being beholden to one another

is awkward

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I drew this comic before I read “When Freedom Kills” by Michelle Jia but it ties in well with this essay that I enjoyed so much. Jia connects her thoughts about living alone (and our culture’s celebration of it) to bigger ideas about what it means to belong in a world that prizes individuality over most other things. There are so many quotes that resonated from the essay, but one that really elucidated the thoughts already inside me is here:

It certainly seems to us now, in this shaky post-lockdown moment, that self-sufficiency is not the glory anyone promised, not even with the milk and honey of capitalistic choice to ease it.

I think about this all the time. Even though we can purchase whatever we want, give ourselves whichever look and sound we please, a sense of belonging in the world is missing. Jia goes on to ask,

When we set out to remake the world, then, how do we make sure it is not solitude we are implicitly making? And how do we not succumb to the rhetoric of abundance and choice, of one more option to consume alone, one more degree of ever-increasing lightness? How do we remain beholden to one another?

Her answer encompasses the idea of mutual indebtedness. We belong in a world in which we are beholden to one another through commitments and IOUs that we can never fully pay, and in being in debt to one another we become a web of support. Jia’s eloquent explanation of the web of indebtedness (just read the essay) also reminded me of a story at the end of Long Life, Honey in the Heart by Martín Prechtel. In the history the author relates, he borrows a large sum of money from his neighbors and community members in order to put together a rite of passage ceremony for local youth. When he tries to pay back his neighbors, he is reprimanded by many people in the community. His friend A Sisay tells him, “Everything comes into this Earth hungry and interdependent on all other things, animals, and people, so they can eat, be warmed, not be lonely, and survive. I know you know this, but why do you push it all away now? We don’t have a word for that kind of death, that isolation of not belonging to all life.”

Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer calls not belonging to all life “species loneliness.” She describes it as “a sense of deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation.” I believe that if mutual indebtedness is a way out of isolation, it must be able to include the more-than-human world.

When I walk around the big ocean shore, I try to practice belonging to all life. Something about being away from people with whom I disagree and removing the option of human loneliness from the equation helps me connect deeper to the web of support that is the more-than-human world. I understand that the cypress trees make air for me to breathe, and the ocean keeps it cool and humid, and the yarrow sprinkles its seeds for birds to eat, the fertility of the bird poop, the magic of the creek and the reeds and the loafing elephant seals. Even though I live in the modern day world, mostly estranged from my dependence and interconnectedness to other animals and wild places, I find ways to reach and stretch toward belonging when I am out there. But it’s a practice; it’s awkward. I recognize the sea daisy and the gulls and the Santa Cruz mudstone in the metamorphic cliffs, but I don’t eat the seeds of the tar plant or wear clothes made of leather from an animal whose life I honorably took. I don’t fully become enmeshed in a web of mutual indebtedness because I still live in a culture that is taking more than we are giving back— so inevitably, my addresses of gratitude and attempts at connection with this wild place are awkward. But I will keep reaching toward interdependence because I believe it’s worth trying to practice that reciprocity with the wild world.