For a long time, climate change has felt like a faceless, omnipresent, and visibly invisible phenomenon to me. I suppose it still is.
Faceless because to me there was never one actor to blame apart from ourselves.
Omnipresent because my concern over climate change continues to hurt me deep inside my body.
And visibly invisible because no one can visually see the cause and effects between green house gases and its effects on the environment. So it’s both very visible and very invisible.
Its facelessness, its omnipresence, its visible invisibilitity makes it like a wendigo (wiindigoo or wetiko) shadow. Wendigo is a Native American’s mythological creature whose greed is insatiable. Native Americans believed that wendigo can live in all of us (the consumers in all of us, for example). And that we can only learn to temper its control of us if we learn that we are enmeshed, interdependent parts of the natural environment.
In this piece of climate change poetry, I am giving voice to my emotions more fully about my climate change shadow. My wendigo.
The performance is part of a research piece I am doing with Berliner artist and theater costume designer, Giulia Paolucci. Next step is to go to the street and engage this climate change shadow, our common wendigo, with passers-by, with the slogan
Come kiss our climate change shadow. Denial is no longer a possibility!
Climate Poetry: My climate change shadow
Shadow, you who call yourself climate change,
I need to face you.
Shadow you are always there,
Always. Fucking always.
Faceless you are.
Omnipresent you are.
Visibly invisible you are.
Shadow, you who call yourself climate change,
Will you kiss me to death with your mouthless mouth?
Or will you make me love this planet like I have never loved?
If I could only see your eye, shadow,
I could hate my denial of you a bit.
But you’re my wendigo shadow,
My own consumptive creation.
My death is your death, isn’t it?
Just like shadows, isn’t it?
What does your mouthless mouth want to kiss me with?
With farewell to glaciers by 2100
With farewell to coral reefs by 2030
With farewell to the artic spirits
With farewell polar bears, green turtles, blue whales…
What does your mouthless mouth want to teach me with?
With welcome burning forests
With welcome African droughts
With welcome Asian floods
With welcome the greatest loneliness of spirit without beasts
I feel your hot breathless breath on my skin,
And your mouthless mouth murmur to my pores.
Hallelujah Planetary love
Hallelujah Earth consciousness
Hallelujah Human fragility
