What Events…

A year ago in 2025, I was busy discovering, documenting, altering and re-discovering text in a process that began with an invitation from artist Brooke Holve https://www.brookeholve.com/ to explore the mysteries of crumpling and crushing. What happens to text on a page when the page is crumpled and then pressed? What does this process tell me about the haphazard, the unpredictable and the mysterious in my pursuit of meaning? And what does it teach me about my life and about life round me?

In the following year, the world seems to have turned upside down. And just when I thought it could not be more upended, my country is at war, my government has arrived on the brink of authoritarianism, conflicts are boiling over in Africa, Russia’s war against Ukraine lumbers on destabilizing Europe, and the global financial system wobbles with the price of oil as high as $115 a barrel — all the while the Sixth Great Extinction continues its alarming rate with the rising temperature of the biosphere. The world’s weather has reached new levels of chaos with rare events becoming ordinary as each passing year registers the hottest on record. And AIs may be the greatest of all threats to life as they practice deception, organize secret meetings and jump the rails to write code beyond human comprehension. In the face of this powerful inorganic alien intelligence the values that determine meaning itself have been thrown into question. What next?

Having focused my writing for several decades on the protection of natural systems, first with bioregionalism and watershed restoration leading into salmon protection, bearing witness to climate disruption, and now the truly frightening future dominated by AI, I find myself so saddened by the blind blundering of government and industry propelling all life toward destruction, that I despair. This coincides with relocating to a new home in a distinctly different microclimate. Closer to the coast, surrounded by a magnificent but unfamiliar oak forest, with my library and papers still in the old house, I have felt such a sense of uprooting only the most mundane events have grounded me — the puppy still being house-trained, the elder cat’s near-death-experiences, and gardening — bringing back to health the old apple trees, tending the plants in the garden my husband has planted., and now harvesting.

Although I was intrigued by the idea of crumpling and crushing, I was also baffled. Brooke was pounding rock to make ink and folding pages into accordion shapes leading viewers to a precipice at the edge of the frame. When I stumbled on the concept of precarity it seemed a link to the way Brooke talks about her work. It anchored me in my work with her.

So little is really known about what lies ahead. Perhaps at no other time in history has the world been more unmoored.

Emergence from crushing is always unpredictable and unique. The result of one crumpling is never the same as another. Taking my cue from Brooke, I wrote then crumpled my pages and crushed the crumple flat. In this process I imposed control, yet I could not determine the outcome. My momentary preoccupations receded into a fascination with what was emerging. Syntax and meaning had disappeared. The remaining words and phrases held the magnetism of an oracle leading me into deeper questions. The mildly destructive and transformative process of crumpling and crushing yields a complexity from what is lost in the creases. As I sought a new context for the altered text, I began to see how much my work has always been about finding meaning.

‍ There is always surprise.The essence of what emerges from that search might resemble what I suspected, but nothing will be xactly what I expect. If it is, then surely I deceive myself and am holding too tightly to my expectations. There cannot be life if I hold it too tightly. Consider the processes of a living system such as a watershed — soil washes away, rocks crumble and shift, fallen branches and slipped banks alter the flow — no matter how much control we assert in restoration, we cannot anticipate what results from the influence of gravity and weather. In fact, we cannot even account for all the influences on outcome, because some are simply beyond our awareness. Consider crumpling and crushing movement below the surface of the earth which is of such magnitude that mountain ranges rise and seas change their boundaries. Earthquakes are capable of rearranging whole landscapes in just minutes. Precarity expresses itself in the emergence of conditions and events previously unimagined.

The process of crushing and crumpling text led me in two directions, one interior as I struggled to find meaning in the fragments of text still visible, the other external as I recognized the complete mystery of what was unfolding around me. One of the important things I learned was how much my writing has always been about this effort to find meaning. As I have needed to make sense of myself and of my life-events, words have been my tools. A solitary person, writing rather than speech has been how I worked with the words. But meaning cannot always be formed from the chaos of un-worded experience. Sometimes all one can do is witness and document, sort and categorize, search for the order in the chaos — find the other sock lost somewhere in the pile of laundry.

So goes much of my current work — I witness and document, I sort and categorize. I search for the lost sock, something in me always driven back to meaning-making. If I cannot discover it, I must try to kindle it. The details must be arranged and in the arranging some small movement finds its own direction. I must follow at the same time I lay the trail, word by word, an explorer forging a path of language without knowing where it is leading.

The poems that emerge through this process are cairns that tell you I have been here. I have gone on.