It's So Natural

Saturday, January 29, 2022, the Bomb Blizzard

Looking out the window over the kitchen sink, awe overtakes me.  Everything that marks this spot on the planet: the towering white pines, the frilly hemlock, the branching river birch; the curved dirt road; the patch of still green Christmas fern—is consumed by wildly swirling funnels that form and reform in the wind as if a host of trembling white ghosts has descended, secreting away everything familiar, leaving behind a mysterious emptiness: timeless and formless. 

In this erasure I am surrounded by forces of wind and cold and snow so fierce that I have completely given myself over to them.  I have nowhere to go, nothing to achieve, to fix, to buy.  Nothing to do but marvel at this Nor’easter, referred to by the meteorologists as a bomb cyclone created by a process called bombogenesis. And pray that the 70-foot-tall white pine twenty feet away from the house and swaying like a ballerina that we have decided not to take down because she is so full of life, doesn’t stumble and fall.

Yesterday, with the weather channels warning of the worst storm in four years, everyone I spoke to, friends and family and patients in my Doxy screen was astir, buzzing like bees. “Did you hear about the storm? I can’t wait,” was a refrain I heard over and over. I heard about trips to the store for good cheese and gasoline for generators. My daughter hoped power would go out so the use of digital devices by the grandchildren would not be an option open to negotiation.   

What is this buzz? “What is the desire in all this fury?” I ask Bob. “It’s so natural,” he replies off-handedly.  That’s it, I think. Today nature and all her wild forces are in the foreground. She’s back, she’s here.  Today my only choice is to marvel at her, at the way in which she came to me without my having to order her on Amazon and choose which color she comes in. Today I don’t have to shovel her or plow her.  I only have to be with her and let her myself trust the fierceness of her life force.  Today I can resonate with the ghosts that rise when the wind gusts to 30 mph and the trees shake and the sound of the wind makes me tremble.

The book open beside me is Amitav Ghosh’s “The Nutmeg’s Curse, Parables for a Planet in Crisis.” I’ve not had a lot of time to read it since citing it last week.  But reading it now while the storm rages outside gives me a perspective on why this moment that is “so natural,” is so dear.

Ghosh tells the parable of the nutmeg, a spice so precious to Europeans that the Dutch found a way to dehumanize and then slaughter and eradicate the people on whose lands the nutmeg grew.  Ghosh uses the word terraforming to describe the frame for subduing human and non-human life we have inherited from the conquerors of the New World.

 “…this is the frame of world-as-resources, in which landscapes…come to be regarded as factories and “Nature” is seen as subdued and cheap.”

“The Earth…having succumbed to mastery holds no more mysteries; the challenge it once posed to the conqueror’s imagination is exhausted.” But, he adds, what the earth is really exhausted of is meaning. 

“Conquered, inert, supine, the earth can no longer ennoble, nor delight, nor produce new aspirations.  Over time this contempt has come to be planted so deep within cultures of modernity that it has become a part of its unseen foundations.”

Four hundred years of colonialism undergirded by humanism’s notion that man and science are the predominant forces in the world, that nature and natural resources are ours for the taking: the mining, the fencing, the paving, the consuming, the taming, the geoengineering have exhausted the natural world and left us on the brink of dangerous changes to the ecosystems that support life.  

And, I realize, sitting here, beholding the bomb cyclone and feeling the cold crawl under the window, it has exhausted me as well. I need this day of surrender to the Earth, this reminder of her untamed presence, her energy. I need to absorb it and rest in the reassurance we haven’t yet killed off winter in Maine.  There is still time.