Sunday, October 16, 2016
Refuge-Launch
Reading through Tarry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, was a delightful treat. She brings about provoking thoughts about nature, humans within nature family, and religion. It was interesting to see how she discussed her religion and related it to her experiences with nature, such as family camping trips and bird watching with her Mimi. The most powerful excerpt from the chapter for me, was when she was explaining to her friend that she doesn't know rage and that she didn't know what rage was truly until she saw the men destroyed the owls' home. This is something that struck an emotion within me as well. My question is this, what do you believe rage is? Why do you think she had to witness nature destruction first hand to be able to experience that particular emotion? And in relation to writing, rage, and nature, how can we, as writers, take these emotions we experience ourselves and turn them into something positive in hope for awareness?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
This too was the most interesting part of the read for me. What is rage? How do we define it or quantify it? While this seems a touch off topic of nature, I think that it is very easy to see the comparisons. If one looks at the line that Sandy Lopez says during their conversation: "Yes. Perhaps your generation, one behind mine, is a step removed from the pain." We can see where some, including myself and many others in our generation get their rage. Williams finds her rage after she sees the Owl's home destroyed which is very close to what the millennial generation is looking at right now, and what we were born into and raised in. We were born into a world where the environment was being destroyed around us, and grew up in a Country that started wars for limited resources and and boasted reduced prices at the risk of our environment. Not only that, but we're inheriting our parents' and grandparents' debt and the mess they've made of the world. So I think while we are not in the same generation as Williams, we are part of a generation that is removed from pain. We haven't had any great wars, we haven't had our brothers and sisters come home from atrocities in the same fashion as past generations have. We don't know someone that was affected by mustard gas. But we're angry. We have rage. We didn't see these things happen before us, so we aren't saddened by it -- we're pissed off. We have rage. We're angry and spiteful that we have to clean up (in our eyes) this mess that has been made. But luckily, that rage is useful. We can turn that into productivity. We can take a stand and say "no, this isn't going to be the way it is going to be anymore" and we can make a change. As writers, we can write about what angers us and how it should be changed. We can try to support impactful legislation. We can build a better world and we are driven to do so by the rage inside of us from the world around us.
ReplyDeleteAs the great Bernie Sanders once said: "Never, ever, lose your sense of rage."