Prayer flags. Photo: Photo: Nivedita Ravishankar / flickr CC.
On being a banner in the wind
Frances Voelcker reflects on responsibility and personal choice
I am feeling torn. The image is of shot silk, rent so that the two colours scream apart, destroying the fabric that needs them meshed to spring to life, shimmer and shift in the light.
‘That’s head talk,’ he said. ‘You need to listen to your heart. Don’t follow worldly wisdom. Listen to the voice of love.’
But that added to my confusion. The world’s voice and my wife-and-mother-heart say, ‘Fly to Japan’. My head says, ‘Don’t go, think of the carbon emissions,’ and my grandmother-heart says, ‘For the love of this same child, and for the other children, and for my grandchild and all the other grandchildren there may be, don’t go.’ Because this one return flight will load as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as one whole year of my life – a life already too carbon-intense without any flying.
The world’s voice tells me there is only one of me, in a planeload of four hundred people, so what difference will it make if I alone don’t travel? But that’s not a valid justification: many of us, like me, will have no real need to go. So, each of us is free to make that choice. And two wrongs have never made a right.
Though this decision is hard, and deciding not to go imposes painful reconsiderations on other people, this foregoing of a treat-journey is really the easier part. The harder part is how to reduce the rest of my over-consumption without losing heart. How do I do it? How do we do it for real? Now we know the footprint, the earthshare, the overshoot, the timescale, we can see that we cannot wait to get it planned perfectly. So, there will have to be rough edges at first: don’t we have to trust that the shape will get clearer even as we build it?
Some kind of structure, then, and we are both the masons and the masons’ material. We’ve done the initial cleaning and chipping; we see the material now for what it is; we’ve found the faultlines. And, time being short, we have to go for these to reduce the bulk fast. So, let’s support this block attentively and carefully. We don’t want to shatter ourselves. But these are major works, and urgent: there is no other way, is there? I can’t see it.
And after time, maybe we will have worked out how to cut the stone to build a myriad shelter, a hive, with shafts, cells, galleries, private living places and spaces for great gatherings and celebration.
Outside, the winds of rapid change will still beat against the hive and we must refine, adapt and reshape it as we learn. By working together, it need not be grim: we can celebrate that we are alive and caring for each other. We might even decorate our home with two-tone banners, exhilarating in their thrum and snap.
