I started writing a totally different musing in the morning that I scrapped after saying goodbye to my dearest friend in this country. See, I’m currently in Mexico City and moving back to California at the end of the month. I’ve begun my farewell tour and though I still have weeks left here, it’s now feeling real. This friend was asking me if I felt any sense of loss as I called moving companies and planned out selling some of my things. I kept telling him that no, I feel sure this is the right thing for me and thus am more excited about the change than sad about what I’m leaving behind. Yet now, sitting down in my living room by myself, I am contemplating and feeling that loss.
I’ve been a nomad for what feels like my whole life. Growing up, I switched between elementary schools at least 4 times and moved homes at least another 10. As an adult it hasn’t been much different. My latest home seeking trip took me through mountain towns in Mexico, Colorado, and New Mexico. I was looking for forests to live near and was immediately struck by how… short they all were. Especially in Colorado. Driving into Rocky Mountain National Park, I was confused to see pines that were maybe just a few stories high and didn’t even cover up the mountains. I suddenly realized I had been spoiled by the redwood forests of my childhood. Those soft-barked giants that twisted my neck trying to see where their crown brushed the sky.
When I was in New Mexico, marveling at the otherworldly deserts and pigmented mountains, I started to miss them. So I tacked on a final stop to my trip to visit small towns in northern California and heed the call of the redwoods.
Those beautiful, dense, impossibly massive ancient forests. That every year burn away some more.
When I first began thinking of leaving Mexico City, I was telling people it was because I wanted to finally live somewhere that wasn’t prone to natural disasters. In California, I grew up with earthquake drills. And in 2017, I remember falling asleep on my bedroom floor after a day of heavy smoke and blood orange skies trying to breathe easy close to the ground. Like California, Mexico City has been in a severe drought for years. When I first moved here in 2019, most reports were saying the city would run out of water within a decade. In the years I’ve lived here, the water companies would, largely unannounced, shut off water in different neighborhoods (mostly the poorer ones) as a way to “conserve” water. Meanwhile the latest skyscraper set to be the tallest in the country required tearing down a whole park and is pumping water up to its sixtieth floor away from the community right below it. As if that wasn’t enough, the summers are rife with flash floods, thunderstorms, overnight earthquakes, and the ever worsening air quality. Oh and we’re but an hour away from an active volcano that would very quickly melt the city should it erupt…
It’s tiring to think this way. When I’m walking through the redwoods, or listening to the river rush among the cottonwoods in New Mexico, it feels like the climate emergency can’t possibly be real. It can’t be because it would mean losing all this beauty. It would mean not being able to climb halfway up the valley of this mighty volcano to taste water from one of Mexico’s last remaining glaciers. It would mean not giggling at the white, heart-shaped fuzzy butts of elk near the Rockies. It would mean saying goodbye to the wonder, the awe of nature and its embrace in our lives. It would mean so much more loss.
I’m thinking of a song, “Another World”. She sings:
I need another place
Will there be peace?
I need another world
This one’s nearly gone
I’m gonna miss the birds
Singing all their songs
I’m gonna miss the wind
Been kissing me so long
The lyrics feel like a goodbye to Earth and all we have loved here. They feel like accepting defeat after all we’ve lost and will lose. And then, listening again right now, contemplating loss, I am reminded of what Greta Thunberg shared in a speech:
“Hope is not passive. Hope is not blah, blah, blah. Hope is telling the truth. Hope is taking action, and hope always comes from the people”.
Perhaps Anohni isn’t singing about a planet B she hopes to go live in — another place. Perhaps she is urging us to build another world ourselves, here. One where we value the gifts of nature and fight to keep our romance with the wind, kissing us so long. And that begins by acknowledging what we lose if we don’t take action; if we remain passive and silence the truth.
Every time I look for a new home to live in, I feel I am seeking another world. Maybe in the next place, there will be peace. And maybe I am constantly moving to get to see more of this world before it’s gone. Whatever it may be, I can’t quite get myself to feel hopeless. I love this world too much.
Originally written as a Weekly Musing for GLFCAM’s Composing Earth program in February of 2022.
