. the internal realities we pay attention to extend outward. when we focus on what is in accordance with our great-life-force, with the power of our erotic, we turn our world toward that too. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\ni want to let uncertainty guide me, let it turn me inward. how do we plan what crops to seed when we don\u2019t know if the season will bring drought or flood? how do we plan ten, fifty years out for a future we can\u2019t imagine? unknowns loom at every turn. but here we are, planting trees, layering our beds with clover and rye. something grows. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\nthere are lessons to be learned about loving a world whose future is so uncertain, loving it despite its uncertainty, because of it, its fragility and adaptability. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\npriya sudhakaran nair <\/b>(\u201824), an environmental justice major born in india and raised in lesotho, is one of saucier<\/span>\u2019s best friends. i thought they were dating. \u201ccommon mistake,\u201d saucier<\/span> said, laughing. \u201cpriya is probably the person that i’ve loved the most in my life. we’ll just get into these super huge conversations about systems of oppression and how everything is wrong and how everything is broken.\u201d it\u2019s a really special kind of love, founded on a shared grief, and then a shared joy to say \u201coh, but i love you and i want you to have a world to live in.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\nnair and saucier<\/span> talk a lot about how we\u2019re a generation of goodbyes. \u201cwe’re just gonna have to say goodbye to things forever, and like, they’re not going to come back. and what do we do with that?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\nwhen bill mckibben tells us that our actions over the next five years will determine the quality of our lives, this is what we hear: that our love of the world will be predicated on loss, fostered among loss, and as one grows so will the other. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\u201cfor me,\u201d saucier<\/span> says, \u201cgrief is not something that stops. we will be grieving for the rest of our lives.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\ni was home <\/b>this summer in western massachusetts, working on a farm. my coworkers and i cut open and ate cantaloupes on the back of the truck. basking in the sun, with juice dripping down my chest, i felt a bit like a demigod. but the orange flesh tasted more like water left out too long. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\nsome things did not lose their potency, though. i had this person i loved, who\u2019d grown up in the same towns that i had. as rain fell and hillsides eroded, he could not be desaturated, the shape of him could not be changed. he held the entirety of our home in his muscles. the mountains of his shoulders were the same ones that held the mountains of our valley. i could trace the river from the top of his head to his feet. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\ni could love him and lose him like i could love and lose the land. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\nthis winter break, when i was home, i drove with a couple friends up to our friend sage\u2019s house, who lives thirty minutes into the hilltowns. the roads wind through the woods for miles between these remote, high ground towns, bending against the curves of the rivers, clinging to the sides of the mountains. a lot of them closed this summer\u2014rocks, dirt, and branches from the mountain tumbling down, water falling and pooling and eventually crumbling the concrete. now, months later, we looked out the window and still saw places where the guard rail fell off and hadn\u2019t been replaced yet. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\nit was foggy that night. it was so foggy and we drove so slow that it took us nearly an hour to get to sage\u2019s. this, we realized, is a new touchstone of new england december. \u201ceverything gets unknown,\u201d my friend fiona said, who was driving. \u201cit\u2019s so creepy. like everything\u2019s obscured. it becomes somewhere else.\u201d the water-cycle\u2019s gone nonlinear. there\u2019s no straight path from rain to groundwater to river to mist to cloud to rain. it floats back and forth in a confused haze and fiona can\u2019t see anything out the windshield of her kia soul.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\nsometime before midnight that night, we all went on a walk down the road at sage\u2019s house. the fog was settling over the fields on either side, gathering up in the distant hills, lurking in the shadows of the woods. overgrown, green-gray grasses slumped on top of overgrown, dead, golden grasses. it all turned ghostly and lumpy in the dark.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\nthis is the new color of winter, and it\u2019s sort of beautiful too:<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\nthe dead, golden fields, the overgrown, green mounds of plants that were supposed to die back two months ago, that just keep spilling over themselves, unable to save their energy for spring. it\u2019s grotesque and it\u2019s also the world, wild and quiet and no more than what it is, teaching us the lesson that it\u2019s okay to just be what we are, to show up however we need to show up. i\u2019m floored at how it can still be beautiful. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\nthe next night, my birthday, i went on a walk with my friend whose body i’ve let hold the entirety of our home. i told him what i thought about this new winter, whose colors are golden and green and gray instead of white and he said this thing about decay. \u201cit\u2019s all on display, now, you know? we have to look at it, we have to witness it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\non another night, in middlebury, at the end of january, i talked to him on the phone. snow had finally fallen and accumulated for real and i walked through it in my clogs, doing loops down the roads around my house. he talked about how decay turns nouns into verbs; the essential elements of something come undone. loving something as it decays means loving it in its moment of change, in its moment of being undone. winter decay sits belly up to the foggy air. i try to love us for our fragility, our changeability. i try to turn inward, to the truth of my body in each moment. there is a feeling of my hands in the dirt right now. there is the feeling of my hands in someone else\u2019s right now. i focus on the life i touch, i give it breath.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
in this essay, charlotte roberts and other middlebury college students reflect on love and grief in the time of climate change. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21153,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4905,4916,4902,7087,7080,4904],"tags":[],"storyfest_categories":[],"class_list":["post-37367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adaptation","category-climate","category-colleges-education","category-storyfest","category-storyfest-2024","category-water"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
looking for the erotic in the decay of a changing climate<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n