Gardening in the Rubble
I made this painting out of trash and the acrylic scrapings from my palette, which is itself made from trash. While I was making it, I was thinking of the women of Gaza, who are even now building their lives in the broken landscape of their devastated cities. The painting is called Gardening in the Rubble.
This week, following the execution of Alex Pretti by federally-backed masked gunmen in the street during a protest of ICE incursion in Minneapolis, I have seen several posts on my two remaining social feeds expressing the disorientation that comes from getting up and going to work, doing regular life things, while the world is on fire. The whiplash of cell-camera footage of murder and cat shenanigans. The way things crumble at the foundations and still we have to somehow keep our footing and carry the weight of days packed with job interviews, dodgy bus schedules, and the never-ending need to figure out what to eat. The rip-tide of outrage and the tenderness of seeing a loved one arrive home and kick off their shoes at the door. The urgency of the times, and the sudden pause when, as just happened, an eagle flaps its broad dark wings against the white on white on white of the winter lake. The way that terrible things seem to course like filthy rivers between the green and fertile banks of daily existence.
Why do regular life?
It’s vertiginous.
It has the tendency to empty out the quotidian routines that make up a life and fill up the space with, at best, a sense of meaninglessness and, at worst, despair. Why do regular life? What is the point of tying shoelaces or making a dentist appointment or agreeing to meet a friend for drinks after work?
Here’s the point. The world is falling apart. Our job is to keep putting it together every day. Every single day, 99.9999% of the humans on this planet do something to put the world back together again. 8.9999 billion acts of decency and hopefulness. Most people don’t kill anybody. Most people try not to trample anything. Most people drive on the correct side of the street. Most people. Almost all of us. All of the time. Every day. Showing up for their responsibilities. Seeing, wanting or making beauty. Appreciating the softness of a cat or the way the streetlight limns a slat in a bus stop bench. Inching over a little bit to give someone space to sit down or tucking a purse strap under a chair so no one will trip on it. The whole world is alive with the scintillation of it, this action, this basic level of humane and human behaviour. It’s right there in front of you, around you, every minute of the day.
That’s why we do regular life when the world is on fire
That’s why we do regular life when the world is on fire. Because we owe it to our fellow human beings to show up and to show each other that the world is not in fact made of or for violence, but rather of and for these innumerable acts of decency. These are the true weightiness of the human world, the substance of it, the substrate upon which it is built.
We are told that, so long as there is one violent person in the world, we must all be willing to do violence. To protect ourselves. To fight violence. One threat defines us all. But look at the protests we have seen throughout the US, from the pussy hats of the Women’s March to the No Kings Protests, to the inflatable unicorns of Portland and the vigils of Minnesota. These prove that this narrative—that it’s a dog-eat-dog world and we should be grateful that at least our dog brushes its teeth—is not the only one. The news tells us that the world is inherently dangerous, but our daily existence tells us that we are overwhelmingly peaceful and decent.
That’s why. That’s the point. Getting up and showing up for yourself and others, putting enough water in the kettle in case someone else wants tea, paying your bus fare, opening the doors at six o’clock like it says on the sign, being what we are, every day, lashing the world together with a billion billion tiny acts. Gardening in the rubble. That’s what we’re here for. That’s what makes us luminous and wonderful and worth saving.