Page 40 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

Who’s to say how much heartbreak or trauma will push a person to violence, or a culture to collective

madness? It could be as straightforward, as complex, as insidious as the ‘christening’ of unimaginably

large tracts of ancient indigenous home terrain with names that bear no relation to those by which

these places were originally known -­‐ names that expressed an intimacy, a depth of relationship

unimaginable to those who imposed the labels. Dehumanization is a potent provocation. To be abused,

‘othered’, or ignored is to become invisible, non-­‐existent, debatable. We are chopped down, becoming

the trees that silently fall in the forest.

My Pakistani friend Hassan is a profound peacebuilder. I met him at Eastern Mennonite, too. It was his

practice to go to remote villages where tribal violence had broken out. He would camp at the edge of a

field, fly a white flag, and invite farmers and warlords alike (sometimes they were one and the same) to

come tell their stories. He once told me, ‘Violence, too, is a form of communication.’ It is the

communication of last resort.

As with what cannot be spoken, what we cannot hear matters a great deal, and not only in the human

realm, where the silence of exclusion is already overwhelming. “There is an information density...of

between one and ten million bits per half hour of whale song – which is the approximate amount of

information contained in Homer’s Odyssey. In other words, whales are communicating each half hour

the same amount of information as that in an entire book that would take us hours or days to read.”11

(And, because of their size, and the fact that they traverse the ocean from surface to depths and along

their epic migrations, whales distribute vital nutrients across vast liquid expanses. In recent years, the

ever-­‐increasing traffic of container ships and super tankers is killing whales at alarming rates.) The

cacophony of modern life is devastating animals whose mating calls and echolocation signals cannot be

heard above the human din, interrupting vital life-­‐sustaining systems, and depriving us of essential,

encyclopedic realms of magic and connection. We find ourselves living a new and terrifying creation

story whose divine authorship has been supplanted by machines. The trauma of separation from which

we suffer globally is not God’s banishment. It is our man-­‐made exile from the Garden of the Earth in all

her resplendent, thriving, complexity. Grief is the key that unlocks the gate to reveal the path that

leads us home. Home is our place within the entirety of Life.

11 Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Into the Dreaming of Earth , Bear & Co., 2014