With the care of a poet and wisdom of an ecologist living in harmony with—rather than domination of—the natural world, Cormier's new book is transformative and healing.
Emerging science shows vast interconnection between all living things and the planet itself. Humans are not invaders: We are a part of ecological communities and can choose our behaviors within it.
, Cormier gives us a beautiful rite of passage in book form. With the fine care of a poet and the nuancedYou have a way of writing about bees that sometimes seems more bee than human. Could you tell us how you arrived at this capacity?years. I started writing poetry and songs as a child; as a result, my approach to the use of words is rooted in music and literary devices such as imagery, metaphor, and sound.
Most animals including bees aren't"talkers" that communicate in spoken words; they’re dancers, singers, musicians, and dramatic theatrical actors. The repeating metaphor of a bee colony behaving like a galaxy was said to me by a friend’s six-year-old child. Children have, in many ways, so much more insight than us adults. Your writing about living a pastoral life in today's tumultuous world shines with a deep kind of comfort, even solace.
Can you tell me where that comes from for you? , and resentment in the world these days, regarding both political situations and the ecological effect human industry has had on the world. We need to forgive instead of festering inis not ignoring the negative and pretending something hasn’t happened; it’s accepting that this is the way things are now. With that acceptance comes a calm clarity that allows for insight and action.
We cannot change the past, but we can set a plan and choose our actions going forward.you braid different experiences of death and burial, including those of indigenous children at forced residential schools. Your tender care with death of animals in rural life mirrors something deeper. What inspired you to explore death in this way? In my teens, I was severely injured in a car accident and was lucky to survive.
This experience profoundly shifted my views on mortality and the fragility of life. Like other biological realities such as farting and bodily fluids, death is a feared and avoided taboo in Western culture. We are alarmed by it, or laugh about it, but we rarely look directly at it.
Those who have dealt with death in an intimately hands-on manner—held a close family member’s hand as they passed, been involved in a fatal incident, made decisions about ailing family, or touched their own potential death—are often quickly relieved of such a taboo. Death as a concept can be frightening, but in reality it is far more complex, more of an omnipotent deity than a terrifying demon.
We cannot do anything to prepare for or defend ourselves against a concept or idea: It is something that exists only in our heads. The lack of agency triggers negative emotions and perpetuates our discomfort. But once you accept that something is real, true, and unavoidable, you can make decisions and take action. Acceptance is empowering.
The Western culture approach to the concepts of life and death has historically been based in the Judeo-Christian idea that humans are separate from all other life forms, and one’s life is a test or qualifying trial that determines a post-mortem/future state of being. As our scientific knowledge grows and supplements or replaces these old ideas, we are becoming increasingly aware of the similarities and connections between us and other living things, including the cyclical nature of life and death and the relationships between various species.
Over the past century, the concern we have for our own lives is extending to consideration of our effects on the physical world, not just as investment in our own future but also as respect for other species and the ecology as entities unto themselves.1. A new perspective on, or an antidote to, the fears and anxieties about the human species’ effects on the earth.
Humans are not evil invading aliens; we are a part of this ecology, and given our knowledge of it, we can choose our behaviors within it.on the quirks and realities of rural life. The majority of our population lives in urban centers, disconnected from nature’s brutal and beautiful glory, and thus the idea of rural living tends to be overly romanticized and sterilized into trendy concepts such as"the tradwife" and"homesteading.
" Actual agriculture is quite a far cry from such fairy tales.is a collection of stories. Everyone loves a good story! Animals and plants can be both surprising and surprisingly silly, while we two-legged meat creatures can often only gawk and flounder and try to figure it all out. I've tried to capture the moments of whimsy, weirdness, and profundity that I've encountered while living in the urban-wildland interface..
Susan is a spoken word artist, event producer, beekeeper, and caretaker of assorted small critters. Her lyrical essay “Advice to a New Beekeeper” won the CBC Nonfiction Prize and her writing has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. Cormier produces Vancouver Story Slam, Canada's longest-running live indie storytelling competition. The Best Ways to Begin AgainSelf Tests are all about you.
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