#and sometimes learning comes from sources you don't expect. sometimes someone else unwittingly shines a light

[echthr0s]

the first holiday season in this apartment, Sparrow and I went with her family to a tree farm and cut down a tree. this was a pretty novel experience for me for several reasons, and it was a lot of fun. we brought the tree home, and Sigma, my friend and our roommate, who had been drinking, sidled up to the tree and soggily apologised for what had been done to it.

this didn’t strike me as remarkable at the time because it was just an in-character thing for them to do, but Sparrow had her own response to the event, which I heard about a few times since then, which cemented the occurrence in my memory. and over the years it’s stuck in my craw a bit, and in reading lately about our modern colonialist relationship with the earth and such-not my thoughts are finally starting to unravel from the yarn ball that is my brain and be coherent;

essentially, from my point of view, what Sigma did is affirm the living-being-ness of this pine that we’d rather cavalierly chopped down and propped up in our living room like a trophy -- a traumatic event, made even more traumatic for going unrecognised, unseen. Sigma drank like a fish and a lot of the time it caused more harm to their immediate environment than good, but sometimes it just highlighted some of the more illuminated if erratic aspects of their nature -- like an inclination towards animism that probably would have been beautiful if encouraged properly, but instead end up as fodder for ridicule because it comes out when they’re drunk and in the company of people who don’t really think much of them as a person already.

it’s only recently that I’ve begun to notice a particular thing that happens, particularly if you’ve been subjected to a lot of toxic shame. let’s say... someone is eating a salad that they’d just made out of ingredients from the farmer’s market, and you’re eating, like... I don’t know, a McDonald’s meal. and it just pisses you off. that person thinks they’re so perfect, eating that salad. you just know they’re doing it to spite you. “at least I won’t be hungry again in a half-hour,” you snipe, waving your burger in front of them so they can smell the hot beef and cheese. but the reason you’re behaving like that isn’t because you’re actually mad at them or think they’re stupid or arrogant or brainwashed or whatever it is. you’re experiencing a shame response -- “damn. maybe I should be eating a salad too... and I did just read that article about the meat industry...” -- and your protector impulse has leapt in to save your ego.

I recognise that response in how I originally felt about the tree incident. I am ashamed of not recognising the tree’s being-ness, its relationship with the land it had grown on, the bond that was unceremoniously severed when we took a saw to it. I am ashamed of not being kinder to it in this process, and I am deeply ashamed that we cut down trees just to serve as props for a commercialised, consumerist holiday! what Sigma did -- unintentionally, of course -- was highlight that shame. what we had done was worthy of an apology. but Sigma shouldn’t have been the one giving it.

anyway, we have a plastic tree now

#i ended it like that because it's funny buuuut i also want to add that i don't necessarily think a plastic tree is better either #because it's /plastic/ #but i DO think that if we keep that one plastic tree for a couple of decades it evens out #what's important about all this to me is not finding The Most Rightest Perfectest Thing to do. it's about thinking about it at all #about our relationships with the beings we treat as things; about how we can improve those relationships even in this society #if you're always thinking about that sort of thing; you make more conscientious and thoughtful choices #even if some of them end up being wrong later; you are already in a position to learn from it #and sometimes learning comes from sources you don't expect. sometimes someone else unwittingly shines a light #singularity.txt