Page 6 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

fact that tends to be ignored by humans, even spiritually developed humans dedicated to social justice.

In Auschwitz, my attempts to bring up the parallels to ecocide that kept presenting themselves to me

were often met with indifference, if not resentment. (Which is why I was so happy to learn of Buddhist

nuns who have taken on the issue of humans’ warped relationship to the earth – see my interview with

Ayya Santacitta in “Listening to Natural Law.”) The astonishing inattention of the rest of the world is the

driver of George Monbiot’s article in The Guardian about the “eco-apocalyptic fires” that have been

raging across Indonesia since July: “The fires are destroying treasures as precious and irreplaceable as

the archaeological remains being levelled by Isis, clouded leopards, sun bears, gibbons, the Sumatran

rhinoceros and Sumatran tiger...” Monbiot writes that there are thousands or possibly millions more

threatened species being driven from their habitat. The title of his article is “Nothing to See Here.”

II.

“...aching for—seeking a word, some word(s) that might bear what we are knowing, and what we are

yet desperate for. Desperate for safety? For peace? For better memories? Of course. What word will

make our lives safe? I’m trying, as you are—to find it.”

– Margo Berdeshevsky

The above words are from notes to the poem-collage “Our Safe Word” which appears in this issue.

They, and the poem, were written by a poet who lives in Paris— and they were written before the Paris

attacks in November. Often, the most important part of our knowing, as human beings, is not

conscious. Is dark matter. Even consciously, it seems we all know a whole lot more than we did just

over a year ago when the first issue of this journal came out—and much of “what we are knowing” often

seems difficult if not impossible to bear. Some days that knowledge seems to be pouring in, like the

refugees at our gates, who also remind us at what cost we in the industrialized West have lived and

continue to live the way we do.** For anyone willing to look, the dots are being connected. Here in

Canada the just-released final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission determined that the

residential school system established in the late 1880s caused the deaths of over 3,000 aboriginal

children and the loss of countless languages, amounting to a “century of cultural genocide” whose

legacy continues today. In the U.S., greed, racism and xenophobia have erupted to the surface like an

angry boil. And, in reporting on the recent Paris climate summit, even mainstream sources were not

denying that “Her Body is Burning.” (See Mary Sutton’s piece in this issue for a harrowing account of

the way cultural disease can take up residence in a human body.)

Knowing what we know, how do we live? (“Knowledge and understanding are not remedy, we came to

understand...” writes Deena Metzger in “Our Radiant Lives.”) This more than anything was the question

that gave rise to this journal. Sharon English asks the question another way in her review of Taiaiake