Chicory, Ash, the Norns & the Third Sister and the Long Night

This past week I wrote something small, at this desk (my kitchen table, when you think of it, the place where many important discussions happen), in this heat, and I did not think much of it. I said that writing feels strange lately. That everything is moving too fast and very little is clear, and there is this indefinable sense that we are all just waiting. Waiting for something to break, or shift, or arrive. And I asked, half joking, if it was just me at the desk in Burgundy staring at the cursor.

It was not just me.

The replies, 100s of them, came in from Ohio and Devon and Lisbon and Perth and a woman in Nairobi who said she had stopped starting projects because she could not see the ground they would stand on. Nurses. A hedge fund guy (wow, he read an animist letter, there is hope!). Two farmers. A teenager. The same feeling in that many bodies is not just a mood, meaning it is not something happening inside us individually (clue: nothing does) because we are somehow different or broken, nor that we can fix it with better sleep and a supplement protocol (I still started on a new supplement for aging man, God I am only 52).

So the question is not, “Am I okay?” The question is, waiting for what, exactly?

And when I finally sat down with that one, in the dark, a day later after watering the land, honestly, the answer came up so fast it embarrassed me and shook me a little.

We are waiting for someone to turn it around. We are waiting for the adults. For an election, a technology, a treaty, a movement, a rain (yes I do…). For someone with more authority than us to announce that the shape of the next ten years is now knowable or at least “better”, so that we can start living again and stop going from an exhausting cycle of crisis to crisis. Reality is that too many people have all silently agreed to postpone their actual lives until the ground firms up.

I was already in the midst of developing this essay when I posted that note that got 100s of comments. And I was doing some reading of Margaret Wheatley (If you have not read “Who Do We Choose to Be?” read it now). Anyhow, she watched people struggling to find the right voice to speak to power, the right program that can scale and provide financial security, the right lever to change their situation, and what she notices is what it costs them. Exhaustion. Despair. Illness. And it is not working. So, her people take a vow in the warrior training, and she takes it from Chögyam Trungpa, and it is not a nice or easy vow.

I cannot change the way the world is.

Deep acceptance of the current reality, she calls it. Not filtered. Not covered over with our optimism or our hopefulness or our despair. And something that at first I resisted, because too many false spiritual new edge teachings are somehow still alive in some part of my psyche (I should say Ego), and we believe that we are some Gods in control of this Earth.

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So, this old teaching is, once again, I cannot change the way the world is.

Which sounds like defeat for about four seconds or four years to four decades if you argue and resist, until you notice what it actually does: release. She calls it going from savior to warrior. Warriors for the human spirit is her phrase, people brave enough to refrain from adding to the fear and aggression of this time.

Maybe that is what the waiting is. Maybe most of us are still standing in the savior posture, arms out, holding up a ceiling that came down a while ago, and some deep part of us has already done the math and has not yet found a way to tell the rest of us.

So I sat with this (years ago when I first read her work, thank you, Pastor Shaman Bruce, for having recommended her) and now again as I was taking notes for this essay, and I want to share something here. I have not said this out loud to anyone, not even my wife Rose, and I am going to say it here:

I do not know how to rewild this land anymore.

Twenty acres. One year of thinking, planting, watching, failing, replanting. Hedgerows, corridors, the wet meadow that is not wet, the orchard, fifteen varieties of grape put in on purpose because I did not want to bet everything on one and they all died anyway from the heat waves. Every single decision I have made here was built on rainfall that no longer arrived. Not “might not arrive.” Does not.

I realized that rewilding twenty years ago, rewilding now, and rewilding for twenty years from now are not the same act. They are not even the same verb. Twenty years ago you put back what was here. Now, what was here is leaving (including the majestic Pedunculate Oaks in our National Forest), and what is coming has no name yet because it has not happened, and I am supposed to plant for it. This week.

Add that under the current arrêté, I am forbidden to water trees and shrubs planted in open ground for more than a year. Day or night. Which is correct, by the way. I would probably vote for it if they did not just allow giant monocrop farms to use even more water without restrictions.

In my heart, the River comes first. But I want you to sit in that with me for a second, because it is the truest thing I can tell you about this summer: a man whose whole work is putting trees into the ground is legally forbidden to give them water while they die.

Meanwhile, and I only learned this properly a few days ago, the ONF has been planting what they call îlots d’avenir. Islands of the future. Small experimental plots, half a hectare to five, testing which trees might live in a France that does not exist yet. In the forêt domaniale de Haye they put in chêne pubescent, sapin de Turquie, calocèdre, to stand where beech and pedunculate oak will not. And in the Giono project they carried more than seven thousand southern oaks and beeches north into the Grand Est, and the answer to whether it worked comes back in about seventy years.

State foresters. Fonctionnaires. Planting trees they will never see grown, for a world they cannot describe, and accepting that the result will arrive long after they are ash. In many ways, that is a ceremony. They just do not have an Elder to tell them.

My teacher said something to me recently that I have not been able to put down.

He said, the party is over.

And then, because he is who he is, he let it sit for a moment before he finished it. The party is over, and most people are still dancing, because nobody told them the music stopped. And then he laughed, not because he found this funny at all; he cares for the Western people as much as for his Andean family, but because sometimes trickster (and I) laugh when someone steps into their own shit.

Western life is a party. No consequence, no bill, the food keeps coming out of the kitchen, the lights stay on, somebody else is doing the dishes, and the trash is sent “away in a 3rd world country” (meaning back into the food and water we will consume). And I want to be careful here because I can feel the sermon rising in me and I do not want that. I am still dancing in some rooms of my life. I fly rarely but still do. I order things that arrive in a van at my doorstep. I have a phone in my pocket made of a mountain in the Congo, and solar panels on my roof that have caused harm somewhere far away. So this is not from above.

But I have old friends, people I love, who genuinely believe they are immune (a friend recently told me on the phone: “where I am, it’s all fine…”). But often this sense of immunity is not conscious. They would never say it. It lives in the assumptions: that climate is a television thing, that food and water are supply questions that other countries have, that money and class and a good passport function as a roof and a shield from the world storms. They are booking the autumn trip. They are talking about the market. And I sit with them, and I feel this vertigo mixed with a good dose of annoyance and despair, because we are looking at the same world and seeing different realities.

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The more excruciating truth is that we watch it happen to other people. We watch and watch, and then one day we are not watching. The wheat next door went the color of sandpaper, and my friend from Paris said, “Oh, that is so sad,” and asked what time we were eating.

(I am not innocent in this. I have said things exactly that stupid, about someone else’s field decades ago.)

So that is the diagnosis, and the diagnosis is the cheap part if you ask me. The internet, the news, and even Substack are drowning in diagnosis.

In this essay, I want to go to the Medicine. Because without medicine, a diagnosis is just another form of violence and fuel for despair and paralysis. Here is what we will explore and what I want to gift you:

Our people watched the sky fail once already. Not something like this. Exactly this. There is a poem where the God of knowing runs out of knowing and goes to a giant to ask, and his question is not how does it end, it is who survives. The poem answers. It gives their names, it says where they hid, it says what they ate during the years without sun, and when I found that last part I literally put the laptop down and walked out into the field under the excruciating burning sun. And the craziest part is that it is not prophecy or myth. There are tree rings and ice cores behind it. It is a report of something that happened to us.

Then I want to talk about the third sister at the root of the world, and what her name actually means, which turns all the questions you ask at three in the morning into one you can answer.

Then joy, and why a NASA climate scientist and a thousand-year-old poem hand us the same instruction.

Then whether a man is allowed to fall apart, and who holds the one who is holding.

Five practices for the long night (One I have never written down, because I have been ashamed of it).

So, come in, let’s dive in.