[June 2023] Birchbark. Newspaper. A match, when struck against raspy side of box. 

Please, inventory with me: dry oak wood, pine needles, handful of hay, last year’s leaves, length of linen, letters you wrote and never meant to send. 

Old corn flour. The contents of long-shelved canisters – cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, powdered garlic. 

Hillsides, mountainsides, thirsty bushes crisp in a droughting ravine. 

Vehicles, houses, whole neighborhoods. 

Ancestral homelands. 

The Tuesday morning of June 6th, I woke just before four a.m. eastern time feeling like my body was on fire. Careful not to wake anyone, I crept to the washroom, took my temperature. Groggy eyes found numbers, deciphered 98.1, just a couple tiny points above my typical low 97.9. So I stumble-returned to the soft dark of bed, decided that if I still felt off in a few hours I would test for Covid. 

If you’ve jumped ahead, imagined me quite sensitive to smoke inhalation, you are correct but likely have missed this fact: my windows were sealed, air purifiers brimming with their usual quiet hum. The outdoors had not entered. Yet I did not fall back asleep, wrestle-tangled toes and calves in twisted sheets. Then I saw. Morning sun rose, orange as a citrus fruit through thick skim of not-clouds. Not milky, not puff or fluff, that smoldering haze billowed fistfuls of raw cotton beyond the solid glass of my window. Hundreds of miles north, areas of what we call Canada were aflame. Are aflame. Trees turned to ash in the land some of my people are from, carried all the way here. By the following day, I’d had to walk through the sludge of smeared air to my car and, even with a mask, was broken out in hives – allergic to this version of apocalypse. 

Not nearly as dire, but a similar experience: a year or two ago, I awoke from a dream of angry bulldozers teething their way through groves of tender maple trees in the woods near where I grew up. In the dream, the trees began to fight back, not with fury, but in self-defense. Their branches hurled small white and yellow pellets at the machines which would not stop. Everything smelled burnt, a charred taste smuggled up my nose and into my mouth. In the morning my arms were sore as if I, too, had been throwing objects to ward off destruction. My sinuses stung. When I spoke with my parents later that week, they shared, unprompted, that the abandoned golf course where we had once run freely as kids had been sold to a developer who was just beginning to build there – knocking down the edges of the forest around it. With construction vehicles, brush fires. I realized the “pellets” in the dream were golf balls, the demolition of nature all too real. Yes, people need homes but we also need to breathe and for that we need the plants. 

The first time I recall the thick presence of this type of wildfire smoke here, and such a strong reaction to it, was a few summers ago. It had drifted to the east coast all the way from the region most maps these days refer to as California. No hives, but that familiar sudden waking, my whole body a taut muscle ready to run. Later that day, when the hour turned reasonable, I read online about what was happening and then talked to family members near LA and Joshua Tree. Take your fires back, I joked. We laughed until tears flooded our faces, though it wasn’t funny. 

In March of 2011, just before receiving reports of the tsunami in Japan, I heard a mad rush of water in my ears. Woke up vertiginous, flailing, gasping for air. My blood and bones are not from that land, though I have family members whose are. Half a world from them, my partner at the time calmed me, hushed me back to sleep, reminded me of my childhood fears of drowning, the story my mother told about how I howled when the preschool teacher playfully pulled me to pool’s edge. No need for terror here. But it wasn’t just a nightmare. We were both stupefied by the news the next day. Similar with Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

These are a few examples. There are more. 

Like many of us, I have a highly mixed scatter of ancestors from a smattering of places, their flock of languages distilled into mostly english through the sky of my brain. The colonial tongue, like it or abhor it, is what I have, save a few stray phrases I cup in my mouth like precious gems, hoarding their sounds like secrets. Words or not, I carry all of my ancestors, the sweet-lovely and the terrible. The terrific and the horrific in each of them, no one of them reducible by a single denominator of beauty or wrongs, each the result of complex equations. 

Home is everywhere we have landed, all the land is home, and yet… and yet… the specificity of my particular historied-herstoried-theystoried body knows some acres of ground more intimately, and tells me so very clearly when I listen. Although I mourn the earthquake in Haiti, the tsunami in India, the wildfires in Brazil no less than all other things aflame and amiss, my body didn’t present with physical symptoms in the same way. I heard about these events after, rather than feeling them first. What I make of that is this: because my ancestors are not from those places, did not spend generations tending and being tended by the land there, the relationship is different, lives more in my head. 

The way my body talks is not always logical or linear, doesn’t make “sense,” though the corporeal story-telling is deeply embedded in my senses. My thinking mind holds far less than the sum of my cells. When I have heard my elders say, “our bodies are the earth,” I don’t understand or experience this as metaphor. To me, it is neither simile nor semantics. 

Still June, days later. Nearly Solstice. Hives somewhat faded, I am again lost in the space of cannot sleep. I flip open my old laptop, press power. The familiar glow through the apple throws an arc of blue light against my wall. It soothes me, though addiction to the convenience of electricity is one of the reasons we are in this bind. Deathsong lullaby. Cognitive dissonance, my longtime buddy. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it is. Meaning: I do not have to find comfort in this artificial brightness, but I do; I tap words here and remember to survive. Meaning: there are alternatives to the-ways-things-are but our societies haven’t embraced them yet. Policy change is important, but it moves more slowly than fire. Culture change, too. As a species, how small our dramas are. How expansive and dissociative we can be. 

We are burning, friends. We are burning, fam. Whenever I feel the weight of these truths, especially if fear of aloneness seeps in, I slink and weave my way to the words of others who also know these things and hold some kind of hope anyway, some resistance, some joy, or all of the above. The anyway of Franny Choi who reminds us that “The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On.” Cam Awkward-Rich’s “Meditations in an Emergency,” a tonic for the feels.  Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua who tell us it is Not Too Late.  And of course Robin Wall Kimmerer who encourages us to love where we are, for what we love we protect. We must love our planet not just as an intellectual exercise but with our whole hearts, our whole bodies. We must not fall into frenzied urgency, yet we must act quickly. 

My body does not offer me a choice except to notice all of this. I have a sensitive system, have been diagnosed with chronic illness. But medical labels give an incomplete picture. Our planet burns and my body expresses it, particularly when one or more of my lineages have had a relationship with the place across time. Sure, I’m an n=1, but I’ve watched this consistently happen to my skin, my limbs, my limbic system for decades. 

Yet for many people this is not the case. If you are one of these people, who perhaps for safety’s sake store your body’s connection to the earth so deep inside it can be hard to locate, I encourage you to get real quiet. Real still. Maybe find a tucked away place. Or if you do not live somewhere with that kind of privacy available, perhaps nab a moment when no one is looking. Or do it subtly, by dropping your phone, a key, a coin to the ground and pausing just a second longer than necessary. Place your fingers down. Whether it is city sand, stripped suburban topsoil, or rich dark garden plot: breathe the dirt through your hand. Whisper to yourself, “We are burning.” Whisper again and again, until it feels real. We are burning. 

Now that we are joined in the dire, turn towards what gives you hope and whisper: right now, for this moment at least, all the buildings and all the books could burn and we’d still have this – planet, heart, our booming pulse together.