A Christmas present of a New Year's exploration

One of the blogs listed on the right-hand side of this page is based at The Center for Humans and Nature. The Center also puts out a journal called Minding Nature. In the most recent issue, Fall 2019, Volume 12, Number 3, there's an announcement about a new project The Center is initiating, The Kinship Project. I've read the Gavin Van Horn article several times. It's giving me fits in, I think, the best possible way, but, for now, I'm reserving judgement.

I was a teenage when Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird was published. I may not have read it until I was in college. I do remember hearing a number of times variations on a quotation attributed to Mockingbird's author:

“You can choose your friends but you sho' can't choose your family, an' they're still kin to you no matter whether you acknowledge 'em or not, and it makes you look right silly when you don't.” 

some kin can be prickly, especially at Christmas

Photo by J. Harrington

In describing what The Kinship Project intends to accomplish, Gavin Van Horn writes:

No matter what expression of media is used for CHN’s Kinship Project, we anticipate stories that do the following: disrupt human chauvinism, counter and complicate narratives of human identity that are based on individualistic ideologies, and celebrate what it means to be human in relation to our fellow earthling kin. At a time when human fidelity with the natural world seems to be fraying, the Kinship Project will bring forward stories of solidarity, highlighting the deep interdependence that exists between humans and the more-than-human world. We will explore challenging questions, including how communities might fairly and effectively give voice to non-human beings and landscapes, and attend to the cosmologies, mythic narratives, and everyday practices that embrace a world of other-than-human persons as worthy of response and responsibility.

Native Americans have long depended on the kinship of a more-than-human world

Photo by J. Harrington

Based on my initial reactions and responses, after the aforementioned several readings of the article describing the project, CHN's Kinship Project has already attained in me several of its objectives. My mind and heart have been disrupted, my identity narrative complicated, and, in light of my long-standing observations about how poorly we humans treat many of our closest kin, I've been challenged to follow along and learn about how to improve my own response and responsibilities to other-than-human-persons that share the world I inhabit. Who knows, in the process I may even enhance my relationships with my human kin, close and extended. Care to join us? What better Christmas present could we hope for than a chance to build a better world for ourselves and our descendants?

Kinship

By Margarita Engle

Two sets

of family stories,

one long and detailed,

about many centuries

of island ancestors, all living

on the same tropical farm...

The other side of the family tells stories

that are brief and vague, about violence

in the Ukraine, which Dad's parents

had to flee forever, leaving all their

loved ones

behind.

They don't even know if anyone

survived.

When Mami tells her flowery tales of Cuba,

she fills the twining words with relatives.

But when I ask my

Ukrainian-Jewish-American grandma

about her childhood in a village

near snowy Kiev,

all she reveals is a single

memory

of ice-skating

on a frozen pond.

Apparently, the length

of a grown-up's

growing-up story

is determined

by the difference

between immigration

and escape.

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