Page 59 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

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

has helped me begin to understand the nature of our world, though it has taken me years to

piece it together.

The “Re-membering” dream tells me: “I wandered out of the woods and got lost.” In the moment

of my friend’s betrayal, my body and the woods had become unsafe, and I fled them. In doing

so, I quite literally became a lost soul, untethered and disconnected from my body and the

earth’s. The bear’s instruction, “Go back to the woods,” suggests that to reclaim the lost parts of

myself, I must return to the forest, rebuild my relationship with it. The bear also tells me, “Go

back to the water.” I understood this to mean that I must return to the ocean—one of my

greatest sources of comfort and inspiration. Along with bathing suits, I had avoided it in the

years since the surgery. The image of the infant in this dream sequence connects me in an

uncanny and terrible way to Eve Ensler, whose work has been significant to me since I

discovered it in the late 1990s. We both have a history that includes being unable to really live in

our bodies, and now my psyche and hers share this hideous image.

The dream of the elephants who self-selected to be culled helps me to understand the anguish

of other species that are being asked to witness and bear the unbearable: the slaughter of their

families, communities, and habitat at the hands of humans. If humans can decide that the only

comfort or hope of relief is death, could not animals decide the same? How do we live with this

possibility?

Through the lens of these dreams, I began to see that the cultural mindset that causes men to

systematically destroy women and children in the Congo is the same mindset that causes them

to brutally decimate communities of elephants for their ivory. It imagines, enacts and justifies

horrors such as the genocide of Native Americans, the African slave trade, the Holocaust,

Hiroshima, the global war on women, and ecocide. It is this same mindset that caused a young

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