A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [170]
"When people go through mourning, and through their crisis of faith, what they come back to as bedrock is their own capacity to love. Sometimes that connection is frail and tenuous, but whether it is with animals, nature, music, or other humans, that's the bedrock to which they must return, to that one caring relationship the perpetrator was never able to destroy. And then they build from there.
"I think as people move into their lives again, the ones who do best are the ones who've developed what Robert Jay Lifton calls a survivor mission. I've seen it happen so many times, that people turn this experience around, and make it a gift to others. That really is the only way you can transcend an atrocity. You can't bury it. You can't make it go away. You can't dissociate it. It comes back. But you can transcend it, first by telling the truth about it, and then by using it in the service of humanity, saying, 'This isn't the way we want to live. We want to live differently'
"In the aftermath of terror many survivors find themselves much clearer and more daring about going after what they want in life, and in relationships. They straighten things out with their families and lovers and friends, and they often say, 'This is the kind of closeness I want, and this is the kind of stuff I don't want.' When people are sensitized to the dynamics of exploitation, they are able to say, 'I don't want this in my life.' And they often become very courageous about speaking truth to power.
"I have heard so many survivors say, 'I know what terror is. I will live in fear every day for the rest of my life. But I also know that I will be all right, and that I feel all right.' And I have heard them join others in saying, This is the thing we want to protect, and this is the thing we want to stop. We don't know how we're going to do it, but we do know that this is what we want. And we're not indifferent.' Sometimes through atrocity people discover in themselves courage that they didn't know they had."
It's not possible to recover from atrocity in isolation, and it is hard to discover a new way to be—or remember an old way— when all signals from the culture pull you in the direction of coercion, control, and ultimately annihilation. I did not walk directly out of my childhood and out of the Colorado School of Mines into a conversation with coyotes, and into the understanding that ours is a culture of atrocity. There were many rebirths along the way, many times of dying—to the control of my emotions, to the silencing of my body, to a belief in Judeo-Christianity, to a belief in the goodness of the United States government, to a belief in the capacity of those in power to act in the best interests of living beings, to a belief in the capacity of a bad culture to reform, to a belief in the superiority or even fundamental specialness of human beings—many times of silent waiting, and many times of kairos, large and small.
I could not have learned to listen to coyotes without having first learned to listen to my unwillingness to sell my hours, then to listen to the signals of my body, then to listen to the disease that has made my insides its home, and thus has become a part of me. And I could not have learned to listen to coyotes without having talked to other people courageous enough to validate my perception of an animate world. I talked to the writer Christopher Manes, who said, "For most cultures throughout history— including our own in preliterate times—the entire world used to speak. Anthropologists call this animism, the most pervasive worldview in human history. Animistic cultures listen to the natural world. For them, birds have something to say. So do worms, wolves, and waterfalls." Later the philosopher Thomas Berry told me, "The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited. Everything has its own voice. Thunder and lightning and stars and planets, flowers, birds, animals, trees—all these have voices, and they constitute a community of existence