Le Guin
Here is a quote I have been thinking of this week:
“We human beings have made a world reduced to ourselves and our artifacts, but we aren’t made for it.” Ursula Le Guin.
I'm thinking about Le Guin this week for several reasons. I'm in the Bay, where she, in part, grew up––close to the university where her father was the the dean of the Anthropology school, which was a fundamental influence on her thinking and work.
I'm also thinking about Le Guin because my boyfriend and I have been doing a new ritual while we're here. In the mornings he'll make coffee and then we'll sit on the tiny stoop outside my parent's basement and look out at the Bay. From the garden you can see the grand sweep of San Francisco, the Marin Headlands, south towards the Peninsula and Oakland and north towards the Delta. On a day when the mist envelops the Golden Gate Bridge and blankets San Francisco you can imagine yourself back in time a few hundred years ago, gazing straight out toward the Pacific.
We start with a deep breath and oh that one breath is so crucial. It's as if, with that one inhale, I am breathing in the morning. All of a sudden the present rushes in: the sunlight warms my face and I hear the calls of the birds and watch the swaying of leaves. We say two things we're grateful for and often, I find I am grateful for this moment, to see the raptors surfing the wind swells and see the hummingbird flirting with the native flowers. In that moment, I feel profoundly less alone. It's not, exactly, that my cares diminish but that the overall weave of my life feels stronger. I am not apart. A thread among many, even as I still worry about my review at work, finishing the slides for class, and the hatred spewed like a toxic fume from Washington.
We aren't made for a world without other life. We belong to a larger tapestry.