Next month there will be a series of guest posts from imaginary friends coming, namely Dear Titus of course, and the new Creātell Collective endeavor.
Dear Titus is my little dystopian friend, the series of which is at it’s fourth installment. Check out the first letter to Titus that I sent back in August, and the letters that came back from my climate anxious imaginary friend here and here.
The Creātell Collective is a Substack tribe writing with the goal of developing greater curiosity, empathy, and connection. We're choosing a common theme and sharing our different perspectives on it. Then debating using the threads feature. This first season's theme is Empathy. Of course, I write about Empathy towards nature. Duh.
Onward to my dear Trivian, to whom I haven’t written in so long she thought I was dead.
Dear Trivian,
Our Homes reflect the way we see ourselves in nature.
And so it is in rekindling this connection that we make for better homes, right? And vice versa. So maybe, our quest for ecologically sane houses is a quest of finding ourselves. What looked like an outer world endeavor now sounds much more like an inner soul search for re-connection.
But if we don't find fulfillment in our outer lives, maybe it's hard for us to get to working on our inner world. Who has time to meditate on our presence within nature and our roles as stewards and regenerators when our brains are on a constant anxiety treadmill? Of course saving nature seems, from there, to be an act of sacrifice, of taking space away from "me" in order to give it up to polar bears. Polar bears are far away and I am barely surviving, surrounded by concrete. Nature is nothing but an afterthought. The treadmill is what matters. Because I'm afraid of the fall.
But what if I was not surrounded by concrete, by long rows of blocks with square windows and parking lots and fluorescent light bulbs, alien, straight and sanitized?
What if my world was connected to nature once more, from feeling the changing colors of the sun to the star-filled sky at night, from tree shade in the summer breeze to the long lost feeling of belonging to place?
What if my buildings where the conveyors of this new relationship with the world, layers of connection instead of shells of separation?
What would happen then?
Just asking for a friend.
Love as always,
Jo
P.S. I presented a bioclimatic design workshop last week. It was in french, for so those of you with such inclination.
Always beautiful, insightful, and a tiny bit heartbreaking. 💖
I’m reading this in the suburbs, a place I no longer really belong. It’s hard to feel that connection to nature here without leaving the house, and I’m way too familiar with vast parking lots, which I always find a little depressing to walk across. So this piece really hit me in the feels.