WRITING AS AN ECOLOGICAL ATTITUDE

Some thoughts arising from past Climate Writing workshops and thinking about more on the horizon… You can apply for a free mini-course ‘How to Start Writing about Climate’ here.  There’s also a Creative Saturday at NCLA on ‘Writing Like Weather’ here.  And a chance to come together and write in ‘The Writing Hour’ here.

Writing about Climate, keeping ecological balance in mind, alongside others is a way of bringing our relationship with the powerful time we are living through into greater awareness.  It helps to articulate half-buried thoughts and feelings and propel us into further research that will deepen our knowledge, which we can then share or use in more politically active ways to move towards establishing more sustainable and equitable systems.  The accumulated effect on us is wholesome and energising – on the side of life and active strong-rooted hope.

It sounds a bit like an advertising slogan but if writing is good for you, it can be good for the planet too.  

…staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.

                                                                                                            Donna Haraway

If we don’t act until we feel the crisis that we rather curiously call ‘environmental’ – as if the destruction of our planet were merely a context – everyone will be committed to solving a problem that can no longer be solved.

                                                                                                                     Jonathan Safran Foer

The process and techniques of writing poetry in particular help cultivate qualities that keep us in balance, moving forward in a positive direction.  I came up with this figuring of causes and effects (– formatting a bit wayward, but hopefully you’ll be able to get the gist).  You might be able to think of more things you’d include – and I’d be delighted to hear about them.  It’s all work in progress.

THE POETICS OF PRESENCE & RESILIENCE

Writing as an Ecological Attitude

Taking space to write, cultivating                           A sense of commitment,

a practice, honouring the process          . . .           discipline & self-care

Grammar & syntax, inherent logic          . . .          Clarity, communication skills

Economy & focus                                    . . .           Simplicity

Truth-telling, managing register              . . .           Authenticity, a common humanity

& tone                                                                       

Taking reader into account                     . . .          Connectedness, empathy, solidarity

Having something to say, breaking           . . .            Courage, speaking out

silences

Making choices about place/character/      . . .           Gaining perspective, looking beyond 

details/flora/fauna etc – based on close                    yourself, orientation

observation                                   

Playing with language & sound – rhyme     . . .         Delight, pleasure, staying fresh, positive,

rhythm, voice, tense, lexicon etc                             awake

One obvious thing writing poetry does is to make you stop.  Stopping is a radical act.  Even in lockdown, we are all trying to do too much, overstimulating our bodies and minds at a time when there is so much to process.  Done in a calm way, with no goal in mind, writing can touch you in similar ways to meditation, offering a space for in-the-moment, judgement-free presence and enquiry.  Yes, we need action on Climate, but action arising from clear thinking and a careful consideration of the consequences. 

I may have posted this quote from Cistercian monk Thomas Merton (1915 – 1968) before – but every year/month/week/day it seems to become more and more relevant:

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. 

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. 

The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

                                                                                                                        Thomas Merton