Two Women

There are two women who live within me, and they do not always get along.

One runs on the clock of the emergency. She knows, because the science she trained in will not let her forget, exactly how fast the reefs are bleaching, how hot the earth is scorching, how the dry seasons are lengthening, how the fires and floods are coming, and how the guardians are losing ground. She lives by campaigns, deadlines, and the relentless march of time, and she is right to. The crisis she answers is real, it is now, and it will not wait for anyone. She is what I consider the most useful part of me, and on her loudest days she stands at the maker’s shoulder and tells her there is something obscene about painting over old love letters and expired immigration papers for a month while the actual elephant, the actual river, the actual people run out of time.

I have stopped letting her win that argument, though I will never fully silence her, nor would I want to. She has her reasons, and truthfully I need them. Because the other woman, the one at the easel with paint on her hands an

d her own past dissolving into shreds of paper before her, is doing what gives me the strength to keep fighting at all. The grief over the state of the world does not fade away when a campaign ends. It accumulates the way the papers lie over one another, loss laid over loss. If I had no easel to bring it to, it would bury me, and a buried person is no use to a whale or a forest, or to anyone for that matter.

Making is how I cultivate the one thing this century is going to demand of all of us: the resilience to keep witnessing horror without turning away and without being destroyed by it. Each object I finish is a small proof that I can take something unbearable—a loss, a document of failure—and not be defeated by it. That I can hold it in my hands and make it into something with dignity and weight and beauty. I am, in the most literal way, building an emotional levee to withstand the deluge that is coming.

These days my mornings look a little different. The inbox fills with emails that sit and wait. The phone lights up and then dims again. Somewhere, a flight is boarding or a conference is starting that I should perhaps be at. But after thirty years of fighting, I choose instead to stay in my studio, because the papers that have followed me across continents are finally becoming something I can bear to look at. The light through the window pools across the canvas, and the image is about to become what it was always meant to be. I am late to things. I disappoint people I love. I have made my peace with both, trusting that what this morning made is more vital than me being on that plane.

When a painting is finished, the feeling that wells within me is closer to relief than pride, and closer still to defiance. Over the image of a life caught before it passed by, I lay the documents that tried to govern that life, the deciding and the discarding and the judging of worth. And then I cover all of it with flowers.

And yes, the whales are still dying. The women are still walking under a burning sun, burdened by heavy water jugs or loads of firewood, with a host of children and goats in tow. The forest is still burning. The worst is still ahead of me, and I have no illusion that my hands shredding and pressing can somehow stop it. But here, on this easel, on the painted ruins of my own belonging, one disappearing life has been weighed and found precious and made to stay.

That is what I do. I hold what is vanishing from this world in my hands, and I make myself strong enough to fight for it. Strong enough to bear witness, to take action, to feel compassion and empathy even through the days when numbness threatens to take over. The two women who always felt at war within me are not enemies at all. They are two sides of the same self: the maker and the fighter. The studio is where we all converge and sharpen ourselves for what is to come.

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