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Embracing a Philosophy of Change [1]
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Date: 2024-07-03
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.
On the last day of June, just three days after one of the most disappointing presidential debates I have had the displeasure of watching, I hauled myself to a you-pick berry farm near Newberg, Oregon, to eat my weight in blueberries, raspberries, and end-of-season but still delicious strawberries.
Three friends and I walked up and down the rows collecting berries and eating just as many until our tongues turned blue. When we were done we drank the best espresso milkshakes I’ve ever tasted in the cool shade of the farm’s patio. The weekend ended too soon.
Writing every week about the climate, U.S. politics, rural triumphs and, too often, losses is a practice in detachment. To counteract the despair that can settle in, I’ve been setting my sights on my own tiny universe.
My biggest achievement of late is that the beeblossom bush and wildflower seeds I planted a few months ago are blooming, and instead of just fruit flies in my garden I’ve seen butterflies and bumblebees bobbing in and out of flowers.
I also had my first bean harvest this week: yellow, purple, and green beans all sprouted from seeds I planted in late April. My second round of radish seeds produced the single largest radish I’ve ever seen in the most glorious magenta shade, and with it I garnished a salad made from lettuce I’ve tended to only somewhat diligently.
Another form of imperfect diligence: I read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower for the first time, and at a pace slow enough to fully absorb it. It felt like the appropriate time to read this book considering it’s set in the 2020s when climate change and disease have led the world into a dystopia where food is priced at 10 times the amount we’re used to and the majority of people are without a home.
The reader follows Lauren Olamina, a young woman who watches her family die around her before she heads north, up the California coast to find a place to start over, hopefully away from the violence that took her loved ones.
She wants to build a new community led by a religion she’s coined Earthseed. Earthseed’s only god is change. Influenced by Buddhism, existentialism, and the second law of thermodynamics, this religion’s sole dogma is that everything will change and only once you accept this can you be ready for an uncertain future.
Lauren’s religion is based on her own experiences which have shown that resisting change leads to disaster. Embracing and preparing for change becomes the drumbeat of her religion.
While Parable of the Sower is fiction, it tells the truth about living in a world where we are guaranteed change and nothing else.
Humans tend to be lulled by a false sense of stability and an assumption that everything that once was is everything that will be, even though history shows us that people die, societies change, empires fall. Nothing that once was will be again.
Over the past week, the U.S. Supreme Court released decisions on several key cases that chart the near future of homelessness policy, presidential immunity, and the power of federal agencies to interpret ambiguous regulation – all blows to Democrats.
If you look at any left-leaning media outlet, you’d be struck by the sense of total despair from middle-to-upper class white pundits who are shocked by the state of U.S. politics, even though non-white folks have been ringing the alarm bells for much, much longer. For some, about 248 years longer.
Right now, many liberals seem to be mourning a past when presidents weren’t felons and the Supreme Court wasn’t skewed to the right. But mourning the past can seem indulgent considering how far we’ve come from the days when slavery was legal and women couldn’t vote, to name just a couple of realities that are unfathomable now.
Things are bad, yes, but at least the bad isn’t hiding from us. The rise of fascism occuring not just in the U.S. but around the world is happening right in front of our faces, so shock at the past week’s Supreme Court decisions feels a little… naive, to say the least.
Embracing Lauren Olamina’s change philosophy could be the only way to prepare ourselves for what the future holds. In the meantime, I’ll be picking berries.
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