what is sustainable?
According to the U.N. (who popularized the term in the 1980s), sustainability is when everyone, everywhere can meet their basic needs, forever.
The term sustainable has been around long enough that most of us think of it as an achievable end to a means. These days, many of us are wondering about how to sustain the energy of the Black Lives Matter movement and the demand for the justice system to be overhauled. Others are talking about how to sustain pressure on the political systems to reckon with climate catastrophe. Still others are wondering how to sustain the unsustainable task of endless parenting/working/hometending simultaneously (with a good attitude about it all, no less). Over and over, I hear (in others as well as my own stubborn head), that sustainability is key in making change; sustainability is needed in each of us individually to “fight the good fight”, “do the work”, or “make change happen”. Essentially, that true sustainability equals forever. Usually, after a good bout of this ideology, I feel like a coffee percolator when it’s out of liquid to percolate, gurgling and gasping, but flat out of steam.
Then, I go outside. It’s immediately apparent that sustainability does not actually exist anywhere in the natural world. The only thing I can clearly see is that change doesn’t need any effort to happen, it’s just happening. Everything is at some place in it’s cycle: sprouting growing flowering seeding dying.
The only sustainable part is that it does it again and again and again. Like the moon waxing and waning every 28 1/2 days - like the sun rising relentlessly to remind us to wake up every single morning. Everything that inspires has to expire…we have to exhale after every inhale. Try it. It’s impossible not to. So whether we are in the streets right now protesting or in the courthouse demanding justice or writing a book on racial equity, at some point we’ll need to exhale. To soften, to sleep, to take a vacation even (“GASP!” goes the martyr in me). Essentially, to drop back into the spine, the back of the eyes, and simply surrender to falling over. It’s so scary to fall down, because there’s always the chance we won’t be able to get back up, you know? In dance, contact improvisation in particular, I’ve found the best way to learn how to fly is to practice falling. When you know how to fall, the body can trust the wildly untrustworthy position of flight. What does falling look like in your life? And if we do dare “fall” into that soporific vacation, or find ourselves trolling one of our social media feeds mindlessly, or just wishing that everything would go back to the way it was, at some point we are going to need to inhale again. To wake up and rise up, back into this reality.
The thing I learn from plants about sustainability is that, although it doesn't actually exist, there is always the earth to return to and rise out of. Falling down and getting up repeatedly is a circular pathway. Life is not linear. Life is not one direction. Life is a series of ever widening circles – spiraling - turning from one direction to the next and the next and the next. One of the most helpful spirals I know of is that of Joanna Macy's work, the Work That Reconnects. She tells us to begin with gratitude, with the inhale. At any point, any place in a process that feels endless, dragging, exhausting, or unsustaining, inhale gratitude. It’s a helpful beginning. Also, tonglen, the radical act of suffering with as a practice of compassion, taught by Pema Chodron.
This work is a nice way to trick our selves into practicing self-acceptance, which is always the starting point. Giving ourselves permission to exist and be enough is a slap in the face to the capitalistic, patriarchal society that force-feeds us (especially women, BIPOC, queer people) the notion that we are never, ever enough. Fuck that, right?!
So, my hunch is that when we can be grateful for ourselves, the whole world really will shift on its axis, and become what we would like it to become. Sustainable. Sustained inhaling and exhaling, rising and falling, continuously circling towards our center. Towards ourselves with love, and spreading that love wide and far with each exhale. In systems theory, the microcosm is simply a smaller circle of the macrocosm. Widening circles. Participating, willingly, in the cyclical nature of everything, the
sprouting growing flowering seeding dying, and sprouting again.
It’s all in one breath, or one collapse onto the earth.