[P2P-F] Fwd: Cynthia Travis reviews Deena Metzger's

[Michel Bauwens]

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Date: Fri, Oct 12, 2018 at 7:40 PM
Subject: Cynthia Travis reviews Deena Metzger's
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Cynthia
Travis reviews Deena Metzger’s latest novel A Rain of Night Birds
October 11, 2018 .
 You can read this review online at
https://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/cynthia-travis-reviews-deena-metzge
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r

*Book Review for Tikkun*

*by Cynthia Travis*

*of*

*A RAIN OF NIGHT BIRDS*

*by Deena Metzger*



*Natural Law was here before and will be here after we’re gone.*

*Western law was not here then and will not last.*

*~ Marie Gladue, Navajo elder*



Sometimes a story poses a question that is inescapable, compelling us to
yield to its mandate, demanding its rightful place at the magnetic center
of our lives. This is because, in the words of a wise friend, it is a story
that reminds us who we are. Such is the question at the heart of Deena
Metzger’s *A Rain of Night Birds* (Hand to Hand Publishing, 2017): *What
are the ways of being that will ensure a viable future for all life?* A
cultural shift of incomprehensible magnitude is urgently required in order
to deliver us to that future.

Sandra Birdswell is a climatologist. She senses the Earth’s shifts and
sufferings in her body; sun flares, earthquakes, and wind are kin to her.
Because her mother died in childbirth, she has been raised by her father,
John Birdswell, a doctor whose years of work in a small hospital on the
nearby Navajo reservation have brought him into an unlikely friendship with
Diné elder Hosteen Tseda. Sandra’s professor in graduate school, Terrence
Green, is the head of the Department of Earth & Environmental Studies. He
is a Native American man of mixed origins. All except Hosteen are missing
one or both parents and so do not know the full story of where they came
from or who they are. Like most of us, they are bereft of the full lineage
that might have guided them in perilous times.

The book, at first, is a gently sloping floor, a meditation on love and
loss, identity and language, permeated by despair for the decimation of the
natural world. It is a slope that becomes incrementally steeper and
infinitely more slippery as we come to recognize our own heartache as well
as our complicity in the unfolding climate crisis that Terrence and Sandra
– and we, must grapple with. By accompanying Sandra, Terrence, Hosteen and
John in their undoing and eventual ragged remaking, Metzger invites us to
tumble into the abyss of our own despair at what our species has done to
the Earth and to each other, and to let ourselves be transformed.

The bones of the story seem familiar at first, turning us back on ourselves
until we come to see, like the characters in the book, that in the context
of Gaia’s impending demise, personal questions can no longer be separated
from questions of Earth’s distress. Rather, love, loss and identity in the
age of the Anthropocene are nested dilemmas that can only be met with the
full surrender of everything we thought we knew in order to become
trustworthy to Creation once again. The story sends us to the edges of our
thinking, exposed to the elements, with nothing to guide us but our broken
hearts and our willingness to be dismantled until individual concerns are
subsumed – not erased, but contextualized, by the lived understanding of
community in the most expanded and comprehensive sense. The characters’
dilemmas are our dilemmas; they show us the way forward, if we are willing
to follow their lead: to yield to our Earthling selves and to ‘the beyond’,
that is, to intelligences within and beyond ourselves, expressed in their
sovereign forms and understood on their terms, not ours, though they may
seek to express themselves through us.

At the beginning of the book, Sandra recognizes, through intuition and
bodily sensation that a solar flare is occurring. Reflecting on the ways
that scientific language dilutes the primacy of felt experience, she muses
that “Somehow the technical language that had developed to meet the
infinitely large or small… took focus away from the thing-in-itself, the
astounding and incomprehensible beauty that was revealing itself to her.”
She struggles with the language of science because it does not encompass
the aliveness of the world nor the passionate devotion to the Earth of
scientists like herself and Terrence Green. She is keenly aware that, in
its demand for objectivity, certainty, and commercial value, modern
language has become a trap, squeezing the miraculous out of life’s
complexities by privileging objects over relationships. Logic over soul.
Acquisition over accompaniment. In particular, scientific language and
protocols, with their zeal for data, leave little room for emotion,
reverence or wonder. Sandra helps us see that we have allowed the cult of
objects, objectives, objectivity, to hypnotize us so completely that it’s
killing us – and yet we remain in its thrall. Throughout the book, as in
our waking world, the loss of wonder has resulted in the subjugation of the
Earth and the silencing of too many voices. Loss of reverence is at the
core of our self-imposed exile from the Natural World. What is being done
to women, to children, to indigenous cultures and people of color
everywhere is what is being done to the Earth. Assault is assault. Rape is
rape. If we allowed awe to shape us, we could not continue as we are, as
the writer Jeanette Winterson rightly reminds us: *They say that every
snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How
could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the
wonder of it? *This is the world that *A Rain of Night Birds* is calling us
to: a world of wonder that brings us to our knees.

The fact that Sandra senses the Earth’s pain, Her tilts and shifts, makes
it impossible for Sandra to live a conventional life, though she tries.
After earning her PhD., she takes a job as a consultant to developers who
seek to greenwash their activities by having people like Sandra and a
handful of Native American consultants help determine the best placement
and design for real estate developments on pristine land. It’s an
unwinnable challenge, but she does her best because she has realized that
buildings, landscaping, streets and infrastructure alter water flow,
migrations, wind and weather, so she tells herself that her role could be
helpful. A Native American colleague is of similar mind, and one day they
take their lunches to the top of a nearby hill. “From the vantage of a full
landscape, she saw how one might think differently about placement. An
eagle’s perspective as well as the prairie dog’s… The invisible had to be
included with the visible.” Her Native colleague tells her, “I need to see
where the wind wants to go before I put anything in its way.” Still, the
dilemma is not resolvable. Even in-depth study of a fragile area slated for
development will not result in abstention, only minor modifications: tract
homes and shopping centers will be built that do not respect living systems
and cannot protect non-human or even human communities. Driving past
vineyards and strip malls, Sandra thinks to herself, “There was no logic
for the terrain except human willfulness…. The global transition from we to
I was almost complete.” She is forced to recognize that her recommendations
are mere palliatives, and recoils at the horror of her participation. “Was
the river the same river if it was dammed, damned by the violation of the
first laws?” Sandra recognizes that “the rapid metastasis of extraction and
manufacture” means that Western culture, by its nature, will never allow a
fully co-equal co-existence with the Earth. Soon, she can no longer ignore
the disparity between her inner and outer landscapes. She reaches “back in
memory and beyond her own memory to the ways the ones who had lived on the
land had spoken to the elementals and had been answered… Someone had
believed that life was dialogic.”

When she goes to study ice melt in the Arctic Circle, Native colleagues
help her see that “The Western scientists trusted their instruments more
than they trusted their own powers of observation or those of the
Indigenous… (but) information is not knowledge.” When science pares
complex, interwoven living systems down to mere data, it is impossible to
come to deep knowing, especially when most of us do not have deep history
or deep roots in a place, and when buildings and machinery obscure our
experience. As Sandra muses, “Science has no council of elders to decide
what might or might not be explored.”

We have lost our indigeneity, our Earth stories and our Earth-memories, and
do not have the luxury of time to cultivate these things, or to reinvent
them. And yet, it’s curious how synchronized we actually are to Earth’s
living rhythms, her inhale and exhale; like the water in the soil, the
liquids in our bodies rise and fall twice daily with the moon, like
internal tides, no matter how far we might be from the shore. And at one
time, we too walked the Earth with feet perfectly suited to all Her varied
terrains. In recent times, though, we have lost our *baseline gait*, a term
borrowed from the science of wildlife tracking that refers to the prints
left by a healthy animal moving in a relaxed manner through her
environment. With our shoes and our pavements, our high-rises and cars, we
have eliminated the in-built, visceral knowing received directly from the
Earth. And because we are being bombarded by information, toxins, and
electronic signals coming at us faster than our bodies can process, our
brains assemble fragments of information into a distorted composite from
which we react rather than respond.

Terrence’s soul, too, is sundered by science. Like Sandra, he loves the
wind and all sorts of weather. But, as he tells her, his weather station,
“doesn’t tell me if the wind is blowing through a pine tree, an alder or a
yew. It can’t even tell me if it is blowing through a grove of aspen which
anyone would recognize.” As a Native man, what Terrence knows that most of
us do not is that story and language are inextricable from place. The
illness of our times is that we have severed them. In most Indigenous
cultures, life events cannot be understood unless they are explicitly
located *somewhere*. The physical landscape is an encyclopedia of
occurrences over time. The physical world is a narrative rich in teachings
for those who know how to read it.

Names, like knowledge, arise in tandem with place as well. But Sandra
cannot make sense of her name. Whenever she asks her father about it, he
refuses to divulge anything about how she came to be called Sandra. It is
the only jagged edge between them. Her preoccupation speaks again to one of
Metzger’s concerns with the too-many ways that language is used to erase
the realities of the vanquished, of the Earth and of our connection to Her,
including through the way we name people, places and things. Language and
the erasure of language have become weapons used for silencing – but not
because silence is valued in its own right. *A Rain of Night Birds* reminds
us of how many, many children’s identities were and still are being erased
by forbidding them to speak their native tongue. English is being
weaponized in other ways; as author Robert MacFarlane sadly explains, the
editors of the Oxford Junior Dictionary have taken it upon themselves to
excise certain words that they feel are no longer “relevant to a modern-day
childhood. The deletions included *acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell,
buttercup, catkin… cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy,
kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow.* The
words introduced to the new edition included *attachment, block-graph,
blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee,
cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail…* the outdoor and the natural
being displaced by the indoor and virtual. Children are now… adept
ecologists of the technoscape, with numerous terms for file types but few
for different trees and creatures. For blackberry, read BlackBerry.”
(Robert Macfarlane, *Landmarks*) By tampering with the language of the
natural world, we erase ourselves and the future.

And so we must rediscover or reinvent the language of the mysterious, epic,
living world and our place in it, complementary to Earth’s voice so that,
in saving Her from us, we also rescue ourselves. If we are fortunate and
sufficiently dedicated, it may be possible to reawaken our sense of
Earth-related purpose. This necessarily redefines our understanding of what
it means to ‘make a living’. Terrence and Sandra both struggle with this:
“Given the causes of climate change, he was thinking, it was ludicrous to
expect that the same perpetrators would want to employ people at
significant salaries to work more than forty hours a week to remedy that
which would mean change… The too familiar goal of making a standard living
to support a standard life style continued as if the right to it was carved
in stone, notwithstanding that it was entirely contradictory to the
evidence in the field.” Making a living is an empty thing unless we are
making a living – and livable, world.

The foundation of Sandra and Terrence’s relationship is their visceral
connection to the Earth. When Sandra leaves her house to go live with
Terrence, she realizes “She would miss the land and didn’t know if she had
the right to leave it. What were the agreements between them? Would the
land where he lived receive her? Would she receive it?” These are questions
that we in the West seldom ask ourselves, uprooted as we are; we have
forgotten that every speck of the Earth is teeming with sentient life,
comprising a sentient whole. In many traditional cultures, a child’s
umbilical cord is buried in the place they were born, creating a lifelong
connection to that place. Until modern times, the idea of leaving or
selling the land of one’s birth was unimaginable. What is *our* agreement
with the land? What is our covenant?

As Sandra faces the fact that “Something dire and sinister was at work
undermining all life,” she wonders “What did the unthinkable imply?” Human
folly plays out as it must, but until now this has always happened against
the backdrop of Earth’s abiding and unalterable continuity. Now that this
fundamental certainty is crumbling, we are seeing that, since Earth’s
systems are fractal by nature, so, too, is Her unraveling. We are living in
the End Times. The holographic Gordian knot for humans alive today is the
unbearable tragedy that life on Earth may no longer be possible in any
viable way for us or our descendants. This realization is, in turn, wrapped
in the bottomless heartbreak of knowing that we will never experience an
intact Earth, however fervently we may long for it. For Native Americans,
this sorrow is not new, nor is it abstract. After only 500 years, it is
still fresh and infinitely compounded by the fact that at the time of first
contact, the balance between humans and Earth was so exquisite that disease
was virtually unknown (*1491*, Charles C. Mann). For Terrence especially,
the hopeful, hope-crushing inclusion of TEKW (Traditional Ecological
Knowledge and Wisdom) in the 2007 IPCC report detailing the looming climate
crisis, is unbearable because it is both a belated acknowledgment of
essential wisdom and barely a footnote.

Terrence muses that “His great grandfather… confronted by today’s issues
would have spoken to storm or wind itself, also to eagle, and the spirits
would have taught the old man because they would have been in relationship
with each other… Yes, this was myth, but it didn’t mean it didn’t happen…
myth was a story form of the transmitted teachings and experiences from
which, over centuries, his people had built their informed cultures and
their lives.” Modernity has discarded the practice of being in conversation
with the Natural World, and the mythmaking that arises as a result, with
which the tenets of a viable culture are transmitted over time. It takes
rigorous discernment, patience and close observation to develop a
conversation with the wild. Respect has to be earned, and it requires
community – listening together, comparing notes, taking responsibility. The
only myth extant now is that unchecked growth is desirable, possible and
necessary.

What to do? Or, rather, what to undo? How to behave so that things are put
right? I sometimes try to imagine what it might be like to reverse the flow
of history, to rewind ourselves back to where we came from, back and back
until we reach the lifeways that our ancestors once knew. I try to imagine
what it would be like to reclaim (if only in our imaginations) our
relationships with the original lands that birthed us by returning to the
places our ancestors left. For those of us descended from multiple
geographies, how would we even choose where to go, and how could we
legitimately claim that place of original connection and form an authentic
relationship with it? What might we feel? What might the land feel, and the
ancestors? Perhaps, by now, the Earth is beyond caring about such
particulars and would be grateful for any lived connection, so long as it’s
sincere. I have a friend who once dreamed the words “return the people to
the land.” But how to accomplish this in a way that restores balance when
none of the original relational combinations exist anymore and so cannot be
known or repaired? How to remove invasive species, including ourselves, and
create a full reclamation when we do not even know of what? Like Sandra and
Terrence, I have come to believe that only in surrendering to the grief
that takes us apart and strips everything away, can we hope to salvage the
essential alliances that keep life going; the partnership between humans
and Earth and the reverence engendered by deep knowing that will restore a
language with which to speak of it.

Terrence and Sandra recognize that they cannot continue living in
conventional ways, especially when those ways force them to choose between
their professional selves and their Earth-selves. As the story unfolds, we
accompany them in the dismantling of their external identities as they
realize they must change everything about the way they live: where they
sleep, how they express themselves, and how they hold the sorrow that
sweeps them away from their habitual lives like a flash flood. In her
darkest moments, Sandra begins to see that “holding a field of possibility
within which recovery lived” is different from holding out hope because
“Hope in any form turns us toward ourselves.”

There is no medicine for the illness of grief except grief itself. For
Terrence and Sandra there is no sanctuary in the ordinary world, nowhere to
turn except toward the mysterious and overwhelming sensations that have
engulfed them, the same overwhelming sensations that will engulf us if we
allow ourselves to dissolve as they do. The consensual world does not,
cannot, understand this process, nor provide a language with any points of
reference for it. As Metzger points out: “Illness and symptoms… were
markers of breaks in complex relationships that occurred when right
relations were askew.” The illness of grief for the Earth is no different.

Sandra and Terrence’s only refuge is the sacred spaciousness of Hosteen
Tseda’s traditional wisdom and his ability, with the help of Sandra’s
father, John Birdswell, to craft a sacred circle to hold them. In a way we
can envy Sandra and Terrence their forced surrender to Earth’s wonders and
to Her distress; the way this crowds out any other concerns until they must
die to their old lives, knowing that initiation, in order to be real, must
risk literal death. Everything is at stake, so everything is on the line.
If we refuse grief’s call, we will be alone with our madness and its
consequences. We must ask ourselves whether we, too, are willing to step
away from the tethers of the culture that is killing us. Can we resist its
seduction, or shall we remain outside a life of sacred alignment with the
Earth’s exquisite complexity and relegate ourselves to the role of longing
observer, as we suffer and die along with everything that matters?

These are not choices to be made lightly. We’ve worked hard for what we
have, distorted though it may be. Our forebears endured great hardship and
uncertainty on our behalf, and now we must do likewise for the sake of the
future. Until now, most of us have expressed our concern in tamer ways.
Until now, it even seemed that occasionally there was progress: though the
United States refuses to honor the Paris Accords, other countries remain on
board. Perhaps a different president will rejoin the effort. Then again,
even if the international community succeeds, even if, as California’s
Governor Brown insists, ‘we’ll launch our own damn (weather) satellite’,
our efforts are late. Ice melt has outstripped all projections, extinctions
are skyrocketing, insect populations are in freefall, extreme weather is
intensifying, and reactionary governments are on the rise. In spite of
everything, we have somehow developed a taste for the Kool-Aid of denial
and paralysis in the face of what’s happening. Are we willing to offer up
our comfortably uncomfortable lives for the possibility that there may yet
be time to change course?

For those of us who are Jewish, a special quandary exists. As my father
would have said, it’s time to grab the bull by the tail and face the
situation. We are immigrants or children of immigrants, children of the
holocaust and the atomic bomb who find ourselves in a mirrored hall of
multiplying modern holocausts too numerous to count or respond to. This
includes the violence being done in our names in Israel/Palestine,
including the violence being perpetrated on the land Herself – bulldozed
orchards and abandoned villages, poisoned waterways, lethal levels of ocean
pollution and the relentless double-standard of self-protection through
subjugation of the perceived Other. As in prewar Europe, Rwanda, Myanmar
and too many elsewheres, ecocide foretells genocide. Are we willing to
accept the inevitable challenges of simultaneously protecting ourselves,
our Palestinian neighbors, and the Earth?

These responses require some emotional heavy lifting to handle our personal
demons, to sweep out the dusty corners of our individual psyches. It is up
to us to unpack and metabolize our collective trauma, and our justifiable
terror of the abyss, aware that there is an ever-finer line between our
personal anguish and the utterly appropriate panic, depression, rage and
despair in the face of the planetary catastrophe unfolding before us. There
are no recipes for effective actions to take. No cookie cutters. No
instruction manuals. No shortcuts and no guarantees. Only the internal
reckoning and the responses that arise from the ashes of that reckoning.
Only and above all else our love for the Earth. An unprecedented shift is
needed that will reshape us into an entirely different way of being, in an
entirely different relationship with the Earth and the non-human world.
Everything depends on the decision to step away from the violence of
Western culture. The catch is that this cannot be done while participating
in it. As Terrence comes to understand, “Western mind was a miasma of
denial that entered through the cracks and fissures of his being, like
water seeping through rock, undermining the original structure of all
things.”

Before sitting down to write this, I consulted the I Ching, a
3,000-year-old system of divination based on codified observations about
the nature of change and the role of the spirit world in human lives. It is
one of the more reliable sources I have found for information from ‘the
beyond.’ (*Total I Ching: Myths for Change*, Stephen Karcher). The question
I asked was: *What should be the central focus of this book review for
maximum impact to change behavior, including my own, in response to the
climate crisis?* As sometimes happens, the answer was unnervingly clear:
The Context Hexagram (the field we find ourselves in) was #47,
Confining/Oppression: *Oppressed, restricted, exhausted, cut off; at the
end of your resources… Search within to find the way out… Confining shows
an old, dilapidated house or a great open mouth in which a tree is
confined… It implies the threat of poverty, exhaustion, being at the end of
available resources, unable to meet the challenges presenting themselves.
Communication is blocked, indeed deceptive or deceitful…. However this
oppression is exactly what teaches you about de, power and virtue, the
power to find what is Great and rely on it. It exhausts the old and awakens
you from its collective dream. This oppression also teaches the futility of
anger and hatred and shows how the Way opens.* The Answering Hexagram
(specific response to the question) was #28, Great Traverses: *Great
Traverses describes your situation in terms of how to act in a time of
crisis… Find what is truly important and organize yourself accordingly. The
ridgepole of your house is warped and sagging. The structure of your life
is in danger of collapse. But there is a creative force at work in this
breakdown. The spirits will help you. This is a very great time… Hold the
heart fast and take the risk. *Changing line: Nine at Third* The structure
of your life buckles and fails, collapsing under the weight of the
transition. There is nothing you can do to brace it up. The Way closes.
Accept the change. See it as a sacrifice of the old.*

We read, we march, we vote. We recycle, we pray, we meditate. We buy fair
trade coffee and ride our bicycles. Perhaps we have solar panels or drive a
Prius. And yet somewhere we know, or dread to admit that these things are
not sufficient. We teeter on a threshold of change that we have not been
willing to cross. Beneath our frenetic creativity lurks a chasm of sorrow
for the ways we are complicit, because complicity is a form of
authorization, albeit against our will. Never mind that we did not
explicitly authorize permanent war, the shooting of unarmed Black people,
or the fouling of the water and the air. But what are the alternatives,
really, in the ways we live our lives? A few years ago, I decided to live
without plastic. That lasted until I sat down at my computer. Picked up the
phone. Started my car. Shall we leave our houses? Sleep outside? Run for
office? Perhaps, yes to all of these. And…?

Maybe, we start with Story and Place. Author Ursula K. Le Guin once said,
“If you want to create an unknown reality, tell the story and see what
happens.” Peacebuiling pioneer John Paul Lederach tells of how he found a
way to work with the violence engulfing Northern Ireland at the time: he
told a story. Sitting with partisans from both sides, he asked them to
imagine a day several generations hence. It’s late, and a storm is raging
outside. A little child climbs onto her grandfather’s knee and begs not to
be put off to bed quite yet. “Tell me again, tell me again,” she implores.
“How did The Troubles end?” The people in that room were tasked with
casting themselves into a future beyond their time and looking back to tell
the story of how peace came at last to Northern Ireland. And now here we
are, when all will soon be lost, and every dilemma seems intractable. Might
we be willing to tell ourselves a story of metamorphosis that meets the
magnitude of what we are facing?

In the Native American and Indigenous prophesies of what we now call the
Americas, doom was foreseen. What to make of this to guide us now? Perhaps
it is as it appears: a stark warning seen by Indigenous people across a
range of cultures and territory; the echo of a door slamming shut,
reverberating down through the centuries. But perhaps, just perhaps, it is
an invitation; the beginning of a story that is as yet incomplete. Terrence
and Sandra ask themselves, “Is this the end or are we beginning again?” We
must ask the same question. There may yet be time to craft a story we can
live in that puts things right. But first we must stop doing harm. Then we
can undertake the complex process of making amends, of exquisitely careful
repair: *tikkun olam *at last? If we succeed, it will usher in what the I
Ching calls a whole new cycle of time, one that lifts us out of the
Anthropocene and into an epoch as yet unnamed. The Restoracene? The
Terramoracene? From the shards of possibility scattered at our feet we can
craft a story-vessel that will return us to ourselves, using words that are
ripe with anguish and courage. We must emulate Sandra, who “reached out to
the world with the balm of her heartbreak.” By entering Terence and
Sandra’s story, we take their question to heart: “How could they possibly
be well if the Earth was afflicted?”

*A Rain of Night Birds* provides a place to begin, or, rather, a jumping
off point from which to continue. The new life becomes the story; the story
calls forth a new life. Better to die trying than to sacrifice everything
on the altar of convenience. Better a fragmentary map that shows us a
glimpse of a future with a future, “An eagle’s perspective as well as the
prairie dog’s… The invisible… included with the visible,” than an atlas
showing only the road to ruin we are already on. Quickly now. We have
arrived at the precipice. No turning back. If we take the leap, we will
find that Sandra and Terrence, Hosteen and John, are –with us.

—-

Cynthia Travis is a writer, photographer and documentary film-maker. Her
blog, Earth Altar, features Full Moon and New Moon posts about
peacebuilding, microbial alliances, earth culture and the wisdom of the
breakdown (www.earth-altar.org
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=m1DUb0YsFuZK3hgZbLDOfNnQC3TaOoc5>).
Her collection of essays, *Riffs, Rants and Visitations* is forthcoming in
2019. She lives on the Mendocino Coast.

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