‘Staying with the trouble’
Life after 2020
I’ve spent a lot of time looking outside my study window this year. Watching the trees bloom, glisten, and shed. Hearing squirrels chatter, scratch, and gnaw. Feeling the warm sun, gritty air, and chilly winds. Knowing that life-changing experiences seep through cracks that can’t always be seen, only felt.
The view from the window has held my attention through an unending loop of loss and mourning, joy and celebration, burnouts and breakdowns. The window has brought me fear and taught me courage.
Gazing outside the window, I have so often thought, I can’t go on, I can’t do, I can’t be. Yet, on I go, changed and changing.
Have you felt it too? The loop, the gazing, the change?
It’s as if the trees, saplings, squirrels, butterflies, sun, fire, and wind, have been seeing me through the cracks, feeling me, and breathing life into me.
I’m trying to make meaning from this experience. What does it mean to truly inhabit a place, be in an attentive relationship with it, to be cared for, and held by it? What does this experience tell us about working through, being-with, and ‘staying with the trouble’ of life after 2020?
This year of social distancing from human kin showed us how we are intimately connected with a multitude of nonhuman kin, across places. We have pondered the COVID-19 pandemic’s origins. We have witnessed how urban areas can go through processes of rewilding when humans go quiet.
We have also learned that being with nonhuman kin is not just an experience to be sought out in the wilderness. Staying at home this year, we are finally seeing and being with many nonhuman kin in our urban neighborhoods.
Our backyards are teeming with life, old and new. I have woken up to previously unheard birdsongs and recently installed chicken coop cacophonies. I have obsessively watched videos of coyotes, raccoon families and gophers, scaling, burrowing and meeting in our urban backyards.
Earlier in the year, I spent weeks trying to rat-proof the attic, squirrel-proof the fences, hive-proof the siding and critter-proof my blooming ‘victory garden’. At the end of this year, I can comfortably acknowledge that the land I occupy is shared habitat, and always will be. The land is living, breathing, thriving, with or without me.
I bid farewell to 2020 with deep gratitude for the trees, saplings, squirrels, butterflies, sun, fire, and wind, for seeing me through the cracks, feeling me, and breathing life into me.
Perhaps recognizing these intimate entanglements with nonhuman kin will help us through the trouble of life after 2020. Even as the loop of mourning, quiet joys, and breakdowns continues to change us in the new year, I hope we remember to experience care and kinship with the places we inhabit.
