Rebecca Solnit

I listen to stuff that's been said so long ago, so it's cool to watch something 15 hours ago.

There's a talk by Rebecca Solnit on Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe and on YouTube. She reads from paper. She talks about Rachel Carson. Poisons killed everything, not just what it's targeted. Her famous book was called Silent Spring. She quotes MLK on interconnectivity. Revolutions are objections to separateness. Lynn Margulis developed symbiogenesis wasn't how Darwin saw things, he saw things splitting off instead of coming together, but live combines and develops cooperatively, relationality, interdependence. She talks about Suzanne Simard who saw how trees cooperate (NY Times article). She talks about politics, how she was afraid Kamala Harris was going to be torn down as a black woman, so pleased the opposite has been happening so far. The celebration of place too. Interesting, Madonna/Whore syndrome with the environment, we can't touch nature, or we strip mine it.

She does a podcast to promote her book on how it's not too late to try and do some things about climate change, and it's transcribed in Tricycle.

More links:

Profile on Wikipedia

Solnit's website

Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir by Rebecca Solnit

"I once encountered a Buddhist saint who had worn tokens devotees gave him; they loaded him up, tiny token by tiny token until he was dragging hundreds of pounds of clinking griefs."

She's talking about the price women pay to be preyed upon outside in society, specifically in her household as a child, with family and then in the streets of San Francisco USA. She wrote that once expert told her, "rape is about four times more likely to result in diagnosable PTSD than combat." and she, "joked later that not getting raped was the most avid hobby of my youth."

She reports that she wrote in her walking book, "It was the most devastating discovery of my life that I had no real right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness out of doors, that the world was full of strangers who seemed to hate me and wished to harm me for no reason other than my gender, that sex so readily became violence, and that hardly anyone else considered it a public issue rather than a private problem."

Later, "I realized then that making you think like a predator was one thing predators could do to you. Violence itself had penetrated me."

Also, "We die all the time to avoid being killed."

And, "Perhaps it’s that a woman exists in a perpetual state of wrongness, and the only way to triumph is to refuse the terms by which this is so."

Pretty intense stuff. I imagined her in a nunnery and not as hassled, but then I remember that French movie about the Polish nuns who were raped by soldiers coming back from war, such that they had to build a nursery in the nunnery because so many nuns were raped. I imagined a violent scifi movie where women had armor, but as usual that was only for the rich. A dystopia that took this aspect of our current society to its logical extreme. I wondered who that bodhisattva was that took tokens of suffering and then was weighed down by them. I felt guilty that I thought she was cute in her photo. I hope and aspire to make women feel safe from me. I lay next to my daughter, me reading, her watching a children's show, and hope she doesn't have too much to deal with. But I will also have to teach her the rules of safety to cope with the reality, despite it's unfairness.