Excerpt Four of Fit For Survival, from Laundry Lines, A Memoir in Stories and Poems.
Turtles can no longer swim far enough or deep enough to escape from us. And they cannot swim backwards. Humans are the first predators that have made reversing an evolutionary necessity for them. Who knows how long, in the evolutionary scheme of things, this may take? They clearly don't have time to adapt to the conditions that threaten their survival now. Some of us, like the scientists I saw, hope that learning more about them will help them live in a world we now must share. Others are trying to help the turtles disentangle from the mess we unknowingly created for them in our search for food.
Observing the leatherback turtle's dilemma and our efforts to enable our co-existence I wonder, "Can humans learn to reverse course before we are inextricably entangled in a way of life that may lead to our extinction?" Not to go back to a Utopian way it was, but to move towards the largely and scarily unknowable way it could be?
It is said that we humans are the first species to realize how we impact our environment, ourselves, and other species worldwide. We have learned how to reach out to each other all over the world at lightning speed. What are we saying to each other that will begin the long task of disentangling us from the nets of destruction we have woven around ourselves? Can we, like the turtle hatchlings, dive deep into the mysterious places that feed us until we are able to offer a way forward?
I am a jumble of fascination and frustration, of despair enmeshed in a deep caring. I live with and try to truly understand the ways "we" misuse or ignore our knowledge from the past. Balancing my sadness, and a debilitating sense of defeat, is hope that we will piece together new learning and old knowledge to weave the unforeseeable future we must plan for as best we can:
We can reflect on the ways our elders have charted a course through centuries of turbulence to get us this far. We can be mindful of the nurturing mother-line reaching back millennia and feeding us forward. We must trust the passion, exuberance and love of our grandchildren.
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Laundry Lines: A Memoir in Stories and Poems
Non-FictionWhy do we remember what we remember? As Ann Elizabeth Carson looks back at the long laundry line of her life strung with memories, in a rare combination of visceral, sensuous prose and poetry she explores how many Western women lived and were shaped...
