Page 63 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015
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Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION
friend’s property was bone-dry. My friends out West have been praying for rain for four long
years; across the country, we are losing millions of acres and animals each year to mega-fires.
It is 2015, and Her body is burning... Wildfire... advances across ...boundaries in hours....
Extremes of hot and cold refuse to be regulated... A river floods... killing the good ... along with
the bad. The boundaries we draw stop nothing...
When I do as the dream tells me to do, and return to the woods and the water, I am right-sized,
no longer at the center or the apex of things, as our culture would have us believe, but one
miniscule part of a living, breathing, interconnected organism that is constantly communicating.
In the presence of brook or ocean, under a canopy of birch and conifer, I begin to remember
what I come from, what I am made of and belong to, what I must attend to, and what is at stake.
* “Mary Sutton” is an assumed name to protect the author’s identity in an era of Google
searches and background checks, and in a culture in which addiction is still a source of great
stigma and shame.
ı Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals (New York: Seven Stories Press, Revised
edition, 2008), Introduction.
About the author:
Mary Sutton lives with her husband and cats. They happily share the land with bears, deer,
foxes, coyotes, rabbits, hawks, skunks, squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, vole, countless birds
and crawlers, a gorgeous variety of trees, and generations of Stone people.
!!"
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