The "Religion and Ecology" class met online today, just a little ahead of the curve. It was easier than I expected - because Zoom is designed to feel like a conversation, I think, but in part no doubt also because my students are more comfortable online than I am. Still, it was weird to be talking again about Braiding Sweetgrass, the course text most grounded in actual lived experience of place, of bodily interaction with an environment. The section we read today talked about vegetable gardens, how people were domesticated by plants even as we domesticated them, how our participation in "honorable harvest" gives us a role in the flourishing of the other-than-human persons of our world. (Black ash thrives around communities who cut trees for
baskets.) But even as we discussed it, media (which we'd seen David Abram excoriate as the toxic fantasy that we can live without the air that links and literally inspires us) was making our human interlocutors seem less real! Weird... but I'm not going down that road. This seems a moment for surfacing and celebrating all the connections and relationships we have, and for turning that awareness and gratitude toward finding ways of maintaining these connections even in a time of "social distancing" and panicked fantasies that we could live outside webs of connection, vulnerability and care. Yes, that means counting on "virtual" encounters to be "real," an irony which we'll just have to work with. I know I feel like I'm holding on for dear life.
