A new semester is upon us. This term I’ve eased my course load knowing full well that in the wintertime, I hibernate.
Like so many plants and animals, each year during this season my energy wanes while my desire to recharge and reflect waxes. Flipping the calendar always elicits in me a desire to look back and take stock of what was good in the last year, and what I could have done without.
The course I’m taking this semester opened with required reading that spoke to the First Nations’ interconnected relationship with the land, and how vastly this contrasts with that of western society’s. It stated how Indigenous peoples look to the earth as a teacher. I thought back to my early 20s when I first observed how my cyclic energy depletion seemed to align with deciduous trees giving up their leaves and pausing, not blooming, not producing, as I also huddled indoors near a wood stove and refused invitations to go out.
Back in the present moment I feel a combination of exhaustion and hope.
Exhaustion arises as I reflect on conversations I had last year where I felt like I was banging my head against a wall. Conversations where I tried to explain to relatives and acquaintances on the internet why I am against the CGL pipeline being forced through unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. Or conversations where I tried to offer my opinion to those same people about settlers stepping back so Indigenous leaders could assume their rightful positions as stewards and decision-makers for this land. Or conversations where I merely tried to state how sometimes I go for walks in nature, by myself, and gain knowledge from openly observing the natural environment around me.
Within all of these explanations, I recall being met with condescending remarks, laughter, or blank stares, like I had just been dropped off via UFO. The exhaustion often mixes with anger and frustration.
I do, however, feel hope. If there’s anything that 2020 showed the human race, it’s how the old systems are fraying and crumbling at the seams, and how there is an eager and passionate young generation waiting and willing to step in and show us a new way forward. A way that supports and heals the earth. A way that does its damndest to reverse the climate destruction we have caused thus far. A way that allows the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island the right to reclaim the land that has always been theirs, and show the settlers, the visitors, how to exist respectfully on this continent.
As our days now gradually lengthen with more light, I am inclined to err on the side of hope. The truth will set you free, so they say, and I am hopeful that the truth around how our planet deserves to be treated will one day (soon) be common sense.