BECOME CLIMATE CONSCIOUSNESS Ahní Rocheleau The juniper savannah, the forest gardens, the carved-out arroyo, the prairie moisture storehouses have been rained on for four consecutive days now. Ki is drenched, roots of the boscage absorbing while the dry wash releasing much bottom sand to rushing flows. The spectacle is not seen, nor experienced. The arroyo waits for us, sipping water, cleansing its own bed of branches, roots, four-winged saltbush, Apache plume/fallugia, and some of the native species of tumbleweed. The high-desert arroyo so rarely plied with the liquor of the cloud gods awaits, like any addict in need of company. Ki, Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerrer’s term1 and kin, now wet, awaits you to partake, to feel, to perceive an entirely forgotten world, to comprehend previously unavailable possibility, to move out of numbness. If experiences that create a leap in our trajectory can occur on an individual level, it is possible for leaps of consciousness to occur across large groups and across continents, to be transported -just as “mycelium pass messages between plants” (Leah Penniman Founding Co-Director of Soul Fire Farm). Steam rises, moisture could fill nostrils and hearts which had become so dry. Ahh, to be in a less dominating space, to be among the native medicinals, the grasses, the hyper-accumulating flora, and the endangered species refreshes priorities. The powerful pull of arroyo, the studio lab of the outdoors, reflects the immediacy of the climate emergency, plunging into economic aridity and social contortion as grandmother cleanses with water, cleanses with fire. Each and every one of us are cultural workers. How are we nourishing our core transmission center, allowing in stillness and inner knowing to construct its own thoughts, and what are we broadcasting into our immediate communities? Before us is a new and unfamiliar proposal to plunge ourselves into the climate emergency and the power of exuding our own individual magnetic power and visual poetry, in silence or in song, to generate collective energy. Kimmerrer, Dr. Robin, 08/31/2022 talk at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico 1
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