try, as a matter of critical practice, to inscribe the circle as wide as the circumference of Earth itself. If there one piece of wisdom I feel the world has been offering in recent years, it’s this: There is no bunker, physical or metaphorical, worth surviving in. It doesn’t matter whether we dream of anarcho-syndaclist communes or heavily fortified compounds or spiritual communities or homeschool pods or co-housing with our closest friends—if our utopias don’t include solidarity across radical difference, solidarity across species, they won’t work. We do this together or not at all.

Last year around this time I woke up from a dream with no memory of what had passed in it, but with a clear and strangely specific train of thought in my head: If a certain strain of Christian theology could be imagined to be true: that only humans have souls—not other animals, not plants, not fungi nor any other lifeforms but our single iteration of lanky, brainy primate—then what a barren, tragic wasteland is that heaven? And if one imagines it green—to have sound, scent, color, texture, movement, life—then what is it really, an artificial rendering of a biosphere? Fake, soulless birds alighting on fake, ever-summered branches, their song nothing but piped-in Muzac? An existence devoid of encounter with any other more-than-human being…whose version of paradise is this? How could I ever hope my soul goes there in the end, rather than mulching back into soil that gave it meaning?

Today I’m inviting myself to feel into this again. To remember: there’s no heaven, no utopia, no possible future worth gifting my daughter that doesn’t include the mockingbirds, the fireflies, the coneflowers, the inky caps. There’s no real peace and security I can make for my family inside our fences as long as the neighbors on the other side might be abducted from their home at any moment. It’s untenable. Our fates are always and inextricably interwoven.

Looking forward at our darkening path I have far more questions than answers about how to move forward. But today I can and I do set this intention: Every time I feel myself want to draw the circle tighter, I will push it even wider than it was before. Every time I fear losing this beauty, I will let myself need it more.