Dear Wanderer,
Today as I was dropping my husband off at work I heard a singular shriek coming from the sky. It was a sound I knew well, but usually in a chorus of many voices. I craned my neck to see a lone Canadian goose flapping hard above my head. One doesn’t usually encounter a goose on its own—farther down the road I could see the shape of its flock growing small in the distance, but not as fast as this bird was growing small as it raced to catch up with them.
I had never seen a goose fly so fast or call so loudly. The desperation of its flight and voice cut through the morning air, through all my thoughts and distractions. I didn’t need to be a goose to understand what it was saying.
Wait for me, it cried, I’m coming, I’m here! But really it was calling out LIFE!! loud and clear and unmistakable.
I want to live!
A lone goose is a sitting duck.
I don’t know why this bird was left behind or how it got separated from its group. I once heard that it’s important to leave wild geese undisturbed when we encounter them on the ground, making sure, especially to leash our dogs, because they are resting on the long journey of their yearly migration. Letting them rest when they can increases their chances of survival.
Maybe this bird’s flock was chased off unexpectedly, or maybe it wandered too far away from them. However it happened, the strength of its wings and voice, its will to survive and rejoin the group, filled the whole sky for a moment.
I feel like that goose sometimes: left behind and desperate to rejoin the group. I feel like I have to work harder to get to the place where everyone already is, yell louder to be heard. The other geese did not wait for the one left behind, which would have been its death sentence most likely, but perhaps they slowed the pumping of their wings a little at its call. Perhaps they trusted it to make it back to them. Perhaps not.
I’ll never know.
I think, at the end of the day, most all of us want life to continue. It’s built into our bones, our sinew, the thrust of all of our desires. But we fundamentally disagree on what life means and how it is to be achieved. For the lone goose catching up with the flock the continuance of life means flying as hard as it can for as long as it takes. For the flock it means flying away from danger or toward sustanance, and for life to continue one bird might have to be left behind. For a hungry predator at the end of a long winter that one lost bird might mean surviving another year. We know how this works.
Death means life. Life requires death.
For the Congolese man who set himself on fire to draw attention to the plight of his people, his death was a desperate cry for life. For Palestinian refugees waiting for the next bomb to fall, life means doing things like distributing toys to children, dancing, telling stories and other “nonessential” things that are so essential. It means broadcasting the deaths of their loved ones for the world to see. For me it means centering their voices in every way possible, fighting the erasure on which oppressive systems run.
I want to live!! is the cry we hear through all the death.
We know others must die so we can live. This is the nature of life. Things get out of control when we lose our connection to who we are killing and see our individual survival as more important than Life itself. Life with a capital “L.” The Life that will go on, whether or not we choose to be a part of it.
I want to be a part of it.
One of the hardest things about choosing a liberatory practice, which is a capital “L” Life practice, is having to admit that my individual survival—and more importantly, that of my children—is not more important than anyone else’s. It’s as difficult to admit as it is true and important: the lives of my children are not more important than the lives of other peoples’ children, the continuance of Life.
And yet they are; it is because I love my own life, and my childrens’ lives above all else, that I even know what love is and can extend that love beyond us to the place where all things matter: the altar of all Life. It is because of my love for my children that I have to love all things—because I would make for them a world where love rules all.
I want with all my heart for the lone goose to survive, but do I want it more than I want geese, every year, filling the sky and the grassy parts of the park and the river banks? How long would a goose, or indeed any of us, live without geese? I want to live, but not if it means sitting back doing nothing while others die for my convenience and safety. That, for me, is a living death.
A liberatory practice is a different kind of living death. It ties my survival to yours, and to theirs and to everyone’s. I learned that another word for a group of geese in flight is “skein.” As an avid knitter, I am always amazed by the slow alchemy of a skein of yarn becoming cloth, a single strand looping and binding itself to itself to make something that never existed before. Something life-sustaining.
In one of Rick Riodan’s Percy Jackson books that my kids read, a Cherokee character named Piper recalls a myth her father told her, the Cherokee version of the flood myth that exists all over the world. In this version a man is warned by his dog that a flood is coming and that, in order to survive, he must make a raft and sacrifice the dog by throwing it into the rising water.
Heartbroken, the man refuses to sacrifice his dog, but as he touches the dog its fur and sinew fall to the ground until only his skeleton remains. He reassures the man that it must be done, telling him, “I’m already dead.”
So the man builds the raft, sacrifices the dog to the rising water and he and his family survive on the raft until one day they come to a hill of land rising above the water. As they pull the raft to dry land they hear the sounds of laughter and cheering, as if a joyful celebration is being held nearby. The man climbs the hill to see what’s happening but when he looks he sees no one there.
In the novel Piper remembers this myth in the midst of a dangerous situation and realizes that, in order to survive, she and her friends must sacrifice themselves and all they have by giving their gifts to the creatures that are trying to kill them. “I’m already dead,” she thinks, identifying not with the man who lived but with the dog who was sacrificed, who knew he was to be sacrificed and accepted it.
What gives us the ability to sacrifice our lives for others? Our time even, our energy? As a parent I give my life to my children because I love them, which is to say, they are part of me. As a parent without parents I know that, even though I will never have the support, accountability and care that I wanted—that I deserved—I can make sure my kids have it, and that is enough.
Why is it enough? Because my children are part of me. I would choose them over my own body, my own life, because my life exyends beyond my body. But how far beyond?
The answer is, as far as it takes. In a healed, whole culture the self extends to the whole community, and to the land and everything the community requires for sustenance. Now, as we come to understand that we are in global community, our task is to extend our sense of self to everyone—to those who are paying the most dear costs for the imperial and colonial activities of our governments, to those extracting those costs in the most violent of ways, to all the parts of ourselves that feel rage and fear and despair and joy and hope and gratitude—not in spite of our own individual loves, because of them. We must remember how to extend it to the earth itself and all its inhabitants so we can all keep it going. It’s a lot of work, requiring a lot of mercy and care and difficult truth-telling. We are implicated in it all.
This is what Life is: a messy, steaming, boiling cauldron of mututal implication. And if you are for it, there is Death required—not as a decision—for that decision has already been made—but as something to accept. It’s not a matter of whether you or I or the lone goose will die, but of how hard we will fight for life before we die.
How loudly will we call? How hard will we pump our wings against the crisp morning air to catch up with the rest of our kin?
New moon blessings,
Sasha