Page 7 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION

Alfred’s Wasáse. “How do we non-indigenous, who have no cultural connections outside of an

imperialist system and thinking, recover an indigenous consciousness? What does it even mean for us

to come home to this land? To root?” As if in answer to her question, Anne Bergeron writes, in “Calling

out the Names”: “....saying all the names of the things I love is the beginning of breaking a deafening

silence and rooting myself in my home, the earth.”

There are so many beautiful responses in this issue, so many forms of offering: setting out food, sitting

in silence, singing, waterwalking, dancing, carrying story. Paying attention. “There are,” Cynthia Travis

writes, “endless ways to show gratitude, or to notify the Spirits of our heartfelt commitment to live in

active alliance with the natural or unseen world.” Most of these ways involve surrendering to what we

don’t know: to dreams, to nonhuman intelligences. To dark matter. Even, in the case of Nora Jamieson

in “I am Nothing Without my Dead,” to the voice of the “pitted earth”: “...the test pits, the uranium pit,

the mined earth gouged with our longing. Out of the throat of the keening woman comes everything you

did not know you longed for. Out of the throat of the keening woman comes everything we destroyed in

our innocent desire for a good life.”

“Who is prepared to walk into darkness?” asks Lily Yeh. She is speaking most especially of Rwanda,

where she built a genocide memorial. “There is unknown. You don’t know what’s lurking there. One

doesn’t know whether one has the capacity to deal with the unknown...Yet when we are guided by our

heart, when life beckons us, and when we are sensitive to the inner voice, and when we are brave

enough to follow life’s calling, then wonders happen. Things unfold...” Ayya Santacitta and Megan

Hollingsworth, in their interviews, also speak of leaving comfort behind, and safety, of entering the

unknown. And of following their heart.

“When you’re lost,” Yeh says, “there are birds talking to you. There are animals pointing directions.

There are people along the way helping us. We just have to be brave enough to listen to our heart,

which has that wisdom, intuition, that evolved through millions of years. Nature’s evolution. A lot of time

we don’t pay attention. We lose touch with that.”

How do we know? How do we live? In this issue, as has been so in every issue of Dark Matter so far,

there are animals pointing directions. Perhaps nowhere more beautifully than in the only piece in this

issue with a nonhuman narrator (Mei Mei Sanford’s “Serach bat Ascher speaks”): “We are so big and

we touch each others’ mouths so gently with our trunks, we touch the songs in each others’ mouths.”

Lise Weil
Montreal December 2015

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