Learning to Lie Down with the World

I used to teach the trouble.

It was the kind of teaching that came from a fierce love and a restless mind – newly systems-aware, justice-longing, piecing together the sharp edges of inequality and environmental ruination like a mosaic of wrongness. As a professor for over a decade, I led students into the heart of the food system and didn’t look away: labor exploitation, land theft, corporate consolidation, ecological extraction, and the intentional obfuscations that make it all seem normal.

We took the tour. Named all the -isms and -archies.

We traced the river of harms and hierarchies upstream: past the canyon flanked by industrial agriculture and global hunger and into the darker waters of stolen attention, individualism and individualization, carceralism and militarism, imperialism, racism and eugenics. We paused here for a bit and shouted for justice. Hearing only echoes, I knew we still had a ways to go. Unequal exchange, colonialism, Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius, were still up ahead and they had confluences with capitalism, patriarchy, enclosure. And then there was an especially wide stretch of river formed by the Enlightenment and Cartesian dualism. Further, further beyond that, we reached the slow-flowing source: separation. As we gazed at its oddly placid surface, we also saw dominionism reflected back – man apart from and looming over nature. And then it started to rain: the very notion of paradise as elsewhere, beyond the clouds. Heaven-off-earth.

Standing near the poisoned headwaters, my students and I gazed out at all the new-growth green solutions of so many varieties. In our sector, it was local food, organics, fair trade, agritourism, ESG, ethical certification schemes, regenerative branding. In others it was “clean energy” or “urban resilience.” Each of these were flung toward the waterway, expected to skip clear across, but we all know how that goes. Skipping stones become riverbed, and as each eventually tumbles through the locks and culverts of modernity, it is reshaped to serve it.

Blunted (but still heavy with bad ideas and capable of being used to bludgeon).
Depoliticized. Made safe for capital.
For winners. For cheaters. For cheapeners.
Designed to distract, to delay real reckoning, to enable a more desperate round of accumulation.

That was when the ache began to deepen. In the light refracted off these waters, I could suddenly see that I had devoted my life to seeking justice from dams designed to hold back what sustains life – structures designed to channel its riverine power toward destruction. As I squinted into the bright beams of progressivism, I saw that it was still the pursuit of progress, not of flow.

Naming and knowing the trouble wasn’t enough. Rafting in the ruined waters didn’t teach us how to drink them in and be quenched. Nor did it reveal how we might bind the toxins already dissolved in the water of our bodies. Examining eroded shorelines didn’t keep us safe from the now-seasonal floods. Semester after semester, we paddled hard against the currents of complacency. We floated quietly past the guards who did not want us to get any closer to the source. But nothing in that challenge – chosen by some, imposed on others – taught us how to be together in a time when everything was coming apart.

So I rowed to shore and stared at my shoes. Sad. Sickened. Soggy. Achingly aware of my footprints. I stopped because I really wasn’t sure where to go. I didn’t know where I could step that wouldn’t smash something trying to survive. With each footfall and shoe-squelch, I feared slipping into the muck and mire.

I looked down long enough to get interested in what was under my feet. The cracks in the surface.

I wondered how I might get down into them. My intentions were different from those who typically study the subsurface. I didn’t want to mine. If I’m really honest, a pained part of me probably wanted to disappear. But another part, the one tethered to my loves and commitments, suggested something else. Try being with a different kind of darkness, went the whisper. Emulate your chthonic ancestors. Even if you don’t know how they did it, explore and honor what lies beneath.

I followed that urge into abolitionist dreaming and radical imagination, into social anarchy and kin-centricity, toward the wisdom that lives at the margins, where care and creativity were never luxuries, but necessary strategies for survival inside the beast of modernity. And there, I began to notice that the energy of resistance could be replaced with the touch of tenderness. That we could use conversation not just for critique, but co-sensing.

Down in the cracks, things were just different. The bright, shiny alternatives didn’t shine so bright. They didn’t really shine at all. And so, I sort of lost interest in the search for ready-made sustainable solutions. I stopped grabbing for mirages of stable futures that seemed to be within my reach but invariably disappeared as I approached. I stopped hoping my ingenuity would fix anything and started wondering if it was blocking what needed to emerge. I started grieving for what once was and could not be in this lifetime.

I began to ask different questions. Questions that didn’t seek solution or salvation, but that deepened our inquiries, sometimes revealed our common bewilderment, and allowed polarized or algorithmically manipulated people to start being decent to each other again.

It’s tricky to close an essay without conclusions. But what I’m writing toward is a gentler, more open-ended, shared way of trying. I’m looking for a murmuration at mid-life. It won’t glide through the sky, but might dance underground. Yet I know that one person, all on her own, does not make a murmuration (of any kind).

So let this be an opening fall-together.
Lie here with me, if you can. (And if I can, too.)

Sometimes the land holds you. Sometimes the rock is unforgiving. It’s okay to sit up, to stand up, to stretch toward something we’ve never known.

Yes, let’s lie here, if we can.
We might smell the smoke.
We might sense the storms.
We might see the stars.