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Final Reflections Upon the Class and Action Groups A Follow Up to a “Budding Believer to an Engaged Activist”

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As a summary of my final paper I would like to summarize my thoughts with the phrase that caring and taking affirmative action are two completely different things. For as long as I can remember I have been an advocate for the environment and have tried to do my part through eating vegan and taking part in charities that clean up the waste we leave behind. Although I have learned extensively about what our damage has been to the Earth and the system that we rely on this class I felt like I was visually and physically exposed to the work that truly needs to be done to make a change for the better.

My action group focused upon banning fur farming from Washington, and hopefully Oregon, which was a refreshing change from just reposting stories during Covid when it felt like nothing could be done. Yet during our action project I was able to appreciate the positive impact that social media can actually have on spreading a message for a good cause. Social media is often a very negative and surface level space, so it was incredibly refreshing to use it for the right purpose. I felt like although I wish I could have done more we as a group were able to enact the actions that we hoped to, and also some of us committed to taking further actions in the coming months as well as further into the future.

In relation to the class I felt extremely appreciative about the action group that I chose, as I felt like it touched upon so many of the subjects that we had covered over the quarter. From manifesting political ecology, to confirming that change begins with emotion, to learning about the gruesome topic of animal farming both from animals farmed for their skins as well as their bodies. I was even able to gain knowledge pertaining to how these practices that are hidden from the general public contributed to the spread of Covid.

Overall I feel extremely blessed to have been part of a class that encouraged conscientiousness and connection as well as understanding when difficult situations in our personal lives beseech us unexpectedly. I have been reinspired to stop shielding myself from the death and sadness in the world and instead take what I have learned to counteract the negativity in the world.

Building Connections Inside and Outside the Classroom  

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This class provided a valuable experience for me to learn about three inextricably related topics of politics, ecology, and death and how I related to them. Using the readings to educate myself, the discussions to learn about others in the class, and the contemplative practices to sit with myself, all helped me to engage with the course. 

For me, the highlight was working on the action project. It was a tangible way of demonstrating our knowledge and impact on the community. I felt that our group was successfully able to navigate the challenges of the hybrid course and stay in consistent and fast communication throughout the quarter. For our action project, we were initially paired with the Good Grief Network to discuss the implications of the Terror Management Theory, with an emphasis on youth voices. Together, we drafted a series of questions designed to prompt people to think about how they think about climate change and death, as well as begin to build connections in their mind between those topics. 

I realized that we had been a little ambitious in the number of questions we asked and the number of people we interviewed. Unfortunately, this resulted in a lot of very thoughtful responses being cut in order to create a succinct five minute product. Regardless, I was very pleased to see the reception from our class being overwhelmingly positive. I am proud of our group for being able to take initiative and exercise our creativity with this action project. 

The interviews reinforced many of the class concepts we discussed in class. Almost everyone that we spoke to found significance in individual actions regarding climate change, yet placed a higher responsibility on corporations to address the issue. It seemed that people were moving away from religion as a cultural value and turning more toward the idea of community and family. Reflecting the sentiments from our class, most people seemed to accept their inevitable death. Being prompted to think about it encouraged them to live their lives with more conviction. 

My main takeaway from this class is to be able to live with uncomfortability and uncertainty. Being conscious and accepting of our temporary existence is something that must be mastered in order to truly affect change in the realm of politics and climate change.

Motz, C. (2020, March 18). 5 ways to build community amid a crisis (and why it matters). Wellington Experience. Retrieved December 17, 2021, from https://wellingtonexperience.com/5-ways-to-build-community-amid-a-crisis/

In defense of old people

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Gosh, I was piqued by some of the discussion toward the end of class that intimated that other professors teach that elderly people are a drag on the economy.

So, while dinner is cooking I want to expound a little.

The elderly are not freeloaders. Most working people in our economy contribute to their retirement with every paycheck via a social security account. For those lucky enough to be earning a pension, additional amounts from their pay are contributed to a retirement account. These are not bonuses, but are deferred wages. So, when people receive their modest social security or pensions, they are receiving back money they earned. (For clarity, the only people who get money they are not earning are the very wealthy who take it from people who are working. And also undocumented workers pay into social security and other funds with no hope of ever collecting.)

Elderly people without sufficient income are still working for pay and healthcare into their 70s – you see them every day as grocery baggers, department store greeters, retail clerks…

The elderly are not idle. It was a funny truism that when a member of my senior exercise class would be wondrously happy at the prospect of being a grandparent, we others knew that we were seeing the last of them. Because as soon as the baby was born, boom!, our friend would disappear to be enmeshed in fulltime baby care.

But we don’t all do child care. A quick survey of what people like me are doing yields volunteer hours at food banks, animal shelters, gardens, teacher’s aides, hospital and hospice assistants, crossing guards, in-home healthcare givers, tax advisors. Many of us are in the streets and legislative meetings demanding graduated taxes, decent schools and healthcare and police accountability and an end to wars. We work hard to keep and extend the public services we know young and not-so-young people will continue to need.

Our society depends on the unpaid work of elderly just as it requires the unpaid work of women in the home.

One time I went with a group of retirees to talk with then-Boeing CEO Phil Condit. We were seeking cost-of-living increases for pensions. (Without that, the value of a pension decreases every year.) He had the temerity to tell us that our pensions were a drag on Boeing’s ability to compete with Airbus because European workers got old-age pensions from the state, rather than a company. He demurred about demanding such as system here.  And he got an irate earful about all the wealth former workers had created for the company.

Uhoh, I smell peppers burning so I need to close, but I think you get my drift.

Musical portals to contemplation

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People’s bodies respond to music very early in our development, even as fetuses. And also very late in life – folks in the depths of Alzheimer’s Disease will respond to familiar music.

Certain pieces and genres of music are very helpful when I wish to wind down and practice contemplation.

And I’m not the only one in our class!! Thank you so much for sharing your precious recordings. I’ve listened to all of them and urge others to do so, too. Each is a portal to slowing down, taking a breath and getting inside oneself.

Here they are. Enjoy:

Annabel – Else You
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGQdkxFbG2o

Hannah – Public Service Broadcasting Race for Space, first song

Karen – Hang Drum music for dancing

Lindsay – Dead & Company Eyes of the World

Luka – Beach House  PPP
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFhJRTdmviA

Mahika – Elliot Smith Between the bars and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74j0Hs9OkOo and
Adrianne Lenker Indiana

Nanditha – Glass Animals Gooey

Parker – Gustav Holst St Paul’s Suite
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRRtmrjWsPE

Rhiannon – Beach House Space Song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBtlPT23PTM

Zack – Phish Ruby Waves
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI6xUJ4fmDk

Lillian – Poem by Mary Oliver Geese
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IiylWR2orE

Henry – (I’ve had time to think of a few)
J.S. Bach – English Suite
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS0lss7ogNI&t=722ss
Kishori Amonkar – Raag Bhoop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfKpt-_kLdA
        Erik Satie Gnossiennes #1 for cello

Thelonius Monk Blue Monk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_40V2lcxM7k
Gamelan from Indonesia Mojang Priangan

 

Introspection: A Challenge in and of Itself

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I struggled a lot with this blog post. I wanted badly to write about how much insight I have gained from the contemplative practices, because I see that so many of my classmates love them. In all honesty, I find it extremely difficult to focus during contemplative practices and I cannot remember any particular practice or what thoughts it sparked in me. The noise of the fan and the persistent discomfort of my chair against my back alone are enough to completely prevent me from entering into introspection. I feel that I would gain more by journaling responses to some of the prompts presented in our contemplative practices. I also gain more self-awareness and insight about my place within systems when I am in conversation with someone else or when I can synthesize materials from one course with content from another. For example, I gained a lot of insight on Limberg and Barnes’ piece about “Culture War 2.0” when I mentioned it in a discussion in my Spanish seminar, because we were able to consider how it might apply to cultures within Latin America and I was able to spend more time thinking about how I might play into one or more of those “tribes.”

Still, I believe and respect that the practices are fruitful for others who find it easier to quiet their minds and who are less distracted by the abundance of sensory inputs with which daily life barrages us. I do think that inner work is an important component in activism and in retraining our brains, should we find that our ingrained beliefs do not align with our values. I agree with the assertion in Schley’s “Sustainability: The Inner and Outer Work” that our emotions can give us feedback which can inform the potential direction of our individual and collective efforts to create change, and that inner work helps people recognize the qualities and attitudes necessary to make a difference. I also think that healthy emotional regulation would be crucial to any radical, positive social movement or reorganization, as with this come empathy and resilience. For many people, contemplative practice and meditation are helpful for such regulation. In the meantime, I will continue to put effort into trying to adapt the practices to my needs to see if I am able to gain more going forward.

(Michael Menchaca). This artist’s work deserves attention for its intended purpose, but I include it here because I find it to be overwhelming and for me it is a visual representation of how my mind feels during contemplative practices.

Contemplation as an Antidote to Fear

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These days, I’m some form of anxious or scared almost all of the time. And while I could chalk this up to an anxiety disorder, or some other deep-seated biochemical imbalance, I think that it has more to do with what I study. 

For the past few years, I’ve spent most of my days thinking about death, dying, and endings. In my classes, we talk about climate change, which many of my professors and classmates theorize will lead to the fall of our civilization. After school, I go to the geoarchaeology lab and pick through the remains of a society that has fallen, trying to understand my ancestors from 60,000 years ago. I think about the shaky undergraduate assistant who may, 60,000 years from now, pick apart my life, and try to understand why my civilization has fallen. She’ll analyze every mistake we’ve made and every sign we’ve ignored. And of course, these thoughts of societal death follow me home.

This deep-seated fear I hold over the inevitable fall of our civilization can get overwhelming, and contemplative practices have been incredibly useful to me in managing this. I was scared at first, because I thought that thinking more deeply about death, in a space with no distractions, would worsen my anxiety. And, initially it did–the first few contemplative practices I participated in left me feeling off-kilter and overwhelmed.

But, over the past few weeks, contemplation on death has become my form of terror management–the concept described in Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski’s “The Worm at the Core,” as the way in which people cope with the looming terror of death. Contemplative practices allow me to center myself by sinking more deeply into my fears, but also help me to better feel connection to my physical self, which in turn quiets my mind. They entice me to focus on my present experience as a time of abundance and possibility, instead of eventual doom. And this shift in perspective has lessened my fears and, therefore, enhanced my ability to connect more meaningfully with the coursework. As Walt Whitman writes of perspective in “A Song of the Rolling Earth,”

“I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete! 

I swear the earth remains broken and jagged only to him or her who remains broken and 

Jagged!”

 

This is an image my friend took of me while caving in Washington recently. During the trip, we sat down, turned out the lights, and did a short contemplative practice together in the thick darkness just listening to our breathing and thinking about where we were within the earth. Afterward, we found that we had both calmed down significantly–contemplating in a focused way on the danger and the physical actualities of our experience helped us to cope with the fear we felt.

 

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

Contemplating interdependence

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As I opened my eyes after an in-person contemplative practice on interconnectedness, I looked around the room with the profound realization that everything I saw was either produced by a series of human hands or came directly from nature. Everything! Laptops, tables, chairs, clock, windows, tiles, shirts, shoes, pens, paint, …

I tried to imagine the hands that made the buttonholes on my shirt and others that cared for the cow who’s milk is in my cheese stick. I remembered the essence of a quote from Karl Marx to the effect that all we value comes from human production, working on and with nature.

It was good to have the space to nurse the realization – along with with gratitude – that we people are indeed totally interdependent with one another and with the planet.

A world without plastics

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I am thinking about my contribution to the Utopia action group, specifically what to do about plastics – probably influenced by the Albatross film. This morning I’ve had 2 revelations: Nearly everything in the bathroom is made of plastic! Towel rack, toothbrush, shower curtain, even the toilet seat. The other insight is that, growing up, I actually lived in a world before plastic. Imagine that. Plastics were beginning to appear mid 20th century as cheap and easily breakable artifacts. We made fun of them. I don’t suppose anyone watches the film “The Graduate” and more –  it has a scene around “plastics” that you can view on youtube, depicting plastic as an aspect of the falsity of the decaying elder generation.

So, could I envision a 21st century utopia without plastic – could we return to a world reliant on ceramics, rubber, metal, wood, and paper for containers and tools. Maybe not. But perhaps chemists among us can devise nonpoisonous compounds that will make plastic degrade at certain timelines.Such as six months, or a couple of years.  And what if those compounds can be made from recycled existing plastic?

However,  the basis for plastics is oil or natural gas. This speculation is for naught.  We’ll want neither if we’re to slow climate change. So, a world without plastics will need something sustainable to replace the ubiquitous commodity that presents such danger in the anthropocene.

Solidarity in Trying Times

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As we face climate change, I can understand an increase in anxiety among the younger generation.   Reading The Worm at its Core connected struggling with anxiety to self-esteem in a way I had previously not viewed it, with the authors explaining how a lack of self-esteem contributes to a higher amount of anxiety.  With the increased use of social media, people are inundated with a skewed view of what life looks like due to the way the algorithm elevates certain content while also advertising what your life should be like which is a sure fire way to make most people question their self-worth.

When this happens, I believe most people find stability the way they always have, by finding like-minded individuals to be in community with.  Currently with impending climate catastrophe I think that means people who are willing to alter their way of life to do what they can to minimize their impact gravitate towards each other.  While this can be seen as a positive the story Karen told about her vegan friends no longer talking to her after she started to eat animal protein again was to me unsurprising but shows a serious problem with the way people view community.  Individuals absolutely have a role to play in stewardship of the planet but far too many people identify against each other as opposed to with each other.  You see it in the lack of class-consciousness and with situations like the professor alluded to and I believe it is to the detriment of any ability to combat or slow climate change.  The only way I see to make a change is solidarity among people and a strong stance against the continued extraction of resources and exploitation that the people of the global south bear the brunt of.

One has to look no further than the COP26 conference to see how unserious the wealthy elite are about changing our extraction and exploitation economy with the number of private jets flown in so they can ensure nothing will fundamentally change.  The sooner people stop listening and supporting the plutocrats the better.

 

The lies that they feed to me, are as edible as Mercury-Tom Marshall, Ernest Giuseppe Anastasio III