I set off with only one purpose: to open to the mystery and paradox of the east shield. The first dawn light is still an hour away, and so these first steps are a slow, aimless wander. I know this place, have spent a quarter century of my existence weaving my life with here. Colleen sleeps inside, Gaia held close while Dao has staked up in his corner chair–-some strange wingback thing which, like most of our furniture, we inherited. Why that seems funny to me this morning is beyond my scope. What I know, though, is that the fire is crackling in the wood stove, my sacred ones are dreaming, and I am stepping into the night to see that great rise.

The stars are myriad, sharp, and vast. They are a great tapestry of possibility, so close in yet so far beyond my ability to really comprehend: eight minutes by light to our sun, four-point two years to the next star, and our galaxy some one-hundred thousand years across. By light. Staggering.

I walk the ridge in the darkness slowly to the south. High above the Spruce on my left, a wispy, fast-moving shooting star slices the sky pointing east. I pause, wonder. I turn east, walk to the edge of the ridge where land begins to fall away dramatically. I feel into this spot, and then drop my sleeping pad and lay on the convexity, feet in the east and downhill. I watch the rise of the light, and wonder some more at the vastness of it all.

I have a tendency to read a lot of different things all the time. Ostensibly, my reading should be quite focused on (eco)psychology, and particularly that (empirical) literature which will/is populate my dissertation literature review (draft incoming soon professor, promise :) lol. But on some level, it's all about (eco)psychology! So my reading meanders, regularly, threads of some patchwork still unhewn, raw, wild…

If I get in our automobile, take a right out of our dirt driveway and onto our dirt neighborhood road, follow it 1/8th mile down the hill to the right, I come to Colorado Highway 133. There I am faced with a choice: I can turn right or I can turn left. But no matter which I choose, I will enter a gridwork of roads (and ferries, ocean vessels, trains, airplanes) which can literally take me to every single person I have ever met and billions more I have not, across our globe.

Not even for one hundred years has this been so. This is–-as first generation ecopsychologist Chellis Glendinning (1999) so carefully laid out in her book Off the Map–-a direct result of empire.

Consider the deep time perspective: for somewhere around two-hundred and fifty thousand years our species navigated life in entirely different ways. Arguably, we have always been a species on the move (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021). Recent evidence shows cultural similarities across and between vast ranges and landscapes going well into pre-history, trade routes serving as cultural exchanges that seem somewhat miraculous for the technologies at hand. Today, however, empire writ large via globalization means in a single keystroke here, I have (invisibly) engaged with people working in mines, factories, power plants, chemical plants, and office cubicles in dozens if not a hundred different nation-states (aka, small empires). 

What is wrong with that? I/you might say.

If I/we look beyond the duality construct (encultured right/wrong-nesses) and gaze more towards impact, what I notice in me is that because of my (almost) daily engagement with the industrial transporation and logistics network, I map my life and time according to the rhythms of modernity. As I consider the breadth of these impacts, I feel confused, a paradox of emotions stirring a discomfort in my core. A discomfort that knows deeply that I too am that empire.

I do not mark most of my days by sunrise or sunset, by the cycle of the Oak acorn harvest or the huckleberry ripeness. Instead, I have integrated and internalized a system by which almost anything of the market can be brought to me via these systems of roads. Such a reshaping of my animal identity is not just a mass shift from evolutionary ecopsychological grounds of our species but also has/does/is a reshaping of our embodiment. Taken together, this is/has been/ a somatic ecopsychological reconfiguration happening ongoingly and almost completely invisibly all the time.

Put forth in the early 1990s, ecopsychology was/is not just a trans- and inter-disciplinary field; at its root is a radical praxis calling for the disruption of such systems. Integrating wisdom from deep ecology, systems theory, ecofeminism, and social justice, the call was/is for a re-remembering of our innate (biophilic) affinity to the lifeworld and the potential reciprocity therein.

And we can't go back. Not in any current realistic context. Nor would that really be engaging and accepting the costs of what has been done, what has been gained, and what has been lost.

Maps, roads, networks, transportation infrastructure: all of it came with a cost, the most important of which is that no lands across the planet were unoccupied. The expansionist and colonial empires of Western Europe for the last six-hundred years did not and still have not cared about the indigenous peoples, and the great sweep of resultant empires are only just now beginning to see/accept/feel/engage with the devastation wrought in the wake of such callous greed.

As Graeber and Wengrow (2021) have so pointedly detailed, the falsehood which has

There is a falsehood which has permeated our social and educational systems–-that the Homo sapiens prior to the rise of civilizations based on markets (i.e., capital) were somehow less creative, less socially and politically adept, and generally less than our current Selves. As graeber and Wengrow (2021) detailed so thoroughly, this is clear fallacy–-a fallacy which, however, clearly promotes the doctrine of empires of the last six-hundred years, current ones notwithstanding. What the authors' draw us toward even more clearly, which is currently riding the inner circuitry of my embodied psyche, is this: why, when, and what factors led to the permanent installation of a ruling class powering-over the rest?

The dawn light is moving; night is setting and the unconquerable star fields with it. Perhaps this skyway, as given, is the final, non-empire-able setting. Perhaps this vast cosmic web is a sacred gift to ease our conquest-ing minds and relax into the infinity of each moment: an infinite sky which shall have no roads.

This summer a 14-year old came on the teen quest with us. He was reading The Road by Cormac MacCarthy. I remembered thinking and then asking both him and his mom about it: "Is he too young to be reading that?" I proceeded to learn over our time together just how amazing this young human is, how smart and wise and emotionally intelligent. Still, I keep coming back to that almost horrific novel's ending and the terrifying reality portrayed. Now, a few months past, I am reflecting deeper: perhaps it is just his generation who might live through such a future history and by engaging with the darkness of human shadow at such a young age and so consciously, something which exists in each of us, that trend line toward annihilation will be shifted.

Can we enter these difficult and confusing conversations and spaces, and stay? Is that not the great message of the rising light, the East shield, this place of death and birth, and the confounding nature of all the paradoxes therein? How do I/we hold such a prayer in the midst of these confusing moments and days?

The sun is rising and the transformation to day is nearly complete. To this the rising light, I offer that prayer.

🐦 tbird

References

Glendinning, C. (1999). Off the map: An expedition deep into empire and the global economy. New Society Publishers.

Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (2021). The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity. Picador.

McCarthy, C. (2006). The road. Alfred A. Knopf.