In What Ways Do We Want to Be Human in a More-Than-Human World?
by Renée Coughlin
Lately I’ve been thinking about what practices or rituals I have that connect me back to who I am, inside of my human body, so that I may know who I am within the larger body of this planet.
When I think about finding presence in my body, I immediately think of making music. As a singer and a songwriter, I often connect with my body through my voice. When I sing, I feel the vibration through my physical being, and it creates a resonance I find hard to ignore. Music has always had a way of helping me to navigate life on Earth in this human body. It carries me through challenges and helps me to articulate what life feels like from in here. It also seems to be a helpful way to share how it is that I observe, or bear witness to other lives on Earth.
Music, songwriting, storytelling, and sharing: All of these things from the stage have had a way of helping me to wring out the ache that always seems to settle into my blood and bones. For many years, it has been an ultimate space of presence in my body and continues to help me make sense of life on Earth.
If you’re like me, the threat of climate change and global warming is never far from your mind. While I am not a climate scientist, and hold a limited understanding of what is actually happening on an ecological level, I am a human, born into and of this planet, and I can’t seem to shake myself separate from the looming threats of its impending death. I want to be able to contribute to the change required to sustain human life as part of the complex ecosystem(s) on this planet. Today, the best way I know how to do that is to engage in conversations around purpose and consider how it is we actually want to be, as human beings living on this planet.
Recently, I was asked to collaborate in a research project that took up the question, “What are we sustaining?” The project enlisted an interdisciplinary team of scientists, Indigenous elders, artists, educators, and researchers to participate in conversations that aim to rethink how we are considering models of environmental sustainability within communities. Together we visited forests, school playgrounds, and other outdoor spaces while we shared our varied perspectives and experiences. As we visited these places together, and I was exposed to the stories and ideas of each person in the group, I was flooded with an internal dialogue that bombarded me with questions. Below is the rambling reflection that I was met with as I encountered one forest, with a team of people, asking, “What are we sustaining?”
On the way to the forest, I pass by fried worms on cement sidewalks, a quick reminder of the precarity of life in rising temperatures, and the unending, simultaneous presence of forces that both create and destroy.
We move together through the forest, our feet firmly packing down soil, decaying leaves, broken twigs, and countless other things and beings I’ve never bothered to learn the names of.
I imagine that one day I, too, will become soil that will be trampled by the feet of eager doers, creatives, mind dwellers, and skeptical optimists who seem to move with a kind of collective gentle anarchist energy.
It is my hope that one day, far away from now, I will have the privilege of being feasted on by earthworms and earwigs as I begin my slow journey back to the earth that I was born from.
It is my fear that before that time comes I will be tossed out into oblivion along with all other life on this planet.
Oblivion, in my mind, looks like a place where all vitality is absorbed into infinite nothingness and there is no life.
Oblivion, in my body, feels like hard edges in empty rooms. It feels like plastic chairs, synthetic rugs, hard tiles that used to be mountain tops, and posters of suffocating trees that will never know the wholeness of a full life cycle.
It is becoming a consistent truth I cannot evade that my hope coexists with my fear, that institutions coexist with the trees they choose to let stand or cut down, and that creation will always coexist with destruction.
For 3.8 billion years, this planet has sustained life.
What are we, as humans, sustaining? What do I, as a human, sustain? In many ways, my life sustains death.
To live relies on the ending or transformation of other lives and absorbing them into mine.
In what ways will I continue to live and create, knowing that destruction is the air I breathe?
What rituals will I embody to honor the lives that transform into mine?
As I slowly waste away under the daily pressures of gravity, what will my destruction give life to?
Whose life gets to be lived and when? And for how long? Who and what decides when those lives are done being lived? In what ways can we humans learn to renegotiate the space around and between creation and destruction?
Who and what will we allow to be our teachers of negotiation?
In what ways does the more-than-human world negotiate?
For 3.8 billion years, this planet has sustained life.
Mostly in the absence of the thinking human mind, and without the writhing tongues that spray our spoken word like pesticides, as if we’re accomplishing something. Where is our restraint? Where is our humility? Who and what already knows and practices these ways of being?
What do we need to silence in order to hear and understand a different story about who we are and how we can be human in a more-than-human world?
Today, I look to a lump on a log. A ball of mud. A perceptibly still but gradually slumping presence that bears witness to the life around it. It’s lazy and beautiful. Of all the life and all the sustenance we passed by in the forest today, this lump on this log has captivated me. It defies colonial logics of efficiency, material expansion, and extraction. Oh, to be a lump on a log. Oh, to be lazy. To be still. To observe time and life as it interacts around you, and in you. What a gift.
In a world of rapid expansion and destructive evolution, how might we, as humans, sustain meaningful stillness?
How can we sustain restraint?
How can we sustain our observations long enough to be struck by awe?
How can we sustain and celebrate an emotional response that doesn’t drive us to extract and stake claim over what elates us?
How might we, like this lump on this log, sustain life while bearing witness to the life of all others.
In what ways might the spaces we occupy encourage us to take pause?
In what ways might the spaces we move within remind us to acknowledge the trails we leave behind?
In what ways might the spaces we think in demand that we pause and engage with alternative intelligences?
In what ways might the spaces in which we take up life in our own human bodies work to soften our assumptions of superiority and celebrate what it could mean to live a more gentle and attuned life as part of this earth’s body.