Author Archives: mrao2

The Benefits of a Walk in the Park (While the World Ends)

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As humans, we have created remarkable things while simultaneously manufacturing horrors that scar the land itself. Oceans and mountains of garbage will long outlive us. To combat the plastics that plague us, we must feel the connections between us and Earth and each other. Especially, in today’s world, with pandemics and polarization pulling us apart, we must hold on to our humanity.

My group’s action project dealt with the practical and political part of the plastics problem. Working with WashPIRG, we had a petition for people to sign, but my action project group decided that we wanted to get a little more hands-on with our work. To engage our community, we organized two plastics clean-ups around campus, taking paper bags and gloves to the streets for a couple hours at a time to pick up the plastics and other litter we found. By also including people outside of our class on these clean-ups, we were able to introduce the idea of contemplative practices and mindfulness to those who had not previously done it with a leader in a quiet classroom. Trading the hum of the air conditioning system for the breeze and glimpses into strangers’ conversations as we walked by, we reflected on our intentions for the clean-up that day.

Through my reflections, I thought about how in a pandemic, our collective fear has certainly been heightened – this is the largest and most communal death experience I have lived through. Though I have been beyond fortunate not to experience anyone very close to me passing away from Covid-19, the constant news of climbing death tolls has certainly been a weight on my mind. When confronted with the fear of death, people tend to become more insular, more tribal, and more isolated – and I felt those urges as the pandemic polarized public health. But our in-person meetings and connections have encouraged me to reach out more and soften my boundaries, accepting others’ limits and being more open with mine. The only way forwards is together, and my action project has shown me that it is possible to make progress when we connect with each other. Though the fear of disease and death remains a background noise to my daily life, neighborhood walks with bags of trash and sunshine help hold it at bay.

My action project group on one of our clean-ups!

The Space Between the Earth and the Stars: Mahika’s Thoughts on Gravity

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My dad and I like to go star gazing. We drive out to central Washington in the middle of the night, he sets up his wide-angle camera lens and fine tunes his long exposure settings, and I lay on the ground in a parking lot. When I look at the stars, I like to imagine that instead of looking up, I am looking down – suspended in space, held close by the Earth. “Gravity’s Law” by Rainer Maria Rilke makes me feel the same way.

During our contemplative practices, I have pushed myself to sit quietly and think deeply about poems and my personal responses to them, both intellectually and emotionally. I’ve always wanted to be a poetry person – the idea of lyrical verses and esoteric metaphors seems romantic, and poetry is such a valuable medium used to communicate beyond simply the literal words on the page. Somehow, though, I’ve never gotten the chance to devote motivated and genuine time to its study. Through the contemplative practices, I have been able to connect the poems we read to the class material as well as to my own life. Rilke’s instructions to ground ourselves and “trust in our heaviness” – emphasizing the collective pronouns – remind me of the innate connections we have discussed between the human experience and the biosphere. I think about Avi Solomon’s piece “Working Undercover in a Slaughterhouse” and wonder how we ever became so disconnected in the first place.

And the contemplative practices could truly not have come at a better time. Going into this school year feeling confused about my future but particularly connected to the Earth after a summer spent outdoors, I wasn’t sure how contemplative practices would help me find my way. But sure enough, the moment I began thinking about the grounding feeling of the floor beneath my feet, and the constant embrace of gravity, I felt less lost. When anxious or stressed I often feel as if there are far too many things to ever control, but simply focusing on the comforting force always pulling me down makes it easier. Though our group contemplative practices only last a short ten weeks, I will take the grounding processes with me far beyond this class, into my interactions with the Earth, the sky, and other people.

One of my dad’s Milky Way photographs, and an example of the intimate relationship between Earth, stars, us, and the gravitational forces that bind us all

When Death Comes, I Hope We’re Holding Hands

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It is a bit comforting that, as the supposed great equalizer, death comes for us all in the end. Hamlet tells us that “your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service—two dishes, but to one table.” Similarly, climate change, pandemics, and eventual societal collapse are existential, planetary threats that could force us as humanity to truly band together. Why then is our psychological response to death, in this current global-capitalist-industrial era, to draw further within ourselves instead of to reach out and connect? I would like to think that shifting our cultural mindset towards a collective, selfless responsibility to each other would mitigate both the threats that face us and our approach towards them.

Solomon, Greenburg, and Pyszczynski write about terror management theory in their book The Worm at the Core as a potential pathway to this shift in mindset. We take comfort in cultural worldviews that “imbue our sense of reality with meaning,” and we tether ourselves to the self-esteem that comes with participating in that worldview. They claim that it is instinctive human nature. My question then becomes, how do we expand our tent of “us” to include the entire living system? I agree with their thesis that death awareness, both conscious and subconscious, is significant to how we carry ourselves through this life. I want to explore using that awareness to build something bigger than ourselves.

To make this shift, to find stability and meaning in an ultimately unstable and meaningless world, I think we might take our cues from Mary Oliver’s “When Death Comes.” She emphasizes the precious potential in our individuality – “each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular.” But just as beautiful is the community we build – “a brotherhood and a sisterhood” – and the passing on of the gift to the next generation. The Worm discusses symbolic immortality as a form of terror management, and James K. Rowe writes about how capitalism instructs us to pursue wealth as an immortality project, but if we rejected capital accumulation in favor of relationship building – if we considered ourselves wealthy in care and support – I imagine that death would not be so ominous. Sad, yes – leaving behind those you love – but not scary, as one would hope that those bonds will stand the tests of the great beyond.

Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais. A quintessential symbol of the pain of death surrounded by the beauty of life, but not love or empathy.

Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski (2015) The worm at the core: on the role of death in life, New York: Random House.

James K. Rowe (2016) Is a fear of death at the heart of capitalism? The Arrow.

Mary Oliver (2017) Devotions: the selected poems of Mary Oliver, Penguin Books.

Millais, John Everett (1851) Ophelia, Tate Britain.

On Love and Decomposition: Mahika’s First Thoughts

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“Changes” by Big Thief

My roommate recently mentioned that when she introduces me to people, she leads with my name and the fact that I want to decompose in the woods. This apparently essential part of my personality has become a running joke, but it came from a very genuine place – about a year ago, in the depths of quarantine and going a bit stir-crazy in a small apartment, I had a crisis about what I wanted to do with my life. Unsatisfied with my economics major and disillusioned by my classes, I despaired that I would only be happy if I was surrounded by earth.

Thus, this class. I am particularly drawn to the relationship between things – between humans and the natural world of which we are inextricably a part and on which we depend, between global-capitalist economic systems and the consumerist culture we have developed, between the vibrancy of life and the inevitability of death that gives it meaning. All this, combined with the facts that I am easily moved to tears and love the feeling of dirt under my fingernails, leads me to ecology and death and the anthropocene.

I was raised to be quite blasé about death, my parents sending my brothers and I to an atheist camp for our middle school summers. (Think church camp, but trade psalms for the scientific method.) Then, I came to college, had long conversations with my Quaker roommate, and realized I was drawn to the natural circle of life. As we discuss resilient systems, I remember the life cycles of forests, and how fallen trees become nurse logs for new growth. If I think about that for too long, I’ll cry.

I am taking this class because I am drawn to these conversations about what gives life meaning. Two quotes come to mind: In a Classics course I took here at UW, we looked at ancient graffiti on the walls of Pompeii which described love as “eternal fame, to be sung throughout the whole world forever/ so even when I am given to the final flames, I’ll live.” And from a character on the TV show The Good Place: “I argue that we choose to be good because of our bonds with other people.” Our relationships with each other and with the world can, I believe, give us a clue as to how we approach death and how we live our lives.