Two weeks ago I was in Montreal connecting with Jeremie Robert, a super-talented acrobat and circus performer currently performing with Compagnie XY.
Jeremie and I met through his work with ArtCirq, an indigenous circus in Igloolik, Nunavut, Canada.
I have been applying for grants to travel to Nunavut for about two years now (still no luck) and would love to write about these performers in the Arctic. It’s super-expensive to get to the far north, though.
Climate change is occurring in the Arctic twice as fast as in the rest of the globe, with a predicted 5 to 7 degree Celsius temperature rise in the next century.
Igloolik is a community on the front-lines of climate change, and also a place deeply invested in the healing powers of performance art. I can’t imagine a better place to record stories.
I asked this question to a Compagnie XY acrobat at a barbecue a few nights before their first show.
“Almost anything can be circus in the right context,” she said, “and there are whole theoretical classes at circus school devoted to this exact question. Circus art is something that you have to train and study for years in order to perfect.”
(I’m familiar with this line of questioning, though I’m usually on the receiving end of it: What is Folklore & Mythology?“)
Circuses are generally performed in round tents, too––or so I learned from a mini-exhibition at TOHU.
Ringling Bros. is dead, but circus is not. Modern circuses don’t have animals. It’s more about skill and training than flashy oddities.
If I decide to go to grad school in the coming years, Performance Studies is a field I’m considering. I love the idea of wrestling with the circus question, and interviewing / writing about performers in this sphere.
… and of course, poutine. (Pro tip: poutine tastes best after drinking local beer in the park with a new friend, and will keep you full forever & ever.)
In attending a few performances at Montreal Completement Cirque, I learned that I’m fascinated with flying… maybe because I know it is something my body won’t do.
When I visit a city, there are always layers––the detritus of cities I have been. The shape of houses in Montreal is not unlike DC. The parks that make me breathe deeper remind me of Paris. And anywhere I feel disoriented in language has an odd similarity––I could be in Fiji, or Tuvalu, or Thailand again.
I’m grateful for the sense of dislocation that not knowing a local language can provide. I get lost in the recesses of myself that I didn’t realize were still there.
2.5 months around the 🌎 for climate / water stories (of course), starting now:
Montpelier –> Montreal –> Chengdu –> Beijing –> Copenhagen –> Stockholm –> Chicago –> Boston
Goals for this trip:
Record water / climate change stories in each place
Learn whatever it is that the journey has to teach me
Get more comfortable taking portrait photographs
I bought a used DSLR camera & I’m learning my way around the different settings / breaking through the shyness that I have of photographing people.
This is my friend Cora Brooks in Montpelier, VT. She writes poems and taught me how to bake bread.
We met 5-ish years ago through the archives at the Schlesinger Library, where I was doing a research project on poets who have their papers archived there.
I started alphabetically by last name, elbow deep in grey boxes and filing folders. After a few weeks I realized that Cora was still alive (most people donate their papers only after they’ve passed).
I wrote her a letter. She wrote back. We’ve been writing each other letters ever since.
I’ve visited Cora in Montpelier a few times over the years, and every visit is a new kind of magic. Today we walked to town and ate beetroot and orange gelato.
Cora teaches me how to enjoy slowness. Her home is full of words. She has a cat whose name changes every time I visit. Last time he was Zebra Tattoo. Today he is Barcelona.
Here’s to intergenerational friendships.
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Stay tuned for more. I’m looking forward to updating you all from the road.
The first word I learned on my first day of Arabic class was الأمم المتحدة, the United Nations.
Five years later, I walked inside COP22 in Marrakech, the U.N. talks on climate change, trailing red Moroccan mud on my shoes.
After passing through airport-esque security (no, my shotgun microphone is not a weapon; no, I’m not concealing anything in my hair), I waited in line for my accreditation badge to be printed. I stood behind a delegation from Sudan and an ambassador from the World Bank. The World Bank man liked our green shirts printed with the words “Climate Justice Storyteller” across the front.
I studied Modern Standard Arabic for four years (2009-2013). Save for layovers* in Doha and in Abu Dhabi, I had never set foot in the Middle East before attending COP22 this November.
*Airports don’t count, right? But they are beautiful intersection points. See Naomi Shihab Nye:
Harvard students who take Arabic fall into neat categories: the vast majority who want to work for the State Department or the CIA; aspiring business leaders; the ROTC guy who occasionally came to class in uniform; and a poet obsessed with words (*points at self*). Our vocabulary lessons were skewed accordingly. It was two years before I learned how to ask to use the toilet. Official state functions were deemed more important.
In Morocco, my Modern Standard Arabic was woefully useless. I could introduce myself politely and barter for a taxi or a handful of oranges, but not much beyond that. The dialect spoken in المغرب diverges sharply from the formal stuff I learned in class. If I spent a few more months focusing on immersion, I could probably pick it up. Living breathing languages are beautiful for their twists and turns, but COP was about something else.
One thing I love about learning languages is that it teaches me to be a better resident of my own tongue. I’ll never be done learning Arabic, or English (!) for that matter.
Language is an approximation, always. The words that describe the thing (round, asinine, plastic, vertigo) can never BE the thing. Ceci n’est pas justice climatique.
I’m most interested in the ways that stories (and poems) become doors, portals through which we access experience that is outside of what we would have come across otherwise.
I remember the first poem I ever read: “Zinnias” by Valerie Worth
Zinnias by Valerie Worth
Zinnias, stout and stiff,
Stand no nonsense: their colors
Stare, their leaves
Grow straight out, their petals
Jut like clipped cardboard,
Round, in neat flat rings.
Even cut and bunched
Arranged to please us
In the house, in the water, they
Will hardly wilt– I know
Someone like zinnias: I wish
I were like zinnias.
That poem, for me, was a door. I had never seen a zinnia before, but I felt like I could feel the flower’s texture. I wanted to be “stout and stiff”––as if looking at a flower could make me more confident, more alive. It wowed me (and still does) that words could do that.
How can the climate movement harness the power of a poem? How can we be “like zinnias” and “stand no nonsense”? Where do stories come into play?
A group of 13 storytellers from as far afield as Utah and Hawaii joined together to find out. We were selected as part of a Storytelling Challenge run by SustainUS.
Hundreds of people applied. I had my second round interview when I was super-sick, an amoeba wreaking havoc inside my intestines in Cambodia. I must have said something semi-coherent, though.
It was a privilege and an honor to receive the call from Morgan Curtis on July 4th: “Will you join the delegation?”
I said yes.
SustainUS Climate Justice Storytellers at COP22
Fun fact: I met Morgan Curtis through this blog! She wrote to me about a year and a half ago asking for tips for her bike trip to Paris for COP21, which resulted in this post. And on Monday we’re meeting up for vegan pies in Oxford. LOOK OUT, WORLD.
In the months before November, the SustainUS delegation had weekly Google Hangout calls to work out travel logistics and figure out how we wanted to show up together inside the U.N space.
At a retreat in Oakland, California, we gathered to do a version of Joanna Macy‘s Work that Reconnects and to practice the basics of Nonviolent Communication, a method that involves listening without the intention of responding. Instead, I learned how to listen for needs.
It is a huge privilege to have access to the U.N. space, even as an observer. I wanted to honor the stories of climate change that need to be told; the voices that weren’t present inside the tents of COP22 because they were not allowed access, or the voices that, even present, were systematically silenced within. Why don’t indigenous nations, for example, have a seat at the negotiation tables as sovereign nations? Tribal sovereignty and environmental justice / climate issues go hand in hand.
I view my purpose as one of amplification.
I spent the eve of COP22 on a rooftop with local activists talking solidarity across movements. Stories = fuel.
Earlier that I day I attended COY, the Conference of Youth that proceeds the Conference of the Parties (COP) each year. I stopped in at Green School Bali‘s booth, a storytelling space inspired by this episode of This American Life where a Japanese man uses an old phone booth on top of a hill to communicate with the dead. Inside the Green School booth, you could sit down and tell your own story of climate change. The personal is political is ecological.
November 9, 2016: we are mourning, we are taking action
And while we listened, the world changed. My country elected a climate denier / sexist / homophobe for president. OH JOY.
The day after, SustainUS gathered with international youth climate activists outside COP22 to mourn the election results. The president elect isn’t going to do shit for the planet, so it’s up to the people. We sang. We stood in solidarity with youth climate activists from around the world.
If I had to be in this struggle, there’s no other youth activists I would rather be in it with. Our work starts now. The next four years are critical to take action to limit catastrophic climate change.
I am inspired by how this group shows up, together, in the face of systems of oppression and extraction that feel so heartless.
prayer circle for Standing Rock held outside COP22
We brought human stories to the UN. We listened.
There’s no other group of people I’d rather be facing the climate crisis with. Now the real work begins.
At the midpoint of the conference, I marched in Morocco’s first climate march with thousands of other activists.
“People change not climate change. System change not climate change. Today, today, before tomorrow.”
Local activists marched alongside the international community. In their eyes, the Moroccan regime used COP22 to greenwash its crimes. SustainUS stands in solidarity with local Moroccan activists fighting against an oppressive regime that values profits over people #300kmsouth.
I traveled to COP22 not because I believe that the U.N. can solve all the worlds problems, but for stories. I believe that storytelling, listening, and amplifying voices can be tools for social change.
Manari Kaji Ushigua Santi, President of the Sapara Nation of the Ecuadorian Amazon, took the time to talk with me about climate change:
“We have to get to know ourselves again – who are we? We are part of a chain of life in this earth. We are not a being more important than all other beings. No. Where do energies come from? From the sky and from the earth. We don’t want people to exploit all these natural resources. Each resource: petroleum, gold, uranium, copper – all of those have life. They are elements that help us balance with the sky and with the earth, so that the earth sustains itself. What happens if we exploit all those resources? The world starts to dance.”
Since the end of COP22, I’m thinking more about the dancing world. The unsteady world. The world in which I will grow old.
(P.S. For an awesome book about dance, check out Swing Timeby Zadie Smith. I’m in the middle of it now and the way she writes about movement is stunning.)
How will people look back at this time: the age of screens? The age of environmental indifference? The age when we stood by and let destruction happen––the destruction of species, of the oceans, the Arctic, our coastlines?
Stories are the doors I build and walk through.
How can we tell the stories of the climate justice movement so that it brings in more people than it shuts out? COP, for example, has an old white man problem. I’ll be writing more about this soon.
I want to move through and move beyond closed doors and into new doors. Old doors. Doors where I dismantle the hinges, piece by piece. Doors I ram through and slam my body against, day after day. Doors I repair. Doors where I have no idea what’s waiting on the other side.
(If you’re wondering to yourself––how can I keep this little storytelling boat afloat?––pop on over to my Patreon page. Any and all support is much appreciated. Plus you’ll get access to cool stuff like 1x poem every month written by yours truly.)
Holy goodness, it’s been a while. I have so much to tell you! This is going to be a long post, so fasten your seat belts, friends. Pour a cup of tea. The last month has been full of life.
Autumn always makes me think of new beginnings: the start of school, most intimately (I’m two years out of university, but the feeling still lingers)––classes and lectures and rowing practice and long shadows in the afternoons. It’s a time to go internal, to breathe deeply in that slippery light.
Kapiti Coast
Everything starts in blue, right?
In mid-March I ventured north from the Kapiti Coast to volunteer for three days at WOMAD New Zealand, a world music festival that takes over New Plymouth once a year. The acts were something out of this world. Tami Neilson’s Album “Don’t Be Afraid” has been on heavy rotation in my world for the last six months or so; it was divine to see her perform live. You best believe I danced my socks off.
And then there was DakhaBrakha, a Ukrainian quartet who wear funky hats and dedicate themselves to preserving Ukrainian folk songs. Their creative process is something like this: 1) go to the remote mountain areas in Ukraine, 2) find the oldest living women in the mountain villages, 3) ask them to sing the folk songs they know, 4) record said songs, and 5) reimagine the songs for today’s audience.
The result is AMAZING. Talk about kick-ass percussion. And of course my inner folklorist is dancing.
From Taranaki I traveled north to Auckland for a wedding. Because sometimes surprise things happen on the road.
Speaking of which, I’d love to introduce you all to my travel buddy from here on out… Charlotte Chadwick!
We clean up okay. This was at Charlotte’s high school bff’s wedding in Auckland.
Charlotte is a singer-songwriter, poet, and theater-person extraordinaire (actor / director / playwright / etc.) from Aotearoa New Zealand who also happens to be an awesome ESL teacher. She’s traveled all over and tells great stories, to boot. You can listen to some of Charlotte’s music here: charlottechadwick.bandcamp.com
The journey will be solo at times, together at times, and delightfully messy, as per always. Because that is what journeys are. Journeys change. And this change is most definitely good.
Happy Devi is happy 🙂
From Auckland, Charlotte and I headed to Tauranga to learn some coding skills from the delightfully talented Robert O’Brien, a software developer who has generously given his time to make the next phase of the One Bike One Year journey a reality. His son, Max, has also kindly volunteered his design talents.
Octocat, a new friend
Ya’ll know how I have been alluding to making a map on a website where you can click on a point and listen to a story from that place?
Well, it’s coming to fruition. Slowly, but yes. Things are happening. Stay tuned.
Doing metadata research at the National Library audio archives in Wellington & geeking out over all the old audio equipment
Then Charlotte & I started to plot a way out of Aotearoa. This wasn’t easy, because I had made a commitment not to fly.
Friends, we tried everything.
I went back and forth for four months with a cargo ship executive who had promised me a free trip out of New Zealand. Long story short, he couldn’t make it happen. There were insurance problems. Oy.
Then we tried for super yacht / sailing positions. But it’s the wrong season to sail towards Southeast Asia. The cruise ship companies we talked to didn’t have positions that would suit our needs, but we applied anyway and heard nothing.
Then, grudgingly, we looked at flights. There was a ridiculous sale going from Wellington to Bangkok in mid-May.
We bought the tickets.
I’ll be writing more about this soon, but weighing the value of travel and continuing to collect stories vs. the carbon footprint of a flight (or even a cargo ship trip, for that matter)… it’s sticky stuff. And stuff that it’s necessary to talk more about.
Honestly, poetry helps get me through.
And while I do have a small place in the “family of things”, it’s my duty as an activist to tread lightly on this planet while doing the kind of listening work that has become my life.
“You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.”
So many questions. Mary Oliver is a goddess of questions.
In other news:
The cardboard sign turned three years old! HAPPY BIRTHDAY to the wrinkly piece of cardboard that has helped me collect hundreds of stories in five countries during the last 3 years. There will be a new incarnation of the cardboard sign in SE Asia, most likely with words in more than one language. Woot!
Baby cardboard sign / day one of story collecting / Boston / April 2013
Speaking of multi-lingualism, my work was featured in a newspaper in Vietnam:
And last week was pretty big: I did an interview with the German enorm Magazin for their June issue, plus an interview & photo shoot with Bicycling Magazine in the good ol’ US of A. Not sure when that print copy will be out, but I’ll post some sneak peak photos as soon as I have them to share.
It was a windy afternoon on top of the world where Jacob Howard took the photos for Bicycling––you check out some of his other work here. The big uphill climb up beyond the Brooklyn Turbine was totally worth it.
It gets everywhere: windowsills, tabletops, the kitchen ceiling.
Marmor, QLD, Australia
This home is a good 3/4 of a kilometer from the train tracks.
Marmor isn’t a coal mining town, just a village on the transport route.
The starting salary for driving trucks at the mines out west, though? Somewhere north of $100,000. I can see why anyone would want a piece of that pie. Fly in, fly out. Live in a camp. Get the work done. Twelve hour shifts. Reap the benefits.
I want to be a part of making the world habitable for future generations.
This is my part. Listening. Breathing in the dust. Sipping tea with new friends on a porch and recording a story about the cyclone that passed over here in February of this year––eye and all––almost ripping off the roof and felling several trees. Interconnectivity in action. What fuels the climate system? What fuels the economy?
“We’re not tree-huggers,” the storytellers are quick to add. As if environmentalism were a dirty word.
Dirt.
Coal dust on the windowsill.
One of my hosts used to manage service stations out west. The miners would come in after work to buy a cola, still in their work uniforms. Save for a ring around their eyes they would be covered in the black stuff.
One day one of the workers changed shifts and came in with his face clean to buy a cola. She didn’t recognize him.
All is swirling but here I am, in the middle of it, probing the edges, crossing continents whole.
There is nothing else I would rather be doing now.
I scribbled this brief meditation on why I do what I do halfway up a mountain pass during a 100km ride from Agnes Water to the Boyne Valley. I love hills. They reset my legs and my head and my heart.
the flat bit before the long gravel climb
I see cycle touring as a form of active listening––listening to myself and the world around me.
Do I feel safe? If not, I move on. When I am hungry, I stop and eat. When I am thirsty, I take a sip of water. I’ve grown to know when my period is coming based on the phase of the moon.
churning waters at Rainbow Beach, QLD, Australia. My travel motto? Go with the flow.
And collecting stories––where do I even begin?
The bicycle is a tool for connection. A conversation starter. A form of movement I love that can take me across borders of nation and gender and class and age.
(I am me. I can never be anyone else but me. I am a white middle class almost 23-year-old cis woman from America. There’s no taking that away. But in listening I give the whole of myself––my ears, my heart––to a storyteller.)
One Bike, One Year 