Write It Out: Instruction Video
“What we want of course is the same old story. The trees pushing out their leaves, fluttering them, shucking them off, the water thrashing around in the oceans, the tweedling of the birds, the unfurling of the slugs, the worms vacuuming dirt. The zinnias and their pungent slow explosions. We want it all to go on and go on again, the same thing each year, monotonous and amazing, just as if we were still behaving ourselves, living in tents, raising sheep, slitting their throats for God’s benefit, refusing to invent plastics. For unbelief and bathrooms you pay a price. If apples were the Devil’s only bait we’d still be able to call our souls our own, but then the prick threw indoor plumbing into the bargain and we were doomed. Now we use up a lot of paper telling one another how to conserve paper, and the sea fills up with killer coffee cups, and we worry about the sun and its ambivalent rays.”
***
Ugh. Hard to believe that Margaret Atwood wrote those words 30 years ago – what a visionary. So now here we are, transitioning. Dealing with the Russia-Ukranian war, climate change, continuing lack of clean water for first nations communities in Canada, crazy rising price of gas, rising inflation. Are we learning anything? Welcome to the Anthropocene – “a proposed geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems, including, but not limited to, anthropogenic climate change” (Wikipedia). How can we transition to the world we want to see?
Thoughts? Feel free to share them here.
