Transcript

MAJOR JACKSON: Hi. I'm Major Jackson.

LEAH THOMAS: And I'm Leah Thomas.

MJ: And this is The Slowdown…

LT: In collaboration today with As She Rises.

I was a park ranger in rural Kansas the summer following the Ferguson uprisings. I just needed to heal in nature. So I took an assignment to go to the middle of nowhere, in a national park that's one of the least visited. And that site is called Nicodemus National Historic Site. It's the first town west of the Mississippi that freed African Americans after slavery went to to build a community. And they quite literally used their hands and barks from the tree to dig into the ground, and build dugouts. And with their freedom, that was enough. And they stared at the sky, and eventually built homes and schools and churches. And I started thinking about how can I help people recontextualize environmental history to see these stories that sometimes are buried in the soil or deep within textbooks or not in textbooks at all, even if this textbook I'm reading doesn't talk about people who look like me in this space, we are out there. And our stories are so different.

MJ: That intentional seeing and seeing through creative work, feels like one of the best ways to get acquainted with these issues, right? So, tell me about a time in which a dry space has upended your expectations.

LT: So I went to Joshua Tree, my last year in school and I go there often. It's a beautiful desert National Park in California. I camped during a historic meteor shower, which essentially just looks like hundreds of, 1000s of, falling stars happening at once.

MJ: What of that experience will you carry with you from day to day?

LT: I think the beauty of feeling so small and this world. And that not to be a scary thing. I think sometimes when you think about the magnitude of the universe or the world, it's really overwhelming. But it's also really beautiful to think of yourself as just one small piece of the puzzle, of this just global, or even across-the-universe ecosystem of who knows what's out there. So there's something about looking at the moon, looking at the stars, that makes me just feel so connected to other humans.

MJ: These dry places… You mentioned how they make you feel small. I'm curious about how that plays itself out in your relationship to the earth — how does size relate to living in the resources of, let's say, the Colorado River Basin?

LT: The first thing that came to me was thinking about little ant colonies, and how I was in Costa Rica and I saw something called leaf cutter ants. So they climb up the tree in sync and they cut leaves to bring back to their little home to build a compost — they're so incredibly smart — to grow mushrooms to feed the colony. And just seeing these hundreds of little ants, all working for the same purpose and going together, that's how I feel, in some ways, like, I am just an ant in this whole world. And yet my role matters.

Because I think sometimes when people feel small, they start to get really nihilistic or like, you know, nothing I do matters. But even one of those little ants, if they didn't bring a leaf down from the tree, that would slow down their ability to build a mushroom. So when it comes to issues of the Colorado River Basin, or other environmental justice issues, I know that I have to identify what my special leaf cutter skills are. And if that's particularly writing, social media, or working with students, that's what I want to do for the greater cause. And then being a great community member to other folks that are doing other things, whether it's protesting on the ground, founding their own nonprofit, whatever it might be, and we can all play a role. So I like feeling small, because I feel like small doesn't mean not impactful or courageous. There's something that can be really empowering about it.

MJ: I feel like one of the barriers is having people honor that interdependence. I think we live in a culture where independence, of self and accomplishments, overrides any kind of connections of shared responsibility or working together to overcome and address issues that may not directly impact us, but once we become aware of how water rights for example, impact communities, then maybe we might be a little bit more invested in those issues.

LT: There definitely is interdependence all across the river. And I love when people stop to take time to think. So if you just hear okay, the Colorado River Basin doesn't have enough water. Someone off wherever it might be—Louisiana—might be like, okay, like, what does that have to do with me? But to be able to say like, do you like peaches? Do you like all these things? You know, it all matters. I hope it encourages people to think about how even when things feel so far away, we are, you know, a global community and our actions impact other people and the earth and so on.

MJ: One of the reasons why I'm drawn to poetry is because it invites a scale of seeing that sometimes might go undetected. Your work kind of allows folks to engage in what might be hidden.

Today’s poem invites that same scale of seeing and care, not only across universes, but also throughout time.

Theme for the nautical cowboy
by Kinsale Drake

My mother wouldn’t let me go to the rodeo
                  when I was younger, so I jet off with my girl
in her truck to a George Strait song. It’s in our cosmology
                  to chase the tails of dogs over the horizon. 
The sky stretches, map of strange stars.
                  I list the star signs of my exes, none of them
from Texas. We cheers our Baja Blasts.
                  Almost all sacred things are blue. Baby blue,
Baby blue. You joke that you’ll never date a white boy,
                  eh, you sing a love song to shit-straight hair and nighttime
eyes. The compass needle stays glued to the moon. 
                  I catch your eyes in every mirror.
There was once a prehistoric ocean all around us,
	
                  even whales. We puff out
the great swimming shapes
                  of their bodies. 
This layer of rock, trilobites.
                  This layer, some ancient eel. How small we are,
how funny. Massive fish-ghosts
                  vibrate to George Strait. Time is read backwards
in the rock-body: oldest to the top, magma pushing
                  what’s fresh to the surface. Your hand
skims the deep blue
                  sandstone, these long-cooled shells. 
Tear drop, turquoise sliver of horizon, the creeping river
                  invisible in the dark. Here’s to you,
here’s to you, ancient and alive.
The sky stretches, full of old and older ghosts,
                  our once and forever wading pool.

"Theme for the nautical cowboy" by Kinsale Drake. Used by permission of the poet.