In my mid-thirties I found myself confronting a horrible silence. I felt it in my throat and my whole body. It was suffocating, paralysing.
I was a poet, but I couldn’t write. When I did write, silent women, stones and heavy weights appeared again and again in my work.
I imagined the silence as a stone, something inanimate. If there was any dialogue, I was cut off from it.
Now, many years later, I know that silence was an expression of the visceral memory of an early childhood trauma that I dared not look at or speak of. My journey has been, in part, to give voice to and make space for that experience.
In the middle of that crisis, my pain was too great to look at directly. But if I expanded my perspective and saw myself not just as an individual, but rather as part of something greater, what at first seemed solid and uniform began to morph. And the stony silence began to transform. If at first the images of the stones made me feel that I was inanimate and disconnected from all beings, over time I came to see that those stones also carried in them a deep wisdom. As I learned to stay with them – to stay with myself – I learned to listen to the silence, and something else emerged, something else that had been there all along.
I want to share here my own personal journey of healing from trauma because it’s connected to my own awakening as an environmentalist, and I hope it might also provide help and insight to others thinking about this moment of crisis in our species’ history and in the history of our Earth. We are all living in a traumatised moment: our Earth itself is out of balance. How can we heal?
Here is one of the few poems I managed to write in that period of personal crisis and despair.
Stone Girl
with the stone face.
The stone heart stone hands stone feet.
See in between she has also stone
and does not speak.
She is acting her part in the dialogue
like the wind listening to wind
or the wind listening to stone.
Stone on wind. Wind on stone.
I think you are almost sisters.
I think you have sat together a long
time. Oh silence, What, from you, wants to emerge?
When I was writing the poem, I experienced myself as a stone girl: I was haunted by a history of women who had been silenced, who had not been able to fully express themselves, who had not been able to fully feel, who had not been able to run and walk and give and receive freely.
In the poem, communication occurs only between stone and wind. I thought I was writing about a world turned inanimate from trauma, about disconnection and death.
But I believe poetry has a wisdom greater than our own, and now, rereading the poem above, I can see the poem is also about the connection, a sisterhood, between all things, and the ever-present potential of transformation.
My healing came, in part, from listening to the silence, from sitting with the stoniness within me. At first, that stoniness felt utterly intractable, monolithic, unchangeable, inanimate. Those stones felt like they might weigh me down and, as they did the writer Virginia Woolf, drown me.
And yet, as I had been taught to do in my practice as a poet, and also in my mindfulness practices and in yoga and therapy, I sat with that silence, that weight. But to do that, I needed to expand my perspective. The pain was too great if I only sat in it as myself – I needed to see myself as part of something larger, to get outside of my small self and witness it from a distance.
And as I expanded my perspective, listening and watching with patience and curiosity, I came to see that what at first seemed permanent and unchangeable, itself shifted. Within the pain was some light, some grace. Within the silence was a very quiet voice – like the wind on the rock.
I had been terrified of death, of annihilation, of being a nothingness, a stone, inanimate, a thing. But as I sat with the stone itself, I saw that the stone itself was no ‘thing’. The stone, too, was part of something larger, a world in which none of us is cut off, but in which we are all interconnected.
Buddhism teaches that all things are impermanent. I came not just to intellectually understand, but to feel viscerally, that even stones are slowly changing. And everything is shaped by everything else. A stone can be shaped by wind: great cathedral-like arcs can be carved by the wind into sandstone.
Over time, I came to feel the connection between my own body and the body of the Earth. And I came to feel that, rather than being cut off, I was also connected to all things; I was elemental. After all, the elements, the stone and the wind are part of the great Gaia, the life of this Earth.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer discusses the Potawatomi language, which does not distinguish between gender – he and she – but does distinguish between the animate and the inanimate. In Potawatomi, stones and wind, fire and places are all considered animate, all part of this living universe, and described not as inanimate nouns, things, but rather as animate verbs. There are very few inanimate things in Potawatomi, usually human-made items that don’t have sacramental purposes – these are the only ‘things’.
I have come to see that, in writing my poems of stone, I was writing not of the inanimate world, as I thought at first, but rather of a deeper way of knowing. But to see this, I needed to get outside of a traditional western vision of animate and inanimate, life and death, being and thingness.
Matter and spirit are one
In her wonderful essay The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, the French philosopher and political activist Simone Weil, writing in the second world war, explores the Greek epic The Iliad, a tale of slaughter and violence, for clues about the nature of violence. Weil writes: “The true hero, the true subject, the centre of The Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away.” She continues: “To define force – it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all.”
When I was abused, overtaken as a child by a violating act of force, I was seen and treated as a thing. My life force, my spirit, was not seen or respected. And in that encounter, I felt not only that I was emotionally overpowered, but also that I might physically die – I could not breathe: would I become a corpse, a ‘nobody’, a mere thing?
In my healing, I needed to re-encounter that force. I felt in my body the truth behind Weil’s words: force wants to enslave man, to turn humans into ‘a thing’. But at the bottom of the silence, I also discovered something even greater than force.
For to become a corpse is not to become ‘nothing’. To die is not to become a thing. And despite our force, no one can make another person a thing. For as long as we are part of this Earth, we are part of something greater. Matter and spirit are one.
Walt Whitman writes in Leaves of Grass in response to the child who asks, What is the grass?: And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Later he continues:
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
What if the grass, our flesh, the stones and the wind, do not collapse into nothingness, but rather, as both Buddhism and science teach us, are always in endless dialogue, an endless process of inter-becoming?
Yet we live at a time in which the threat of nuclear weapons and climate breakdown are existential threats to humanity: we are in the midst of a great extinction caused by human activity. How dare I write in any way in celebration of death when there is so much death around us, when the very natural order is so deeply upset and out of balance? How can I write this when, in some places, grass grows in months it never grew in before, and, in others, it shrivels in unprecedented heatwaves?
What has got us here?
What has got us to this place, it seems to me, is a cultural imagination, stemming back as far as the ancient Greeks, that sees the world around us as inanimate, that takes the sacred out of matter.
In the moment of trauma, we experience ourselves as cut off, inanimate, nothing, annihilated. Time seems to stop. We feel that we have lost our connection to the life force. This is a symptom of trauma.
Thus we are living in a traumatised imagination, an imagination that no longer sees the sacred in all things, because it cannot feel the sacred in itself. We are cut off from the Earth because we are cut off from ourselves.
In a protective measure against the vulnerability of our own feelings, we armour ourselves. We forget that our value, our worth, is in our life force, not in things that we can acquire or in our power, our force, over others. We grow up in a culture of ‘great men’ – Alexander, Napoleon, whose names everyone still knows – or today’s ‘great men’, whose greatness depends on their use of deadly force, on selling more and more things, and on creating rocket ships to take us to distant galaxies. Jeff Bezos, who sends things in cardboard boxes to people around the world, and Elon Musk, who, like Bezos, has a space company, are now two of the richest men, their net worth greater than that of the bottom 50% of the world’s population.
I, too, once adopted a version of this protective armouring: at times, I tried to place value in my accomplishments; at other times, to protect myself against my own suffering, I tried as a younger woman to convince myself of my worth by placing value in my looks – if my body were a perfect, beautiful thing, thin and hard like a stone, then I’d have value. In my crisis, even my silence, those images of stones were forms of armouring.
We have used our minds, our power to try to control the world around – and within – us. Partly, we do this because we are afraid of death. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari suggests that in our fear of death, we have tried to control it and have come to see death as something to be overcome, as a kind of “technical problem”. We have domesticated animals, treating them as things for our own consumption; we have developed agricultural practices that treat the Earth as a resource; we have mined deep into the Earth and now talk of mining in outer space, assuming that resources can simply be taken as our own. But paradoxically, as we have tried to make the world more and more comfortable and vanquish death, we have created more and more deadly weapons and created a system so out of balance that climate breakdown and extinction threaten our very
survival. In our objectification of the body and the elevation of the mind with its rational order and desire for control, we have dehumanised ourselves.
We have become a culture of things, a death culture.
And yet, to heal, we need to deal with our relationship with death. We need not to run from it, but rather to mourn. We need to face our fear of death. We need to reanimate death and bring back our interconnection, not just in the spirit realm, but here, on Earth. We need to reanimate life. Rather than try to make rockets that will take us to Mars, or invest in technologies that will preserve our consciousness for some imagined future, or invest in artificial intelligence, what we urgently need is to shift our course. We must shift our imagin-ation, as poetry helps us do, and come back into sacred, respectful relationship with the world around – and within – us. We must reconsider our relationship with the Earth and the elements.
How does this translate into action?
We need to keep fossil fuels in the ground. What are fossil fuels if not rocks that have within them great amounts of energy? And why do they have that energy? Because rocks, after all, are not completely inanimate. And certain rocks contain millions of years of stored, fossilised energy, because death is not a nothingness, but rather a process of transformation.
And that energy is not simply there as a thing for our taking.
Native American cultures practised no-till farming because they understood that cutting into the Earth was disruptive and violent. The Earth, after all, is the mother, and to cut into her body was to disrupt the sovereignty of her body.
When settlers first ploughed in the Midwest, the sound of the roots being cut through created great echoing booms that echoed in tremors for miles. Cutting through that underground network of roots was traumatic for the Earth and the ecosystems. It’s not a surprise that, less than a hundred years later, the Midwest experienced the devastation of the dustbowl.
Science tells us now that no-till farming helps prevent soil erosion and dehydration and keeps the nutrients in the soil. It tells us that the planet is heating up at unprecedented rates. It tells us that species are dying at unprecedented rates. Science can gather the data from around the globe and present it to us. And in my progressive neighbourhood, there are yard signs that say things like ‘I believe in science’. This is important.
I also want to suggest that in our increasingly polarised world, when there is more and more fake news, when there is more and more mistrust of authority figures, what we need is not necessarily more thinking, more arguments, more evidence, and more of the analytical left brain, but rather more connection and deep listening. Indeed, we are not just thinking animals, but full-bodied, sacred animals.
Western culture, from the church to the reign of the intellect, has cut us off from our bodies, which were seen as not just untrustworthy, but also the realm of the feminine, which was systematically denigrated. What was so threatening about the body and the feminine? Their capacity for both death and birth, their vulnerability and also their creative power.
The Earth, like our bodies, is always speaking to us. And what we need to do is listen. We need to pay attention, not just through our left brains, but through our whole bodies.
My body experienced in its childhood a great traumatic boom that echoed for decades through my life. As I learned to listen to my own body, to my own story, I learned to listen to the whole world around me.
My story is a woman’s story; in my journey to listen to and honour my own, for so long silent places, I have also heard the stories of so many other women who were similarly violated, similarly silenced, similarly cut off from themselves. This is not a unique story, and though it’s a woman’s story, it’s also a story that connects me to all other beings and to Mother Earth herself: the Earth is a body that is not here to be raped and pillaged, just as human bodies are not meant to be raped and pillaged; we are not meant to be killed in acts of war, or degraded in an economy where some lives are considered hundreds of thousands of times more valuable than others.
In coming to heal, I have needed to learn to love my own body and to attend to my connection to the Earth. This, I believe, is what we must do collectively. Hidden in the silence of so many generations of women is a cry for love – a cry to move out of a culture of rape back into a culture of caring, to move out of a culture of possession back into a culture of nurturing.
We must love ourselves back into listening, love ourselves enough that we can bear the pain and suffering around us, and make different choices.
I’ll end with another poem, one that I wrote as I was beginning to come out of my personal crisis and able to listen in a different way to the dialogue all around me.
Outside the Sparrows Are Awake
and all the complications in my heart:
I, who did not know how to love
my own body, who mistook
the world for a task. Listen:
one voice and then another
amid the rustling of the leaves.
