world's on fire
re-membering it all
There’s a quote by Mary Oliver that often finds its way to me at just the right time: “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
I have been paying attention to the world, and lately, it all feels like a lot. The last couple of weeks have been a mix of grief and love, highlighting life’s paradoxes that I can’t help but notice all around me.
After a devastating day in court, we received the judgment a week ago. We got almost everything we asked for, including my being awarded “sole decision-making authority,” or full custody, of Emma just a few months before she turns 18. This good news was soon followed by the challenge of negotiating with the other attorney over the final issuance of the court orders. Sigh. More grief to overcome.
Does the world feel heavy to you, too? Maybe I feel so weighed down with the grief that comes with the destruction of small mountain communities I love, due to recent fire or floods.
Tomorrow also marks the one-year anniversary of the attack on Israel and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
I didn’t grow up learning about Palestine or its people’s fight for recognition and land. Growing up, most of the world around me was unwavering and unquestioning in its support of Israel, cemented by an apocalyptic (and, I would argue, parasitic) pact made with evangelicals. There was always a “good” side and a “bad” one in the conflict — and, of course, the side we supported was always the righteous one.
Since rejecting the evangelical world of my upbringing, my perspective on the conflict has become much more nuanced and complicated. The dominant storyline I had growing up has been replaced, and my perspective has shifted to make more space for the voices that aren’t being heard. As someone who studies communication, it has been fascinating (and horrifying) to see how one-sided Western media can be when presenting the non-Israeli-government perspective of what is happening in Gaza (and now Lebanon).
This weekend, on the verge of the October 7th anniversary, Naomi Klein wrote an essay for The Guardian that captures some of the paradoxical feelings of grief and love I’ve been wrestling with: “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war.” Klein traces through human history this inherent desire we have to erase paradox and rush to embrace certainty.
The essay is a stunning read on the tricky line we can walk between memorializing & monetizing trauma.
It’s the last few lines of her article that I want to note here (emphasis added):
In Hebrew, zochrot means “remembering”, and unlike the re-traumatization currently passing for commemoration, remembering in its truest sense is about putting the shattered and severed pieces of the self together (re-member-ing) in the hopes of becoming whole. Re-membering the land. Re-membering the people exiled from the land. Re-membering earlier colonial genocides that shaped and inspired the Nazi Holocaust, which in turn shaped the state of Israel. Re-membering that Israel is right now in the grips of a nuclear-armed colonial revenge frenzy in the lineage of earlier colonial punitive expeditions, ones that also used art and collective sorrow as potent weapons of annihilation.
Identifying these deep historical throughlines – what the UCLA Holocaust scholar Michael Rothberg has termed “multidirectional memory” – is work of re-membering, and it holds out our best hope of exiting what increasingly feels like an endlessly recurrent genocide loop. Yet this work grows more difficult every day, as Palestinians face what the feminist scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has described as a cataclysm of dismembering at its most literal: dismembered bodies, dismembered geography, and a dismembered body politic.
Re-membering: connecting the shattered or severed to make whole (again).
A few months ago I wrote about how I view this year of my recovery as a kind of “returning to” myself. Borrowing from the Hebrew etymology of zochrot, I think my recovery is also about learning how to connect all the shattered and severed parts of myself back into a whole.
The reconnection process of recovery has been painful and hard for me to go through, but so worth it. And I would have never started my path unless I had first paid attention — to that “endless but proper work” of my life.
I wish I had more polemical words to write about what’s happening in Gaza, but all I have is a broken heart over the injustice of it all — and how forgetful and intolerant we can be here in the privileged West. I wish I could write rousing text about the injustices Danny’s best friend sees every day in Ukraine. Or a post about all pregnant people who don’t have access to lifesaving healthcare because of ridiculous and paternalistic dogma. I could also write volumes of how hard it is to be the mama of a teen who’s inheriting a much scarier world than the one I inherited …
Which is why I always like to end these newsletter entries with a few random moments of light I found in my week, pointing out a few flashes of joy I found. Because while the grief in the world can feel neverending, there’s still love also to be found.
Free Palestine. 🍉
Things that brought me joy this week:
Danny and I finally got to see our Fleetwood Mac (tribute) show! After missing this tour several times around, we had a weekday date this week and caught the “Rumours” tribute show. We probably lowered the venue’s age down by a couple decades and the wigs may have terrible, but it was still pretty great to close your eyes and pretend this was Stevie singing. While I may have only been a year old when the Rumours album first came out in 1979, as a middle-aged white lady, I still love the record so much.
Let the fall foliage begin! The world is full of bright colors with the leaves changing, and I live in daily fear of a windy day that will strip the trees bare. I still have carrots to pick in the community garden plot, but as a wannabe farmer, I’m gonna wait until after a couple of frosts to harvest them.
Our house is decorated for Halloween! I’m trying not to think about Emma not living here next year as I set up all the decorations.
Last weekend we three made a trek to Edmonton, only to discover, en route, that my beloved Carl’s Jr in Lloydminster has discontinued their veggie burger. RIP to our frequent Edmonton trips.
the WEM is terrible, but Korean photo booths FTW PhDing: Writing groups are my newest form of self-care and accountability. I have 4-6 dates scheduled each week, and I’m forcing myself to work only on my own projects during these hours. I can already tell this term will be exhausting — but doable.
Reading: The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard. Watching: Love is Blind, season 7 (omg Leo is the worst). Listening: to all my deadlines whiz past me.
Meme of the Week:
I had to log out of my work Substack and log in to my personal one to say: LEO IS THE WORST!!! (I've only watched the first three episodes, but hoo boy is that man the world's biggest red flag.)