Richard Powers on hope

Two weeks ago, I saw Richard Powers. The morning after his talk, I boarded an Amtrak, headed to New York. Outside, factories belched and fumed, and behind them a roller coaster made its obscene loops against a gray sky. All around me, industry. Allegheny Petroleum. Perfect Industrial Cleaning. A 20-oz plastic Coke bottle floating in a river. Pennsylvania small towns snugged up to the railway, black hills nipping at their flanks. An inflatable Santa drooped in front of a storefront. Our whole American experiment, human experiment, so naked and projecting an almost unbearable innocence in the dawn – the factories and billboards and trains, the jobs and cars, and in between and invisible, the trees.

Richard Powers held up a leaf at the start of his talk: nothing humans have invented, he said, not our most advanced apps on our iPhone 11s, comes close to the complexity and sophistication of the systems inside this leaf. Then he spoke of despair. He told the story of an activist in New York City who set himself on fire in Prospect Park, leaving behind a note that explained this was a representation of what we are doing to the planet. He talked about his own character in The Overstory, whose answer to what humans could do to prevent the current catastrophe was to proffer a small bottle of green poison and sip it. Then he addressed hope, and the difficulty of discussing hope, finding a space between the very grim truths and the equally grim platitudes and false assurances. He described the task of the writer as producing something useful, hopeful, and truthful. Hitting all three, he said, is almost impossible.

Powers told us how his plant consciousness began at age 55, with a health scare. He might die, and what would he have made of his life? What did he want to do? He found solace in an ancient redwood in the mountains of Santa Cruz: this tree had existed since the early days of the Roman Empire. It had weathered several human-driven mass extinctions and would likely weather the coming one. It made his life seem such a tiny thing, a blip. And he began reading about trees.

He spent the next five years learning about the world he’d taken for granted for most of his adult life. It was a profound awakening. He came to see the life all around him, and to realize that most of the Western literature he’d grown up reading was singularly focused on humans and human consciousness–it was, he explained, a monoculture. He came to understand that most of us in the Western world, with our privileges and conveniences, live with four devastating myths: 1) meaning is individual, personal, and autonomous 2) humans are separate from the natural world 3) the natural world is merely a series of commodities and 4) meaning comes from these commodities.

Hope, he offered, comes from connection: it comes from developing plant consciousness, from recognizing the life all around us. He told us, research shows that all that is needed for a major social movement is 3.5% of the population galvanized and eager to act. But how much suffering will it take to reach that 3.5%? Many of us, he said, still “hope we can cross the finish line with all our stuff.”

He wasn’t chastising, or imperative, or prescriptive, or reductive: he was everything a writer should be. That is, he was deliberate, thoughtful, visionary, at once expansive and precise. This Western civilization we have built is not working. It is making us sick. It is destroying the planet. In tragic and ironic ways, it misses the point of consciousness, the wonder of consciousness.

These are my words, stronger than his, which were smoother and softer in their insistence, like a quiet morning river. I heard him and I thought, yes, of course. I got on the train the next morning and I thought yes, of course. All this struggle in my life for money. For productivity. And I need money. And I have to be productive to get it. But how limited. How easy it is to get sucked into a vortex where all that matters is selling and buying and the recognition attached to selling and buying. How easy it is to call that meaning.

And really meaning is so huge and so little. So everyday. It’s about the pair of great-horned owls that live in Frick Park. It’s about Jorge and the Central American mothers who stayed at our house last summer talking about the plants specific to their villages, what herb cures what, what goes with beans and what in soups. About what is there right in front of us all the time and we miss, miss, miss, in ego, in the frenzy of our small lives. How good to remember this. It doesn’t make everything else easier or less complicated. But it adjusts the field of vision, renders the individual scramble for meaning not only futile and crazy-making but silly.

Cultivate attention and you’ll find you appreciate so much more with what seemed like less. Be local. I find truth, usefulness, and hope in this. I find I don’t matter so much, I don’t make meaning by sitting in front of my computer and being productive. Rather, I open myself to it, petting the dog, walking the pastures and woods, talking to my dad. It is a letting go of the old paradigm, difficult, painful, strange, tangled, and healing. It is the way not so much forward as back: back into the realm from which we came, and to which we are all intimately connected.

A quick note

I want to take a moment here and thank you all for reading, and for your many messages this year. It has been lovely being in contact with you, and writing this newsletter each week has been so soul-enriching for me. May your holidays be joyful and full of connection, with ample time for reflection, peace, and gratitude.

Yours,

Sarah

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