what is emerging? what is in the way?
the elephants remember.
At a recent training with the Climate Psychology Alliance, we were asked to make some artwork in response to two prompts:
“What is emerging?”
and
“What is in the way?”
Everyone else drew hopeful, growing things for “what is emerging”—sprouts, new communities, green shoots of change. I didn’t. Without really thinking, I started writing and sketching all the bad stuff.
What is emerging:
For-profit prisons
Trad wife energy
Conflict
Fascism
Mass shootings
Racism
Greed
Super yachts
Natural disasters
Patriarchy
Power hungry
Destruction
Shareholder value
Bigotry
Billionaires
Grief
Attention economy
War
What is in the way:
Healers
Innovators
Breaking generational curses
New takes on old ideas
Pollinators
Scientists
Love
Connection
Mother earth
Healthy conflict
Re-integration of pieces of the self
Possibility thinking
Caring
Using every ounce of privilege we can get
Empathy
Systems thinking
the elephants
Spiderwebs, probably
Understanding relationship dynamics
Gentle parenting
The ocean
Processing trauma
listening to each other
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When I finished, I looked down and realized I’d done the assignment backwards.
Emergence was supposed to be the hopeful side.
I laughed a little, and thought maybe I’d just missed the point. But when we started talking about our work, something interesting happened. As others looked at their own pieces through the lens of mine, they noticed that theirs could be reversed too. What they had put in “the way” could just as easily be described as “what’s emerging.” And that flipped meaning completely.
Normally, when I picture activism, I see Sisyphus.. people pushing the heavy world uphill, straining to make it better, watching it roll back down again.
But this time I saw something else. I saw activists as defenders. Figures holding the world steady as it threatens to tip further into chaos. Not pushing it upward, just keeping it from falling apart completely.
And then came the elephants.
They appeared out of nowhere but made perfect sense. Elephants have that grounded, steadfast energy. They carry memory. They protect. They don’t rush.
I wrote this poem:
They remember
They remember.
They will not crush the chick
The small, soft future
They notice
Their matriarchs
lead by listening
And the herd
listens back
While men buy super-yachts
to flee the rising tide
The elephants wade through it slowly,
Stewards of the mud
bearing the weight of our forgetting
So that the world
Still turns
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I don’t really want to analyze it. It just came through. But I think about it a lot. The idea that maybe activism isn’t only about striving or saving. Maybe it’s also about remembering, holding, steadying.
When so much ugliness is emerging, maybe what stands in the way of collapse are the ones who refuse to forget what tenderness feels like. The ones who wade through the mud instead of trying to escape it.
The elephants remember. And maybe that’s enough.
FYI: Each week I share stories through For People and Planet, a newsletter focused on climate solutions and hope for the future. You can find it here if you’d like to follow along: forpeopleandpla.net