Deep Water (Part 1)

In the days after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill I avoided the news. I wouldn't read it on the web or listen to NPR. I didn't look at the paper and I turned away when people spoke of it. I told myself that I wasn't ready. I couldn't. I would be so broken, so despairing, so angry. A mist-like heaviness settled over me and the cool air of depression rested onto me like fog rolling over seaside hills at dusk. I became quite and slow. I retreated.

Two weeks after the spill happened I couldn't suppress my grief anymore. Something had to move. Finally, I got online and looked at the images coming from the Gulf Coast. Feelings surged. Each wave came with more force, more weight. The feelings were so visceral, instinctual. An intricate and fundamental aspect to my humanness was startled. A loss so great. A wound this enormous. How have we done this? Again.

The gravity of ecological loss brought to the forefront of the American public with the recent Gulf Coast oil spill is not the end or the beginning of anything. Destruction of this scale and magnitude has become an acceptable part of our culture. Our economy is dependent on it. Still, the shock of death is powerful, like lightening it illuminates. In the days, weeks, and now months since the oil spill I have begun the process of accepting and looking at grief not as something to be feared, but as a rite that holds great healing potential. It is like a truth serum that shows you things exactly as they it. The truth can be shattering. The grief can take you apart and unravel everything that you thought was real.

I am starting to let this happen. My whole life I have been a lover of nature and guardian of earth ethics. My mind has always known and always fought the devastation of life the best way it could-through denial. Now I have begun to learn that my denial doesn’t keep me safe; it keeps me passive, delusioned, anxious.

As I sat looking at the slicks of oil burning on the water, the whales, birds, and sea turtles strangled in the sludge, I let the tears keep moving. I let my denial and my fear start to melt. And in the wake of this pain, the most humane parts of me-my compassion, my love, my will to change-emerged. I became more human, more real. Honest. This is how it is right now.

I had to do something.

And I did. I became the lead Portland organizer for an international event in June called Hands Across the Sand. Along with thousands of other Americans in all 50 states and folks form around the globe, we joined hands at beaches, waterfronts, rivers and city centers to acknowledge the devastation and loss caused by our dependence on oil. Our message was clear: “Water is life. Clean energy now.” The Portland event took place on the Burnside Bridge. Our youngest participant was a few months old and our eldest somewhere in their seventies. Together we made a ritual out of our protest, accounting with our hearts for the losses.

Maybe the Willamette River could feel our good intentions or sense of sorrow. What I understand now is that we could. I could feel myself coming back to life with my heart, accepting the world as it is. This world so beautiful, so full of suffering and I am a part of it. Deep Water gave me a teaching: when I engage with the deepest reaches of my pain, it starts to turn me once again upright, with a new more honest vision of myself and the world. The wounds we have inflicted on our planet and ourselves will always ache and the ghost pains of loss will forever echo. The world is forever changed. And so am I.

Thank you to elder Joanna Macy and dear friend Kari Stettler and all those people willing to step into the vastness of loss. Thank you for teaching the empowerment that comes from telling the truth.