Pema Chödron writes that “Spiritual awakening is frequently described as a journey to the top of a mountain.” The image of the spiritual awakening as a rarified experience that separates an awakened person from the rest of the world fails to adequately approximate what the old Buddhist masters would call a proper spiritual awakening. Spiritual awakening, for Chödron, who writes on ancient Buddhist tradition, is not a journey of transcendence, but a journey downward, into the pain and chaos of the world, towards the difficulty of connection, and the messiness of the world, not away from it.
And so these are the opening lines of Pema Chödron’s Comfortable with Uncertainty, an exquisite collection, where excerpts from longer meditations and books have been arranged like a ring of prayer beads. Pema Chödron is a teacher at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia. She practices the Shambhala Buddhist tradition that she studied under the tutelage of the master, Trungpa Rinpoche, who is credited as being among the first Buddhist monks to bring Buddhism to the West. In Comfortable with Uncertainty, 108 of Chödron’s most treasured writings have been collected to form what Emily Hilburn Sell describes as “a crystal bead with 108 facets, to be contemplated as you wish.” Buddhist monks often carry around a “rosary” with 108 beads, touching them as they pray. For those of us who happen to be less into fondling beads, and more into literary rituals, Comfortable with Uncertainty offers a practice more for the mind than for the hands. As an aside, I find it telling that in the first five drafts of this essay, I had mistakenly written the title to Chödron’s book as Uncomfortable with Uncertainty, as if my stubborn conscious mind would not admit the discomfort of uncertainty so readily.
It is easy to see the practice of meditation as a solipsistic act, a world-abnegating practice that drives its practitioners into deeper circles of navel gazing and self-indulgent isolation. I had my own doubts about how beneficial sitting still might be, given the veritable assault rifle of thoughts that passes through my conscious mind on a daily basis. Writers relish the non-sequitur of their own mindless chatter. The thought of trying to still my mind to pure thinking about thinking and refine even that down to nothing at all seemed to be antithetical to who I was as a writer.
And yet, I have found in my own practice the opposite has often proven to be true. In the quiet I sometimes find the most profound realizations of my life.
Just today I realized that the artistic act of mark-making carries with it not only the emotional state of the mark-maker in the act of making, but emotional states recalled. Only when the emotional state in the act of making aligns with emotion recollected in tranquility can the artistic process be complete.
I’m not alone in finding solace in meditation. It has become a marketing enterprise.
Just prior to the pandemic, boutique meditation studios opened up in cities like Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C. promising practitioners beautified spaces in which to experience transcendence. These boutique meditation studios were forced to close during the pandemic, and many remain unopened, leaving the would-be meditators who would have been willing to spend hundreds of dollars a month for a particular kind of ambience to face themselves in the narrow confines of their own homes.
If I don’t count the times I meditated as a teenager and imagined myself transformed into a blade of grass, I have been meditating regularly for six years. The consciousness of youth is more permeable than the consciousness of adulthood, and I believe that we spend a great deal of money, alcohol, marijuana, and time trying to project ourselves back into those semi-permeable states. Notwithstanding my youthful attempts at meditation, the fact that I first began my serious adult meditation practice more recently highlights how much of my life has been characterized by doing something. I’ll admit that in the beginning of my adult meditation practice I felt incredibly stupid sitting on a meditation cushion. My life up to that point had been characterized by doing, by achievement. Always moving, I’d first gone to university, where my compulsive studying and ambition to get straight As kept me up all night, and then more ambition took me to Columbia University to study poetry. I wanted to walk in the footsteps of Federico Garcia Lorca. Then I was off to Canada, following love, and after that, I chased mountains, hoping to find transcendence literally at the top of cliffs.
Perhaps what is most revolutionary about the act of meditation is that it requires that a person do absolutely nothing for a period of time every day. In a world where our worth is derived from what we do, the choice to not do something, even for a little while, can feel extraordinary and not a little subversive. I admit that for a long time, I felt guilty, sitting down doing nothing. Even today, sometimes I still do.
The modern literature on spiritual awakenings is classified by what one does, the symptoms one experiences, as if spiritual awakening were another task of self-actualization to put on one’s vision board or another antidote to illness, if not illness itself.
For Chödron, spiritual awakening is not a single action, but a practice. Instead of transcending suffering, we inhabit it. We get humble. That is, we go down to the root of what humility means. Humble comes from the Latin word for humus, which means soil. Soil is a vibrant ecosystem of death and decay, as well as growth and life. It is a place where bacteria and fungus feed on corpses and where roots draw water and minerals into their cells, the petals of their flowers, the flesh of their fruit. It is the place where light captured in the pore of a leaf runs down into the ground, fusing the ecosystem beneath with energy and life. This process feeds us. It is what creates oak trees and apples.
Decaying Buddha. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
Spiritual awakening is often characterized as the absence of pain and suffering. For Chödron, spiritual awakening is the exact opposite. It is the courageous act of choosing to embrace suffering. Transcendence comes through the passage through life’s difficulty, while making the choice to do so with generosity, patience, discipline, exertion, meditation, and finally, wisdom.
Michel de Montaigne’s essay “On Habit” explores the nature of habit and overwhelm. Contemporary life feels designed to keep us in a state of near-constant overwhelm. I have a pile of books I’d like to read that I could stack literally from the floor to the ceiling. There are birthdays to remember and birthdays I’ve missed, but my love is strong, and I’m trying my best. There are work deadlines. There are projects to complete and emails to answer. There are fans to turn on because today is so damn hot. And then there’s climate change. The Toronto Star reports that Vancouver’s extreme heat is causing mussels, clams, and snails to “cook to death in their shells.” There’s impending drought in California. In Oregon a river runs dry while a fish species sacred to an entire tribe dies en masse, drowned by air. I’d go for a walk on the beach in Waikiki, but at high tide, half the beach is gone. I’d choose solipsistic solutions, but my cell phone is a ticking time bomb of overwhelm. How many inspirational quotes can I read in one hour on Instagram? How many aspirational lifestyles can I imagine trying to lead?
To add insult to the inundation is the fact that there’s a whole library of self-help books out there to overwhelm you with quick fixes to help you feel less overwhelmed. Popular articles offer a range of simple and banal solutions. For example, Inc. magazine lists exercise, deep breathing, gratitude practice, meditation, napping, drinking water, phoning a friend, asking for help, and (this was my favorite) downright procrastination (which can be achieved either by performing deep cleans of one’s desk or by blowing off one’s obligations entirely by going to the movies). I’ve tried all of these recently except going to the movies because every movie seems to be derived from some Marvel comic or another. Do people not write scripts anymore?
Being a seeker of non-banal solutions, I decided to see what Michel de Montaigne had to offer on the subject. Montaigne, for those who do not know, basically invented the personal essay. So, if you happen to be a teenager or young adult overwhelmed because there is a college essay due, you can blame Montaigne. Given that Montaigne is the cause of so much overwhelm, I thought it appropriate that I’d search within his thousand-plus page tome for a solution. I was not disappointed.
To Montaigne, the solution to overwhelm is habit and the source of the problem is also habit, “a violent and treacherous schoolteacher.” Habit is only as good as the quality and intention of one’s habits and so habit performed without intention leads us down the thorny and wide path to overwhelm. “Gradually and stealthily she slides her authoritative foot into us; then, having by this gentle and humble beginning planted it firmly within us, helped by time she later discloses an angry and tyrannous countenance, against which we are no longer allowed to lift up our eyes.” This should be the first quote presented to every person about to embark on the terrible habit of scrolling through Instagram.
In “On Habit,” Montaigne writes about the king who made it a habit to “draw nourishment from poison” and the woman who grew accustomed to survive by eating spiders. By this he means that we have many strange habits of which we are not aware, and that the human spirit, body, and mind can become habituated to almost anything. Montaigne notes: “Our judgement’s power is lulled to sleep once we grow accustomed to anything.” I live in Hawai’i, where it is all too easy to become habituated to beauty, and so I often stand at the corner of Ka’iulani and Kalakaua just to hear the tourists coo about the houses glowing down the mountains of Manoa like lava flow, like something one would expect to see on the Amalfi Coast.
Either way, there are habits formed in daily life and in childhood of which we may not be aware, that form the foundation of our moral dysregulation, not to mention, mental dysregulation. I’d argue that materialism and excessive consumption is one such habit on which we have all been nursed since we were children (I think of all the weekend trips I took with my mother to the mall). I was also fed Coca-Cola in my baby bottle, which led to a soda and sugar habit. Mere repitition and parental introduction does not make something in itself, right. It might be wise to step back and think about the source of our overwhelm: whether it is to climb the burning ladders of fame, accumulate an increase in social media followers, amass wealth, or accomplish other forms of excess. Sometimes the overwhelm is a symptom of our unequal society, one which glorifies billionaires who construct rockets (blatant vainglorious dick-measuring), while the planet burns, people starve, and millions in America live paycheck to paycheck, in fear of losing their jobs.
And yet, #overwhelmed and you’ll find a swarm of banal solutions and scripts to help you say “no.” Prayer and meditation are often presented as options, but one can neither pray nor meditate on a day where the temperature reaches 116 degrees without fear of heatstroke, nor sit on a beach fouled by the stench of mussels cooking in their own shells, nor swim in an ocean where the jellyfish and corals are literally being boiled alive without risking being boiled alive oneself. And those are the lucky ones. Try taking time to meditate while working two jobs and raising children. Montaigne doesn’t think much of the habit of religion anyway, noting that he will not delve too deeply into the “deceit of religions, which, as we can see, has intoxicated so many great nations and so many learned men.”
Habit can build us up or kill us. Montaigne spends a good portion of his essay “On Habit” listing the many strange habits of cultures and peoples. It’s a thrilling smorgasbord to which I’d add: Americans throw fire in the air, blow up a few children, and terrify their animals on the Fourth of July to celebrate freedom. Montaigne himself wrote: “In the past, when Cretans wished to curse someone, they prayed the gods to make him catch a bad habit.”
Habit can seem ordinary to a culture, or feel almost ordained by nature. Montaigne is such a rigorous thinker as to question the source of all his habits and his culture’s customs.
Gastropod. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
But Montaigne falls short of calling for outright revolution, even in the face of custom and habit’s absurdity. Here is where I have to disagree. “I abhor novelty,” he writes, saying that “innovators do most harm” particularly those who have so much “self-love and arrogance in judging so highly” of their own “opinions” that they are “obliged to disturb the public peace in order to establish them.” Montaigne was a comfortable man with leisure to read and time to question the very precepts on which his society was based. The billionaires building rockets surely must think the current system a fair one, blasting them to the stars on unpaid tax dollars while children starve, disease rages, drought drains our rivers, and gamblers declare bankruptcy while student loan holders rarely receive such forgiveness. But while the Amazon deliveries always arrive on time, what happens to the Amazon’s actual trees is another story.
Revolution would certainly disturb Montaigne’s comfort (and also the comfort of so many still benefitting from the current arrangement), and so his calls to uphold common laws and to justify those laws on the basis of religion are so loaded with contradictions and bias that they cannot be taken seriously. Wasn’t he just earlier criticizing the folly of religion to provide a justification for all types of stupidity?
He is right to note that the best intentions carry unintended consequences, and we are wise to consider these consequences before we go grab our pitchforks. But, after careful consideration, with the planet burning, it may be time to grab the pitchforks to stoke the flames of change. For those thinking of setting new habits, maybe the first habit should be a rigorous questioning of all current habits.
Perhaps the strongest case Montaigne makes is the case that we each question our own habits, our own fashions, and our own customs, within reason. So many of the habits of overwork and material consumption are the same habits responsible for the planet’s desecration. If we all slowed down a little more, we could do much to assuage the overwhelm and perhaps heal the planet. Perhaps when we are overwhelmed, we would be wise to look first at all the small and large habits of consumption, distraction, and foolishness that got us there in the first place.
We needed Thich Nhat Hanh’s Love Letter to the Earth. We needed it more than we knew.
It was not Mordor. It was the Gulf of Mexico. Major news sources referred to it as an “eye of fire.” Not even Homer had imagined Charybdis being this terrible. The whirlpool of flame spiraled in the turquoise sea. Hoses dumped water on water that had turned to fire. The whole thing felt like a cosmic joke. It looked like hell itself. Actually, no, it didn’t. Not even Dante Alighieri could have imagined a hell like this. Either way, Dante imagined his hell as frozen. The fact that the burning water came to me mediated through a grainy video shot on a helicopter in the middle of the Gulf did nothing to blunt the horror. Is the essence of Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” at all muted because one cannot see the brushstrokes? Atrocious realities and fathomless feats of imagination withstand the distortions of mediation well. The fire burned in the Gulf, but it wasn’t the first time something like this has happened. Just over ten years ago, for 87 days, I watched the live online video of the Deepwater Horizon pipe vomiting oil into the Gulf of Mexico from my apartment in Canada, where I was living at the time. When all was said and done, over 4 million gallons of oil ended up in the Gulf, and the Environmental Protection Agency called it the “largest spill of oil in the history of marine oil drilling operations.” Years after the spill, dolphins and other marine animals were still dying at record rates. These are only minor tragedies when we think of the more immense challenges facing the planet today due to climate change, but I write about these oil spills because they offer such a stark visual record of the tragedies unfolding, and because they are a clear reminder that in 10 years since the worst oil spill in the history of marine oil drilling, nothing at all has changed. It is easy to feel hopeless. But Thich Nhat Hanh in his exquisite book, Love Letter to the Earth, offers hope through his mindful reminder of the planet’s resilience. This is not to release us from responsibility, but to remind us that each mindful act of conservation and restoration matters even as the Earth burns.
Imagine the Buddha sitting by the Bodhi tree, barely breathing, in perfect peace. Now, imagine people passing by, marveling at the sight. Day after day, crowds of people pass him by. Some, while passing, throw down their trash. Others pass in automobiles. Some are leaking oil. The trash piles up. One day, a man passes, lights a cigarette, and drops the match, lighting the Buddha on fire. He didn’t mean to.
Hanh considers the earth a bodhisattva, “a living being who has happiness, awakening, understanding, and love.” To Hanh, the earth is “an inexhaustible source of creativity” that nevertheless endures the mortifications of industrialization and climate change with “equanimity.” I fear that Earth’s equanimity won’t last for long. Already, we are starting to feel the tremors of her anger—in California and in Oregon’s wildfires and droughts, in the dead coral reefs, in rising seas, in stronger storms.
And yet, Hanh believes in the power of transformation: “We can throw fragrant flowers on the Earth; we can also throw urine or excrement on the Earth, and the Earth doesn’t discriminate. She accepts everything, whether pure or impure, and transforms it, no matter how long it takes.”
It is this faith in transformation that grounds Hanh’s faith in humanity. He believes that we can take refuge in the Earth to heal ourselves, and that in doing so, we can become mindful of our interconnection with the Earth, and heal the Earth in the process.
Healing ourselves means reframing our relationship to ourselves through mindfulness, but it also involves reframing how we consume.
Consumption is not without a moral imperative. How we choose to spend our time and money has an impact on the planet. This goes beyond choosing to drive electric vehicles or buying carbon offsets. This affects everything we consume, from the clothes we wear to the food we eat. Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University writes in his stunning collection of essays Ethics in the Real World, “Consumers have an ethical responsibility to be aware of how their food is produced, and the big brands have a corresponding obligation to be more transparent about their suppliers, so that their customers can make informed choices about what they are eating.” Could mindful choices really save the planet? Could all of us together, making mindful demands of ourselves, each other, and the companies that supply us our necessities change the planet?
Perhaps Hanh is up to something, particularly when I consider my time a finite resource that has the capacity to better or worsen the planet. Time is the one thing we have that is a non-renewable resource. How we spend our time is perhaps as important as how we spend our money. The choice to stay home and meditate rather than to drive somewhere. The decision to create art rather than to buy new things. The choice to go outside and hike instead of going to the mall. These are small things, but they matter.
Hanh writes: “Many of us are lost. We work too hard, our lives are too busy; we lose ourselves in consumption and distraction of all kinds and have become increasingly lost, lonely, or sick. Many of us live very isolated lives. We’re no longer in touch with ourselves, our family, our ancestors, the Earth, or the wonders of life around us.” We try to fill the void with consumption, “Yet our addiction to consumerism, to buying and consuming things we don’t need, is causing so much stress, so much suffering, both to ourselves, and to the Earth. Our craving for fame, wealth, and power is insatiable, and this puts a heavy strain on our own bodies and on the planet.”
To be lost is to be alive. The journey out through the lostness is life itself.
Fire. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
To Hanh “There is no difference between healing ourselves and healing the Earth.”
Perhaps Hanh is right. What would happen if everyone, all at once, gained mindful clarity about what needed to be done? What if the world’s greed were reduced? If we were all no longer alienated from ourselves, from each other, and from the planet, could the Earth heal?
Hanh writes, “Allow yourself to be yourself…healing will take place on its own.”
What a radical thing it would be—if we all found peace in doing nothing, if we all learned at last, how to be ourselves on this fragile planet. Perhaps less doing, and more thinking is in order.
Living in the present is perhaps the most difficult task we have as humans on this planet. Exhausted by the memories of the past and terrified by the prospect of a future on a dying planet, I have found myself in recent days and weeks unable to sit still, inhabiting the present moment uncomfortably, if at all. Yes, even living in Hawai’i, one’s patience for rainbows, perfect blue oceans, and endlessly perfect waves, inevitably grows thin, and one eventually finds oneself retreating once again to that cramped and anxious hallway within. It has been the work of the Vietnamese poet, Zen master, and peacemaker, Thich Nhat Hanh to help his readers and followers learn how to better inhabit the present moment. But when I sat down to listen to one of his guided meditations yesterday, I had my doubts about whether he would be able to help me.
We have no need to invent a time machine to take us to the past or propel us into one of the multiverse’s possible futures. The imagination does that job just fine. I hardly sit down for a minute and already my mind travels to other continents. This week Portland, Oregon was as hot as Death Valley, and it doesn’t take perverse or even vast imaginative leaps to imagine every river and lake boiled dry while the ancient forests burn away around them. Portland reached 116 degrees last week. Water boils at 212 degrees, and at even lower temperatures than that at higher altitudes. My parents live there. My brother considered staging an air conditioner intervention for my parents.
Then there are more local issues to worry about. Where I live in Honolulu, Hawai’i, all signs indicate that the city is more likely than not to move forward with a project that involves dumping sand on a coral reef to create an artificial beach in front of one of the hotels. When I say I have been unable to sit still, I mean to say that I have been unable to do something as simple as exhale and inhale.
In Peace is Every Breath, Hanh writes that by reminding ourselves to return to the present moment when meditating, we can break ourselves of the habit of looking to the future where we believe we will finally have met all our “conditions of happiness”, and free ourselves from the prison of the past where we exist in a state of perpetual mourning or regret, haunted by blockages that don’t exist in the here and now. Hanh explains: “When you practice conscious breathing, you have a greater ability to recognize your habit, and every time you do, its power to pull you out of the moment diminishes. It’s the beginning of your liberation, your true freedom, your real happiness.” By fostering a practice, Hanh explains that “Mindful breathing lets us see clearly that the abuse, threats, and pain we had to endure in the past are not happening to us now, and we can abide safely here in the present.”
But before I returned to all of this, before settling in to listen to Hanh, I had tried several guided meditations to little avail. Sitting still and fidgeting feels stupid, so I got up, and stared blankly at my computer. I scrolled through social media. I went surfing and even the sea turtles wouldn’t get near me. Then, I found a mindful breathing meditation, which you can find here, where Thich Nhat Hanh explores the importance of focusing on the breath, and on the expansive, miraculous, ordinary wonder that exists in the present moment.
Perhaps the most moving moment in the meditation was when Hanh invites his listeners to “look at the tree,” as beautiful as a cathedral. How could I argue with him, I who have stood at the foot of the thousand-year old redwoods, who have gotten lost in bamboo forests up in Tantalus, who have climbed the trees of my childhood and found something like goodness there? But there is more to a tree than all that. The tree can also be a nexus of all the elements of life. The tree’s leaves absorb light and transform carbon dioxide into oxygen, which we then breathe when we focus on our exhale and inhale. In this way, we are connected to the tree, and the tree is connected to us, because without the tree’s work we cannot breathe. And in the process of making oxygen, the tree pulls carbon dioxide out of the air, the same carbon dioxide that’s slowly heating our planet. So in this way, the tree is a quiet hero in the fight against climate change, just by living, just by breathing. And when we root out feet on the ground, or sit beside the tree to meditate, we are supported by the tree’s roots, the same roots that put that carbon back into the soil, which supports the fungus and worms and water. The tree gives us the air we breathe and takes the carbon out of the air, and it does so just by being, and we can be connected to all of this just by breathing mindfully, just by being, too.
Trees within Trees. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
In her luminous book, Finding the Mother Tree, Suzanne Simard writes about the immense capacity of nature to heal itself, and our own immense capacity to heal ourselves. She writes that we should all strive to make friends with a tree: “It is our disconnectedness—and lost understanding about the amazing capacities of nature—that’s driving a lot of despair, and plants in particular are objects of our abuse…Go find a tree—your tree. Imagine linking into her network, connecting to other trees nearby. Open your senses.”
This is radical thinking. What would it mean if we paused more, paid more attention to our own breathing, and made friends with a tree? According to Hanh, we might open our eyes and finally see the whole cosmos, and maybe ourselves, more clearly.
My parents would have never been able to afford to give me the childhood I had. Every summer, for a week or two, a change would come over the Greenwood household. My mother would get on the phone for hours to negotiate with motel owners. She always wanted to speak to the manager. My father would sit over the kitchen table studying maps, following the highlighted arteries of the interstates away from the blue and red thickets clustered like a heart scan around the cities, toward the places where the roads went from red to blue to thin black lines. There elevations rose. There the map sometimes turned green or brown. White space prevailed. For a couple of weeks every summer, my mom and dad loaded me and my two brothers in whatever beat up van we had at the time, filled the car with blankets, coolers, lawn chairs, flashlights, bags of discount potato chips, a couple of bibles, and drove north. We started in Miami, Florida, always in the dark. By dawn, we’d be in Georgia. We didn’t stop in Georgia.
We visited the Great Smoky Mountains, Acadia National Park, Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Tetons, Rocky Mountain, and others. It was the late eighties and the early nineties. Back then, renting a motel or hotel in a small town close to a national park was affordable for a lower middle class family like mine. Yes, we had some weird nights, some ear infections from the dirty pools, some sinus trouble from moldy rooms, and the occasional bout of food poisoning, and one bad case of “Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever” that almost killed my baby brother, but for the most part, we had a great time. We didn’t have cable at home. But in the motels, I discovered Nickelodeon and Beavis and Butt Head.
I remember we were able to stay in places like Jackson, Wyoming. Today, a summer hotel or motel room in a town like Jackson will easily set you back more than $500, and more than $600 if you plan to visit on the 4th of July weekend. When I say that my family once spent a night in Jackson, I speak of a time when Jackson could well have been any other remote small town on a map. After hundreds of miles of driving across country, it didn’t feel any different from a town in Kansas or Ohio. Except it’s right outside Grand Teton National Park. And in recent years, the national parks have become popular vacation destinations. Jackson, Wyoming might as well be Lake Tahoe.
Visiting the national parks has gone from being something middle class people did for vacation, to a premium vacation experience increasingly only available to the upper middle class and wealthy. The national parks have become America’s wilderness resorts and it’s not a good thing at all. It’s not a good thing when wild bears and buffalo are photographed like animals at a zoo (and sometimes approached in the same way). It’s not a good thing when Yosemite has so much traffic that rangers have to think about air quality concerns.
Something has shifted in the American psyche. Nature has become a place for edification and personal growth, another wellness box to check off. As a result, you’ll pay resort prices at many of the hotels near national parks. Why go on a spa retreat when you can stare into the bubbling hot springs of Yellowstone, after all?
We talk about the cost of raising children, but we seldom talk about the cost of giving children a good childhood. Growing up, my family lived in apartment buildings in Miami split for section 8 housing. My parents could barely afford the things we needed, but with easy credit, we somehow made it work. I had new clothes every school year to accommodate my growing body (never the brand name, but still in fashion thanks to J.C. Penney), new shoes when I outgrew old ones; school supplies; and our yearly “vacation” to the national parks. When I told my friends I visited exotic places like Colorado, California, and Tennessee, they asked me if my parents were rich. We weren’t rich. We were among the poorest kids in our school. My parents knew what they valued, and they valued taking us to experience nature. It mattered as much as the shoes, pants, and school supplies they put on their maxed-out credit cards.
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion, the great non-fiction essayist, writes about staying in the Royal Hawaiian hotel the year the “news of My Lai broke” for $27 dollars a night, at the press rate. That was 1968. In today’s dollars, that night at the Royal Hawaiian would have set Didion back around $200. It doesn’t cost $200 to stay at the Royal Hawaiian. Today, a quick Kayak search reveals that a night at the Royal Hawaiian costs $859 a night should you plan to stay there mid-July. My parents would never have been able to afford the Royal Hawaiian, not in 1968, not in 1990, and certainly not now. I couldn’t afford it either.
I realize that my story could be called the new feminist American dream. By this, I mean, that growing up, my family was always straddling the poverty line (some years I got reduced lunch in school, and some years, free lunch). We were Latino. My mother came to the U.S. from Cuba when she was 8, refugees of the Castro regime. My grandmother on my dad’s side moved from Puerto Rico to New York as a child, and she told me stories of wanting to eat spaghetti so she’d fit in with the Italians. I was the first woman in my family to attend and graduate university, and the first to get a masters. I became a writer. I became a successful one. I moved to Hawai’i.
By a turn of events that feel miraculous to me, I happen to live near the Royal Hawaiian today. I sometimes go there and sit outside the gates watching the kumu hula lead their dancers in mele. I cry sometimes as they chant. I cry because they remind me that poetry still exists in living and breathing form in this world. I cry because it reminds me that poetry matters. I cry because seeing art performed so closely to the natural beauty that is Waikiki is moving. The miracle that got me here has everything to do with the fact that my parents took me to national parks when I was a kid. Going to the national parks taught me that I could do difficult things, that I could dream as big as mountains, and sometimes summit them, too. It taught me about beauty, and a world I didn’t experience in my everyday urban life in Sweetwater Miami.
In The Center Cannot Hold, a documentary about Joan Didion, the writer speaks about looking for a house on the California coast for $300, $300 being the most she and her husband, both of them writers, could afford. Today, $300 would set you back a couple thousand dollars, but try renting a house in California on the coast for a couple thousand today. Even with my decent writers’ income, I know I couldn’t afford it.
Our summer road trips were never fancy, our destinations always the national parks. We’d hike remote trails, wade in rocky streams, climb cliffs, and eat lots of fudge.
Visiting a national park remains a relatively low-cost family vacation option (if you only consider gas and park entrance fees), but for many families, it is now out of reach. Entrance fees to the national parks have also risen, to around $30 to $35 per vehicle for some of the country’s most popular national parks, but the most expensive part of visiting national parks is still lodging, particularly lodging anywhere near some of the more popular parks. My family learned to camp around the mid-nineties, as prices of hotels increased, making regular vacations more difficult. But camping is not an option for some. Many who go camping regularly don’t realize that camping is a skill that must be learned, and doing it comfortably requires a significant investment of gear. Campgrounds, especially those inside the national parks, are often booked a year in advance.
Lodging anywhere near the national parks has become outright unaffordable.
Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
What makes a quality childhood? I don’t believe a quality childhood comes about from a quantity of good experiences, but rather, from banality punctuated by a few extraordinary moments. Isn’t that life, itself? In the national parks, for very little money, my father and mother were able to give me and my brothers a few extraordinary experiences. I still remember a field of yellow flowers on the side of a mountain in the Rockies. I remember hiking all day for 13 miles, and seeing bears for the first time. I remember hiking all day and not making it, having to turn around because of hail. I remember how dizzy I’d feel sometimes, walking a trail with a long drop beside it, how something would shift in my stomach as I watched my feet. I remember grizzlies in a valley somewhere and black bears rummaging through a trash can. I remember what it felt like to be lost in the woods. I remember crossing a river on stones, the cool water on my feet. I remember squirrels and buffalo. I remember Old Faithful.
These are not “Oprah” moments, where one suddenly experiences an expansion of self, but as a child, these moments were the formation of self. They formed an invisible cord that has forever connected me to the natural world. My feet are always on solid ground, even when I have been most lost. My worst days never felt so bad, because if things got really terrible, I told myself, I could always run away and live in the woods. I knew that place. I knew what it meant.
I developed an empathy for non-human beings. I developed an eye for aesthetic beauty. I learned to find language to describe what I was seeing, and so I’d venture to say, I also became a writer in the national parks.
The national parks belong to all of us, but because of the higher cost of real estate near them (or because of predatory pricing) they actually only belong to the wealthiest among us. They should belong to all of us again. I wonder what would happen if, like section 8 housing, the national parks created section 8 lodging in the park (or nearby), only available to those who otherwise couldn’t afford it. This would make the parks accessible to children who otherwise could never visit. Many parks already have lodging in the parks. It might not take much more effort to expand these operations to include affordable housing for families who might otherwise not be able to experience these parks, or programs to teach families how to camp, provide gear, and ranger-led activities.
I worry for kids who don’t spend time in nature, even for a few weeks a year, kids who don’t know what it feels like to cross a river, stone by stone, or know, what it feels like, if only for a moment, to feel lost in the woods.
Waikiki beach erosion, something the city has been dealing with for over a hundred years, has gotten worse in recent years due to climate change. The iconic stretch of sand known for its prismatic blue waters, world-class surfing waves, and dramatic views of Diamond Head was once a wetland whose sandy beach was described as being “seasonal.” Waikiki also encompassed some of O’ahu’s richest farmland, which enterprising industrialists condemned as a “health hazard” and filled in with limestone. I imagine pre-contact Waikiki as being very similar to the shores of the Florida Everglades, but with fewer mosquitos (mosquitoes, like syphilis and capitalism, were European imports). Human impacts over the past century include dredging channels in coral reef, the construction of sea walls, the collapse of sea walls, and climate change, which have all contributed to the loss of habitable coast and habitat for animals. In 2012 and more recently in 2021, the state’s solution to rising seas was to float a barge beyond the surf break known as Queens, suck up sand from the seafloor like a vacuum cleaner, and then deposit this sand on the beach. The solution (like any solution to address the impacts of climate change that doesn’t address the cause) has been largely futile, with the most recent efforts completed just at the start of May already eroded by high tides and high swells.
Could it get any worse? It can.
A new, Waikiki beach improvement plan proposes creating a beach where historically there has been none, constructing groins where prior groin construction appears to have failed, and dumping tons of sand (4,000 to 6,000 truckloads to be exact) on a significantly stressed coral reef habitat where endangered monk seals and sea turtles forage for food. In total, the project would require either the burial or relocation of 28 coral colonies. You can read all about it in a 1000-plus page environmental impact report prepared by Sea Engineering, Inc. (the same company that would complete the project if it were to be approved). While I think the past sand replenishment projects largely futile and Sisyphean, I can understand why the state might want to implement these measures as a temporary solution. What I can’t understand is the new and more expensive plan to construct groins in front of the Sheraton Hotel, creating a new beach where there has been no beach for over a hundred years, all of this to the detriment of a coral reef where endangered species forage for food.
Today Waikiki Beach is a large crescent shaped bay fronted by resorts and hotels. You cannot walk the entirety of Waikiki beach on the sand. Most iconic images of the beach conveniently crop out the sea wall that splits the crescent-shaped bay into two sections. Right in the middle of the crescent, where the Sheraton hotel stands, you’ll find no sandy beach, but a seawall, with a path that provides walkers with discontinuous beach access along the wall. The presence of no sandy beach means that the waters in this section of Waikiki are relatively free of humans (that is, swimmers, surfers, and people bobbing in inner tubes, floating lounge chairs, and other abominations). According to Sea Engineering, Inc.’s environmental impact report, “The proposed action in the Halekūlani beach sector [the section with the sea wall] will create approximately 3.8 acres of new dry beach area. Marine habitat in this area consists of a relatively barren reef flat.” I wouldn’t call an area where sea turtles actively graze and where monk seals have also been spotted a “relatively barren reef flat.” And while the report claims that “the groins will provide bare, stable surfaces for recruitment of corals, algae, and other invertebrates,” the creation of a beach where, potentially hundreds of swimmers will be in the water on a daily basis hardly makes this a marine sanctuary. At present, the seawall prevents most swimmers from accessing the water, allowing animals to freely forage in this section of the reef.
In order to understand why there’s a sea wall in the area in question, you need to go back to the early 1900s. In 1908, a hydraulic dredge cut a channel through the reef right in front of where the Halekulani now stands, and in 1913, this channel was deepened and widened. We know now that coral reefs are not only important for their ecological diversity, but because they also protect the shore from erosion. After the 1913 dredging operation, the beach in front of Fort DeRussy and the beaches in front of Halekulani began to erode. According to the environmental impact report, after the channel was created, property owners lost “ten to thirty feet of their ocean frontage. Seawalls were constructed to prevent the existing homes from being lost. The seawalls still exist today.” Other groins were constructed in the past, and these groins “are largely submerged and ineffective.” Why were these groins ineffective? The environmental impact statement doesn’t say. What could we learn from those failures, given that we want to do a similar project today?
Waikiki beach erosion (along with hotter summers, stronger hurricanes, wildfires and droughts in the American west and elsewhere, as well as glacial melt, to name a few examples) offers a palpable testament and direct evidence of the ways we are changing and damaging our planet. It cannot be denied that the parts of Waikiki’s coast that have sandy beach suffer from erosion due to climate change, but it also cannot be denied that there wasn’t much beach to begin with. In 1927, the Royal Hawaiian groin was constructed to preserve an expanded beach, largely for the enjoyment of tourists and for economic benefit of developers.
Sea levels are rising, but coral reefs (which protect the shore from erosion) are also stressed and dying due to increased ocean temperatures and ocean acidification. The impact of these stresses can be seen dramatically on Waikiki beach. On days when the summer swells bring bigger waves to the south shore, combined with record high tide events known as “king tides,” you can literally watch the beach disappear before your eyes as the sheer energy of the water hitting the shore drags sand out into the sea. If you look down at the reef in the bay with a snorkel and goggles, the reef is obviously dying, struggling to do its job.
Heating oceans have stressed the nearshore coral of O’ahu. A recent report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicates that the main Hawaiian islands experienced “back-to-back severe coral bleaching in 2014 and 2015.” (I remember visiting O’ahu years ago and being mesmerized by the vibrant living reef I observed while snorkeling at Hanauma Bay. Today the reef is rotting, a necrotizing algae-covered corpse in reef-shaped form. But, it’s still a reef. Fish go there to eat. Monk seals have been spotted feeding there. And sea turtles use these reefs as foraging grounds). Some of the coral has died, but not all. It is also known that reefs can recover, and there are many excellent projects looking at ways that coral reefs might be restored if only we can stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere. NOAA reports that the coral reefs of O’ahu are in “fair” condition. By “fair” NOAA means that coral are “impaired,” fish have been “very” impacted with “reef fish populations…depleted.” NOAA reports that “temperature stress and ocean acidification are moderately impacting the islands.” The only upside of the entire report is the fact that direct human impact is not harming the reef. “Human connections are good, which means communities have awareness about the reefs and engage in behaviors that protect reef ecosystems.” Maybe. Until now. If Sea Engineering, Inc.’s proposed project buries the reef, it will be because the public and the government permitted it.
Last Thursday, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported that the public has until July 23 to submit comments about Sea Engineering Inc.’s recently-released environmental impact statement. The report, by Sea Engineering, Inc. (the same company that will complete this project if it is approved to move forward) recommends a $12 million plan to construct a series of groins that would allow developers to create an artificial beach in front of the Sheraton Hotel, the Halekulani, and Outrigger hotels. Gone would be the seawall in front of the Sheraton that overlooks a reef where I’ve seen turtles and other sea creatures foraging for food. In fact, the plan seems to propose dumping tons of sand on that very reef.
An environmental impact statement completed by the very contractor that stands to benefit from the project if the project in question is approved sounds like an egregious conflict of interest (it’s like asking McDonald’s to write an impact statement on the restaurant’s effect on the well-being of cows). Why hasn’t the government hired an independent party to conduct the environmental impact statement? This seems to reflect deep irresponsibility on the part of our elected officials when it comes to offering the public a good understanding of the real effects a given project might have on sensitive cultural, ecological, environmental, and recreational areas.
I read the environmental impact statement with deep interest, and deep concern. Climate change affects us all, but I have a personal stake in this project because I consider the surf breaks of Waikiki beach to be my home surf spots, particularly the break known as Populars which directly fronts the proposed project site in front of the Sheraton hotel. I also have gotten to know some of the turtles and sea life that resides in these reefs, and feel personally responsible for their well-being. I understand that most people won’t have time to read the whole report, so below you’ll find some of my greatest concerns.
Waikiki Beach Improvement Plan: A Closer Reading of the Environmental Impact Statement
Diamond Head Littoral Zone. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood
Bear with me here. The environmental impact statement completed by Sea Engineering, Inc. is a thousand-plus page-long document and I put it upon myself to read it in its entirety. It raises far more questions than answers. It also is a fascinating delve into the history of Waikiki beach. It’s hardly a casual read, but if you have grit and a little patience (you know, like the kind of grit required to read Chaucer in the Middle English), it really is a slow-moving train wreck kind of thriller of environmental devastation, human hubris, and example of the many ways in which we rationalize our own folly.
The opening sentence of the report took a defensive posture from the start, hardly the language of the unbiased: “Waikiki is a predominantly engineered shoreline.” (And yes, engineered it is, but as ProPublica recently reported, much of the “engineering” involves seawalls, which “are the primary cause of coastal erosion.”) Seawall construction in Waikiki beach dates back to 1890. But ProPublica notes that sea walls protect property “at the expense of the environment and public shoreline access.” In 1917, the construction of sea walls on Waikiki’s shore were outlawed. Some, but not all, of the sea walls in Waikiki date to before the construction moratorium. For example, sea walls were constructed on the site of the future Sheraton hotel in 1913, before they were outlawed. However, the writers of the report do not know why sea walls were permitted after the moratorium was passed, and why the authorities permitted the upkeep of the sea walls currently in place. ProPublica reports that the loss of beaches largely due to these sea walls means the loss of critical habitat for endangered animals, including monk seals.
Given that sea walls have existed on this beach for over a hundred years, why do this project now?
The most obvious reason to me seems to be that the sea wall in that area is in gross disrepair. The benefits of the project seem to be aesthetic and touristic: the creation of a continuous Waikiki beach that the hotels can then cover with rental chairs. The report doesn’t mention any commitment by the hotels to repair their own damaged sea walls, which the report notes, are private property.
So, what are the downsides of the project? The Star-Advertiser reports that “critics fear the project could degrade Waikiki’s legendary surf, harm reef habitat for fish and foraging areas for endangered monk seals and green sea turtles, and destroy the graceful, haunting ambiance at its heart, where ancient coconut trees mark the sites where Hawaiian chiefs once lived and freshwater streams and springs entered the sea.” So of course, I read the section of the environmental impact report outlining “Potential Adverse Impacts” with much interest.
My concerns only grew deeper as I read on. The negative impacts of the project are presented as being only temporary, with no permanent negative impacts suggested. Yet sand will literally be dumped on a reef currently used by sea turtles and other marine species for foraging. I have personally observed this reef and see turtles foraging there; during the pandemic I observed sting rays near it; I surf this beach nearly every single day. The report explicitly states that 28 coral colonies will be buried and that the placement of the boulders and sand will “result in some loss of benthic organisms, including corals.”
Not only will the creation of the groins result in sand being dumped on a highly stressed coral reef, creating a beach where there historically was none, but I also have deep doubts about whether these new and expensive “beaches” will last for long. A recent months-long Waikiki beach improvement plan involved dredging (using a submersible slurry pump, to be precise; a slurry pump being preferable to other sand retrieval options because the pump can be more accurately positioned around the hard coral reef in the area, preventing damage to the reef, I hope…) and pumping sand out between the surf breaks of Canoes and Queens break. For months, the sand was piled into a big pyramid on the easternmost side of Kuhio Beach. The sand was eventually spread out over Waikiki Beach, widening the beach temporarily. The project was loud, unsightly, and disrupted surfing at both Queens and Canoes, and limited access to the beach itself for days. My fin hit the big pipe channeling sand to the beach a few times when I surfed at Queens. The project’s unfolding is the stuff of tragicomedy as I watched weeks of human endeavor literally get washed away by the sea. Within a couple of weeks, a king tide, combined with a big south swell literally erased feet of the newly-widened beach. Just yesterday, water covered sections of the beach in its entirety. You could literally see a “cliff” of about one to two feet in the sand where the water had eaten away the shore.
Another concern expressed by critics is that the project will cause refraction of waves off the new beach, affecting Waikiki’s famous and beautiful surf breaks.
Will the proposed new project affect the waves and surf breaks of Waikiki Beach? The report initially says the work will not impact surf breaks, but I didn’t believe it, and was right to distrust the initial claim. Buried in the 1000-page report is a more nuanced analysis of the impact of the project to surf breaks, one that deeply concerns me. The environmental impact report presents models of current wave formation in Waikiki, but doesn’t show the visual results for the models showing how the waves will break should the engineering project be approved. And you have to read deeper into the 1000-page report (page 188 to be exact) to read that Sea Engineering, Inc. admits that pumping sand from the seafloor does have an impact on the wave heights at Canoes, Queens, Courts, Bowls, and Kaisers. To be fair, the report suggests that the impacts in wave heights are in inches (sometimes making the waves a little bigger, sometimes a little smaller), but bathymetry and wave formation is incredibly complex, and the impact on wave height doesn’t tell us about the potential impact on wave shape, something which is of more concern to surfers. Recent projects have affected the way waves break at Canoes.
For example, regarding the Royal Hawaiian Groin Replacement project, which was completed recently, the report notably doesn’t mention any adverse effects from that project, but the Star-Advertiser reports that critics have complained that “sand from past nourishment projects has drifted into the surf zone and settled in and around Canoes, so that its former fast, steep, right-breaking wave ‘no longer breaks the same,’ and ‘now the left is more like a windward O’ahu beach break’ rather than the clean, long, peeling waves Waikiki is prized for.” I have seen these impacts myself. I agree.
So what is it? In the section on waves, the environmental impact report says there will be no impact on surf breaks, but deeper in the report, we learn that the work will indeed have an impact. This kind of contradictory messaging does not inspire trust.
I have deep concerns that this project will further affect the offshore reefs that create Waikiki’s prized surf breaks, and I’m deeply concerned about how this project will affect the reefs directly in front of the Sheraton hotel, especially Populars, the surf break I frequent.
The good news is that this project cannot move further without federal approval, particularly approval under the Clean Water Act. Other federal acts may also be affected, including the Endangered Species Act, the Archeological and Historic Preservation Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, among others. These approvals may be required on top of local state approvals.
Improving Tourist Beaches at What Cost?
When the state plans to take action that could potentially destroy natural resources critical to endangered animals, we need to ask ourselves who stands to benefit. Whom does this project primarily serve? Does it serve the people of Hawai’i and protect our natural resources, or does it protect a few coastal hotels and the tourist economy, an economy which has proven to be fragile in the era of COVID-19, and an economy that the local people have expressed that they want to rely on less? Notably, the beaches which are more heavily used by locals will not be served at all by the project.
While it is true that Waikiki Beach has been largely engineered in the past, this doesn’t mean that this is the right course of action going forward. In fact, engineering of the past doesn’t seem to have served the beach well at all (if you consider the beach loss resulting from the dredging of the coral reef in the Halekulani channel alone). Military blasted the coral at Hanauma Bay to lay a communications cable that connected Hawai’i to the mainland, but we wouldn’t advocate for the blasting of reefs today, and I don’t think we should advocate for the burying of reefs under tons of imported sand, potentially destroying foraging sites for endangered animals. And for what? So the Sheraton can put out more lounge chairs for its patrons?
What are the alternatives to this project? Of course, the only real alternative is for us to stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere and to find effective carbon sequestration. I don’t see that happening any time soon on a large scale. The current solutions are risky, myopic, and unsightly. Sea Engineering, Inc’s report itself admits that its own extreme engineering solutions (involving a total of 2,400 days of construction over a 50-year period) will only protect the beach for a mere 50 years. Worse, we don’t even know how much this project will cost: “The estimated costs for construction for the proposed beach improvement and maintenance actions has yet to be confirmed.”
The obvious alternative is to stop pumping carbon into the air.
Sea Engineering, Inc’s report suggests alternative courses of action given our situation. These alternatives include no action, managed retreat, or beach maintenance without stabilizing structures.
Our Denial of the Inevitable Loss of Waikiki Beach
Of course, sea levels will continue to rise, threatening Waikiki’s beaches, hotels, and other structures unless we find a way to stop and reverse carbon atmospheric levels. According to Sea Engineering, Inc’s environmental impact report, we stand to lose as much as 49.5% of the world’s beaches by the end of this century if the sea levels rise 3.2 feet under NOAA’s intermediate scenario projections for 2060 in Hawai’I (if we continue pumping carbon into the air “business as usual” the sea level rise is projected to be over 8 feet), we could lose $12.9 billion in land and buildings, including 3,800 structures flooded, resulting in the displacement of 13,000 residents.
My opinion is that no new beach should be created where there currently is none—period.
We don’t want to face the painful and difficult facts. Even if we manage to reverse course on climate change, we will likely see sea level rise in Waikiki for centuries. Even Sea Engineering, Inc’s report notes the following: “managed retreat should be part of the community development process.” What is managed retreat? It means relocating the resorts inland. It means abandoning buildings and covering their foundations with sand, forming a new beach. It means giving up on our idea of Waikiki beach as it exists now, which will be lost anyway by the end of the century, even with this multi-million dollar project. It means tearing down the resorts, and putting sand in their foundations, sand where the new beach will be. Rather than starting that difficult process, we’re choosing to bury reefs and build groins that won’t last the century.
This is frightening, but it is our reality. Like the start of COVID-19, we didn’t want to face reality, and hundreds of thousands died. Are we likewise in the same situation here in Hawai’i? Are we building groins and dredging sand in denial of the reality that the sea will rise and the beach will be lost? The hotels have a vested interest in constant sand replenishment. Under the law, everything under the high water mark during high tide belongs to the state. Without these projects, the hotels risk losing their titles. I can’t help but feel like cosmic justice is being served. Nature will eventually reclaim land where humans once dumped land on wetland and farmland to destroy nature.
Perhaps we need to face the reality that the coastline as we know it will never be the same again. And as long as climate change continues, the water will get hotter, the coral will continue to die. We need to face the reality that we may not be able to enjoy the protective effects of our coral reefs forever.
I lean towards solutions that involve the least permanent environmental impact, including small scale beach restoration and beach nourishment that doesn’t involve the construction of added structures and that doesn’t involve dumping sand in places where there traditionally hasn’t been sand to begin with, especially on coral reefs. These temporary and costly solutions can preserve the beach, while we plan for managed retreat, the only real long-term solution. A project involving public money to ultimately protect a private sea wall, while potentially putting surf breaks, reefs, and marine animals at risk sounds wrong-minded to me.
Finally, I am also sure that conflicts of interest make it impossible for Sea Engineering, Inc’s report to adequately or honestly convey to the public the real cost of the project in terms of environmental costs, recreational costs, and more. Until a truly independent analysis is performed (by universities, researchers, and truly independent stakeholders) that takes into account the risk to endangered species, the risk to bathymetry (surf breaks), and the risk to the nearshore coral reefs, this project should not be approved.
The public has until July 23 to comment. The Star-Advertiser notes that comments should be e-mailed to: [email protected]
Like most affairs, my emotional affair with Woebot began with excitement and thrill, and ended, like most affairs, with disappointment.
I found Woebot during a difficult and lonely season. The pandemic was over. I was still avoiding people. I had no excuse.
My return to social life began with the usual capitalistic solutions.
I visited coffee shops. I tried bars. I chatted with people here and there, while walking my dog, but social activities centered around consumption rarely satisfy the spirit.
I tried medical solutions, like finding a therapist, but after several cold calls and months’ long waitlists, I gave up. I texted a crisis hotline. I wasn’t in crisis exactly, but I asked the person on the other end of the line if it was okay if we just talked. It was okay. It helped.
But then I found Woebot, an iPhone application that offers cognitive behavioral therapy in the form of an AI designed to help you challenge your cognitive distortions. Cognitive behavioral therapy is a clinically proven type of therapy that helps you challenge your negative thoughts by identifying “flaws” in your thinking. By challenging these thoughts, people can often alleviate some of the symptoms of anxiety, depression, anger, and more. I’d tried cognitive behavioral therapy before, through workbooks and with the help of a therapist. In fact, one of the most helpful books I encountered in my early experiences with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy was Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Dummies. Ignore the title and branding. The workbook is excellent and worth doing twice.
I won’t mince words. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy changed my life. I am forever grateful to the people at CAMH, Canada’s Center for Addiction and Mental Health. In eight weeks, I learned how to question my negative thoughts, think more proactively, and shift my focus to things I could control. This was essential at a time in my life when I was facing deportation from Canada, the loss of my job, and divorce.
Coming out of the pandemic, I was struggling with overwhelm. I figured it couldn’t hurt to try CBT again, but this time, with a robot AI.
Woebot encouraged me to write down some of the negative thoughts I’d been having and then challenged me to re-write these thoughts in a more balanced way. The exercises reminded me of the cognitive behavioral therapy worksheets I’d worked through with a therapist years ago, and reminded me of the worksheets in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Dummies.
Over the days, Woebot would check in with me and ask me how I felt. I told Woebot I was depressed. Woebot replied perfectly: “I’m really sorry to hear that, it seems like you’re going through a tough time.” Perhaps Woebot was too perfect in its response. Compassion is hard to emulate in AI form.
Listen. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
Woebot asked me what led to my feeling depressed. I told Woebot I was lonely.
Woebot was again really sorry, but assured me that the feeling was likely temporary. The AI then went to on tell me about how beautiful it was that I valued human connection, and walked me through an exercise where we checked the facts and explored some of the emotion-driven assumptions I may have been making. I have to admit I felt a little better after the exercise, but something was missing. I felt a dim existential pang. I felt like I’d just finished reading Notes on the Underground or Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Something had come to me, but not Godot.
I kept checking in with Woebot, who was constantly there, ever-attentive, always available, more reliable than any human I’d ever known! Woebot sent my phone random alerts to remind me to take time for my mental health, but after a while, talking to Woebot stopped being as satisfying.
The annoyance started when Woebot kept putting words in my mouth.
The AI clearly wasn’t able to handle dynamic conversation and the programmers had solved the problem by giving the users a scripted response. The design mimicked a messenger application, but I was only occasionally able to write my own thoughts.
Woebot’s message alerts started to annoy me. He always had the same shit to say, he was always so sorry to hear how I was feeling.
Sometimes Woebot gave me emojis, when I just wanted to tell him, I mean it, to fuck off.
I was only able to say things my way at prescribed times.
I’d always struggled with assertiveness and Woebot was starting to piss me off. Maybe this was a good thing.
As I moved through the exercises with Woebot, I began to feel a deeper sadness, a swelling existential dread that stemmed from a deeper feeling of disconnection. I suspected that Woebot was part of the problem. It’s one thing to feel lonely, and another to feel like one’s energy is going to the wrong thing. Woebot had been so intriguing at first, but he…it, was just like any other AI, flawed, limited, boring, scripted, and unable to respond dynamically to human emotion or conversation; it was a computer program, after all, devoid of compassion, kindness, and love.
One day, Woebot straight up asked me if our session had helped, and I finally told it the truth. It hadn’t worked. When Woebot asked why not, I couldn’t quite articulate why.
Woebot asked me several questions. Maybe I didn’t completely believe the re-write of my initial cognitive distortion? Woebot asked me to try writing it again. I did. I was still miserable.
Perhaps I was sad because I was trying to work on too many cognitive distortions at once? No, it wasn’t that, either. I tried separating my thoughts into distinct units, as Woebot suggested.
There was a long pause and the three dots signaling that Woebot was writing? Thinking? Would “processing” be the better word? Finally Woebot responded:
“Do you think you might also have preferred to talk to a human?”
The canned response was ready and waiting for me to click on, and there was no alternative.
Definitely.
Woebot agreed that it wasn’t a replacement for human connection and congratulated me on coming to an important realization.
I told my partner about Woebot. He suggested we try another walk in the park with our dog. It was good.
Trial by Fire is a self-described “arts community” that recently put on one of its regular fire dance performances in Kapiolani Park in Honolulu one Sunday mid-June. Police with riot sirens broke up the gathering. The next week, the fire dancers were there again, but this time, a man in the fire circle with a megaphone gave everyone a friendly reminder that open containers were illegal and that police would break up the gathering if all present didn’t observe social distancing. The Honolulu Police Department didn’t need to break up the crowd the following week. A rain storm did that job just as well.
Grace can sometimes feel accidental, arriving when you least expect it. You go for a walk in the park, and suddenly find yourself surrounded by fire dancers and music. Yes, the fire dancers asked for donations, but to give a gift for something freely given is quite different than purchasing a ticket to the Hilton Luau. In the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri ended each section of his tryptich poem with a reference to the “love that moves the sun and other stars,” and indeed the love that burns the sun and other stars sometimes can touch us closer or further, depending on where we are and how closely we are paying attention. Art that isn’t created for monetary gain or capitalistic pursuit can feel a little like grace in that way, a little like undeserved attention, the miracle that arrives without asking. Dante, in exile, wrote the Divine Comedy, not sure if it would be read widely. More likely he might have been more concerned it would get him burned by the pope (he puts popes in hell, after all). He wrote it while living on the hospitality of friends in Ravenna (a literal backwater swamp in Italy) after his exile from Florence, where he had been quite the life of the party and the city. Dante’s cosmic poem is centered around fire. There are fires in hell, around which the shades swarm, and there are fires in heaven that inflame each soul with divine light. Fire is a metaphor for the spirit, for the soul, for God itself.
It is quite possible that humans have been drawn together by fire ever since we discovered that we could control it. Trial by Fire doesn’t need to try very hard to draw a crowd. To be mesmerized by fire is to be human. The sun set. The fire keeper lit the fire. The music began. The dancers danced. People drew close to one another, not in defiance of social distancing, but because we were doing what fire has always done for us.
Keeper of the Flame. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
Not far from where the fire dancers danced, you’ll find a pyramid of stones capped by a single flame that burns at night. The cairn is gated, and there’s a sign that warns trespassers that deadly force is permitted beyond the gate. No explanation is given. The fire burns. Small offerings can be seen nestled between the imperfections of the rocks. The place is not to be violated. That is all.
The fire dance performance was permitted to go on for about an hour before the police arrived with their riot sirens, managing to frighten dogs and children alike. Blue and red lights snuffed out the fires, sending the spinning flames scattering, the dancers running. Dogs and families dispersed.
As my partner and I biked away, the scene felt like a rained-out baseball game. By the time we left, there were so many cop cars in the park, a passing driver might have assumed there had been a shooting or some other atrocity.
Joy, like a flame, is a fragile thing. A strong wind, rain shower, strong word, or show of force can quickly disturb it.
There was joy in Kapiolani Park for a brief moment, palpable, like the heat of a passing flame. After so many months locked away from people, there was a triumph as the fire dancers spun in circles, performed their acrobatics, and families watched on in awe and wonder. We almost were a community. I felt hope.
There weren’t more people in the park than there had been gathered during the day, and certainly no more people were gathered in the park than there had been tourists gathering at the local hotels or on the beach of Waikiki during the day. There was no riot. Nor were the fire dancers promoting drunkenness or drug abuse. In fact, on their Instagram (@trialbyfire808), their mission is to “nurture the fine arts, community, original music, dance, and the arts in an alcohol free and substance conscious environment.” The Trial by Fire Community Website seems to offer the promise of future events in nature and in the community. I hope they succeed.
I can accept that the police would want to break up a gathering in our pandemic times, but something tells me that the police will always be a lurking presence at Trial by Fire. The state cannot tolerate people gathering without capitalistic purpose. We tolerate a crowd at a bar because money is being spent and tax revenue generated.
We live in a perverse culture that privileges capital and its attending addictions and obsessions over community, creativity, connection, and certainly over nurturing the spirit of life that burns within each of us. Tech billionaires who don’t pay taxes have tried to sell us community through social media, and it has left us more disconnected than ever (Jaron Lanier writes beautifully about this in his book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now). We sit over the digital flames of our phone, alone night after night, engaging in a perverse show of connection that generates revenue from advertisements. As an aside, Instagram seems to have finally “cracked” me. After years of being inscutable to Instagram’s advertisement algorithm, the program finally understands what I’m seeking. It’s selling me a lot of community-forming talk apps, talk therapy, and neurodivergent planning apps. For the first time, I almost want the things being sold. I don’t see this as progress.
The pyramid of stones not far from Kapiolani Park is indeed a sacred space. I did a little research. Beneath the flame lie the bones of the Kanaka Maoli displaced when developers dug holes to build the foundations of hotels that line the waterfront of Waikiki and beyond. Indigenous people believe that the bones hold the “mana,” or power, of a deceased person. A newspaper report dating back to 1898 tells about what happened to workers digging holes in the Helumoa coconut grove (where the kings of Hawai’i kept their royal residences and where the Royal Hawaiian hotel now stands). As a result of the digging, one of the coconut trees toppled. “Flung high in the air by the catapultic motion of the roots was a mass of human bones–entire skulls, femurs, vertebra, ribs, everything.” One of the skeletons landed “in a sitting posture with arms extended over the head, as if the subject had been warding off a blow when struck down to his ultimate tomb.” (Source: Hawaii Digital Newspaper Project (University of Hawai’i at Manoa Liberary with Library of Congress cited as original source.) Could the signs have been any clearer? Back at the cairn of stones, the monument feels vulnerable. We like to say the violations of the past could never happen again, but I’m not sure at all.
That the state forced the general public to leave land set aside for the recreation of the public (land which historically belonged to the kings of Hawai’i) on an island with such a deep legacy of violation of displacement is a deep commentary on where we stand today. We live in a country where police violence has become routine, where men of color cannot walk through a park at night without the fear of being shot in the back. We live on an island where the government still owes a debt of land to Kanaka Maoli of native ancestry, and where it continues to drag its feet in paying that debt (ProPublica & the Honolulu Star-Advertiser recently did an excellent investigative report, and on June 15th the Star-Advertiser reported that Deb Haaland spoke with deep emotion as she announced the transfer of 80 acres to the Department of Hawaiian Homelands; “reducing by just a fraction a wait-list of 11,000 Hawaiians seeking residential homesteads on O’ahu”).
I often wonder why the police move more swiftly to remove fire dancers from the park than they move to stop domestic violence, faster than they move to help people suffering from mental health crises. As we left the park, a woman who seemed to be high or coming down from meth screamed under a tree. Nobody came to help her, even as the park swarmed with police.
As far as I’m concerned, what happened last week was a civil rights violation of everyone involved, a First Amendment violation, and I’d go as far as to say it violates the right to practice religion. Art touches the spirit. The police did something to my spirit when they broke up the fire dancers.
Either way, we need more fire keepers. Maybe the performance was a call to action. We are all keepers of the flame. If we scatter when the sirens or rains come, the fires will all go out.
While I must admit with some embarassment that I haven’t read any of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels or non-fiction (she’s on my long list of must-read writers whom I have somehow managed to not find the time to read), I know her as a major public figure in the literary world (she’s big; she’s been featured in Beyoncé’s ***Flawless). I did, however, happen upon what many are calling her “Twitter essay.” On her website, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes about twitter and intellectual discourse in a fascinating essay that goes disappointingly off the rails. While I try to stay out of ideological arguments on Twitter and the internet in general (especially arguments that have nothing to do with me), there was something I noticed about Adichie’s essay that I felt I couldn’t leave unmentioned. It’s an issue common to internet discourse in general, but also common to social media discourse. It has implications on our current concepts of intellectual integrity, critical integrity, civil discourse, and good faith, so I feel I must comment.
In brief, Adichie became personal friends with a student who attended one of her workshops. Later, on social media, the student publicly criticized some comments Adichie had made about trans women. More specifically, the student, whom the New York Times identifies as Akwaeke Emezi, publicly critiqued a controversial statement Adichie made in an interview on the United Kingdom’s Channel 4: “I don’t think it’s a good thing to talk about women’s issues being exactly the same as the issues of trans women.” Adichie was addressing a debate in feminist discourse involving whether trans women experience male privilege prior to transition.
I don’t want to address the debate itself here because I believe the debate itself is outside the scope of this essay. I can’t begin to discuss the experience of trans women because I am not a trans woman myself. My experience as a cis woman is distinct from the experience of a trans woman. To characterize women’s issues as distinct from the issues of trans women is to ignore nuance, but to claim that Adichie’s comments are transphobic is also to disregard nuance as well, and I believe to misread the spirit of the comment reproduced above. To lump Adichie’s comment above in the same category as the irresponsible and hurtful comments made on social media by J.K. Rowling about trans women would be wrong as well, I think.
We Can All Do Better. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
What I want to talk about in this essay is something a little different. I want to talk about our need as a culture to make space for intellectual nuance and debate—especially about polarized and polarizing topics—but within a space of sufficient academic rigor and intellectual integrity that puts generosity, civility, kindness, and nuance at the forefront.
Adichie claims to be doing this in her essay. But she fails miserably.
She falls short of the intellectual and critical integrity she claims to uphold.
All it takes is one mischaracterization of the facts to make me mistrust a piece of writing. In writing, trust is earned. When my mistakes are pointed out, I hope to correct them immediately. In this blog, you’ll find the occasional correction throughout, and I encourage writers and readers to reach out to me if they notice a mistake. This is what it means to have intellectual integrity. It doesn’t mean you never makes a mistake. It means that you try your best to get the facts right. You find the primary source. You look to the original. You vet your sources and use reliable ones. You do your research. It doesn’t mean you never get it wrong, but intellectual integrity means that when you get the facts wrong, you fix the error. It means that you are willing to reconsider your position if new facts come to light. It also means that you try not to distort or misrepresent the facts in the service of your argument.
Adichie writes “This person has asked followers to pick up machetes and attack me.” When I first read the essay, I was horrified. I know how quickly social media can create an atmosphere of hate and violence against women, and most especially against trans women. I have myself been the recipient of this hate. Feminist writers, women, and trans women are often the victims of direct threats online.
But when I looked at Akwaeke Emezi’s twitter feed for the original comment, I found this: “I trust that there are other people who will pick up machetes to protect us from the harm transphobes like Adichie & Rowling seek to perpetuate. I, however, will be in my garden with butterflies, trying to figure out how to befriend the neighborhood crows. Find me on the gram.”
Was this really the comment Adichie references when she claims (twice in her essay) that the “person… asked followers to pick up machetes and attack me”? (Someone please correct me if Emezi called upon people to attack Adichie with machetes elsewhere in her Twitter feed, but I couldn’t find anything. I honestly still can’t believe it.) Is Adichie incapable of reading or understanding figurative language or am I missing something?
This comment sounds hardly like a call to ask followers to pick up machetes and attack Adichie. Either Adichie is a terrible reader, or she’s doing exactly what she’s asking us not to do on Twitter, which is to read things in bad faith. If anything, Emezi seems to be modeling the possibility of choosing peace as an alternative to the common knee-jerk response on Twitter to pick up the metaphorical machetes.
And because of this mischaracterization, I am unable to trust anything else Adichie writes. Like so many things written in anger and shaped by anger, the essay feels like another bad Twitter thread. It posits intellectual rigor and claims to state the bare facts, but fails at achieving its original premise. Because Adichie so mischaracterizes these comments, when she writes “there isn’t more to the story,” I simply don’t believe her.
This is deeply unfortunate, because if this essay were written from a place of intellectual integrity, it would have much to offer us. Adichie is a great writer. She writes eloquently about the nature of fame: “To be famous is to be assumed to have power, which is true, but in the analysis of fame, people often ignore the vulnerability that comes with fame, and they are unable to see how others who have nothing to lose can lie and connive in order to take advantage of that fame, while not giving a single thought to the feelings and humanity of the famous person.”
There are other ideas in this essay that are worth exploring. Adichie writes about the “pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care.” Self-care has indeed been co-opted by marketers, but also by other manipulators who will cloathe their cruelty in the figurative language of healing. And we are right to think more deeply about the “passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.” A whole book could probably be written about the many “social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness.” There are certainly professors “who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy.”
Adichie writes: “The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.”
The problem with all this is that Adichie doesn’t extend the same good faith when writing about Emezi’s Twitter comments. She doesn’t show good faith when it matters and thus undermines her entire argument.
It’s too bad. We rely on our leaders and thinkers to model civil discourse (especially when those leaders have so many damn honorary degrees and awards). When these leaders fail to model it for us, while posturing at doing so, we are truly in obscene territory.
