A cell seen under microscope. Photo by the Berkshire Community College (BCC) Bioscience Image Library, a public domain digital library of plant and animal histology.
Every month, the Agam Agenda shares a letter from someone in our team: a personal message toward shaping kinder futures. Read the letter for August 2022 by Carissa Pobre, our Strategist for Creative Communication.
The month of August has nerve-endings. The sort of nerve-endings that quiver as when you know that a poem is an ‘eco-poem’ but it isn’t wearing its typical clothes. It isn’t talking about floods, fires, or carbon in the atmosphere. It doesn’t flash inside your eyes in the color green. It’s neon—bright. It turns stale in the middle. You try biting on it but it’s made of air. Then just like that, someone else’s words have bewitched you: you melt. You read a little longer. The earth quakes. Instead, you burn.
*
There are points in life when The Thing stops making sense. August might be one of them. Not quite in the middle of it anymore. Your body begins to give out at the worst points of a day. Your mind is also an unreliable narrator, even though you had fully committed to Showing Up: for the thing you are fighting for, the thing that makes you come alive and burn a little brighter. Sometimes. You feel connected to the world around you. A little longer. And yet.
*
What catches us in a moment like it? Is this even allowed? Who do we think hears us in a moment of plea, of (after all) desire: to be reminded that we still can hope, in a paradise built in hell? Even if it’s only inside our eyes?
*
I’ve long been fascinated by the possibility that what we consider ‘ecological’ is not always ‘right’. It’s not in the right colors, nor least in the spaces we may have already swiped or liked upon entering. We live in complexity, and I’ve always wanted to tell more complex stories, and I’ve also wanted to tell it like it is. All the world began with a yes: a yearning: a mouth.
*
A few years ago, while I was traveling alone on a boat with strangers to a remote island, I had my earphones in with a single song on loop. I played that song for the entire hour and a half getting there: in waves, in the color blue. The blue of distance, one might say—but also of desire, of possibility, of letting go.
If we let go now, what wouldn’t be the same?
What really is quivering inside of your wild heart?
