i pray this isn’t a parting gift
on grief and trees
I am eating an avocado. It is buttery, soft, sweet, and salty all at the same time. This avocado is the perfect ripeness.
I am eating an avocado while watching a live stream of flames engulfing homes and horses escaping through residential streets. I chew and see the mountains aflame. The avocado is delicious. This avocado is the kind that doesn’t peel easily; its skin is smooth and requires attention. Like a plump garlic clove, unwrapping it is a labor of love.
Every so often, we are blessed to receive a lumpy, hard box brimming with unripe avocados grown and picked with love by my partner’s parents. One arrived at the new year. I imagine living in a place where avocados can grow mightily. I dream of the sunshine on my face.
With each bite, each flash of news, I think about this avocado tree nestled at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. I recall her tall and knobby stance. I don’t know her well, yet, but I hope to. I wonder if she is suffocating now in this smoke and heat. I hope that her long twisting branches still reach up into the sky, that she is somehow shielded from the hell visiting her doorstep. I eat the avocado and think how strange it is to be eating this avocado. Hers. I say a prayer of gratitude and a lump forms in my throat. I pray this isn’t a parting gift.
Tears swell as I can’t help but imagine the tree engulfed in flames. It’s easy to do while watching more than a century of history burn on screen. The freshness on my tongue is a perverse and stark contrast. I don’t know if this is her fate. I pray it is not. But as the flickering licks of flame dance across her neighborhood, this isn’t a fantasy. Greedy politicians, unchecked climate pollution, and the billionaire class putting profit over people and planet all made sure of its reality.
I finish the avocado and save her pit in a jar. I’ve not had much success sprouting a sapling from a pit before, but I think I might try again tomorrow.
I’ve been thinking lately of my (our) grief like a mother’s love. At least, that’s what they say: Your capacity for love exponentially expands when you have a kid. I fear that my grief is forcibly ever-expanding, stretching out along a wingspan so wide I can’t possibly see the ends. I don’t know how to hold it, but I am certain there is no choice.
I am on a transport bus in Costa Rica. I find myself here of all places as the oligarchy northward solidifies itself in stone. I make the mistake of checking the news. The tangle in my heart tightens.
Silent streams flow down my cheeks as I recall how Rodrigo, our guide in Talamanca, told us the dense rainforests were harvested for profit without care for the consequences. Logging was a booming industry and by the 1980s nearly half of the country’s forest was gone. But through collaboration and tremendous effort, Costa Rica has reforested about 60% of its land since 1987—an astronomical feat of ecological transformation.
I imagine a time when it all felt lost for these jungled lands. How such transformation felt impossible, unimaginable. And yet here stands proof of reformation, creativity, and a future only dreamed of coming to fruition right before our eyes.
Looking out the window, I see the lush earth stretching, winding, breathing. Vines of pothos climb trees of all sizes. The density of the reformed forest is palpable. I conjure memories of days prior, standing beneath the canopy and taking in the smells and sounds of the complex ecosystem—monkeys chirping in the trees, wind brushing against vines, the scurry of a nearby agouti, the bubbling swamp.
I thank the trees and wipe my tears. As I continue home to a place that feels more and more foreign, I carry this parting gift of wisdom alongside my grief. ✦
Elsewhere in the county
A council was voting
Ooh, sweet sparrow song
The trees had an illness
They wanted a quick fix
A chemical treatment
To right their wrongs
Well it sure killed the virus
But nobody noticed
Ooh, 'til spring had sprung
That the birds were all dying
The earth had been poisoned
And I was still listening
For sparrow song
They say that what goes up
Usually comes back down
Sometimes the silence just rings out
Rings out, rings out, rings out
Sparrow by Katie Gavin
What I’ve been reading lately that has some nugget of hope, inspiration, or actionable information that makes me not drown in doom:
How I became 'collapse aware' And started to imagine what comes next | by Rosie Spinks
“To be collapse aware is to live with the sense that something about the way we live is coming to an end. And then to ask the next obvious question head on: If the incrementalist approach of our existing political and economic structures is not up to the task of improving things — climate, society, inequality, injustice — what comes next?”
Welcome to the Resi...lience: How to Resist Techno-authoritarianism and Grow the Regenerative Alternative | by Spencer R. Scott
“One of the best ways to understand how to both resist their techno-authoritarian grip and build a regenerative replacement simultaneously is to think of everything as a living organism.”
10 PRACTICAL THINGS TO DO TO PREPARE FOR THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY | by Emily Amick
A practical guide from securing your data to getting involved.
it really is that damn phone. on, digital anarchy, the aesthetic of revolution, and how we are becoming strangers. | by anuhea
it is brazenly clear to me that our Aesthetic Problem– our severe maintenance of desirability– lays a foundation for communal harm. algorithms rob us of our self-understanding, urging us to trade self expression for self exploitation.
We failed to stop the rise of fascism. What comes next? How to navigate the future without a map. | by Robert Evans
Shit can be different, but not unless we’re willing to try different shit.
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