Walking the dog along the grey shoreline has been my meditative morning ritual since I began my PhD in Kingston, Ontario. Nestled between Toronto and Ottawa along the shores of Lake Ontario, it’s a small Canadian town where the St Lawrence river meets the Great Lakes. The limestone shores, which became the limestone homes and even the law office of Canada’s first Prime Minister pay tribute to the rustic landscape along the city’s quaint downtown streets. With its ideal location and its natural beauty, Kingston became Canada’s first capital in 1841, but within only three years, the city’s capital moved North along the St. Lawrence river to Ottawa, supposedly due to Kingston’s proximity to certain aggressive anti-loyalist neighbours to the South. Save the inflex of Queen’s University students pouring in from the greater Toronto area each fall, the city has a sleepy charm. Walking the dog through the cold winter months, some mornings I see no one as we wade through the snow, slipping on the ice. The rest of the year, there are 5-10 regulars we’ll encounter, mostly retired people, some joggers, and other dog walkers. We smile and nod to one another silently and enjoy the small miracles that each season brings: the brilliant yellow and deep red leaves, the first frost on the green grass, the sunrise over the frozen water, the arrival of the crocus just when it seems that the long winter will never end. The rocky shores are somewhat bleak in their beauty. They are arresting. In the distance, on Wolfe Island, one can see dozens of windmills turning across the horizon. At the best of times there is a sense of stark isolation in the beauty of the Kingston shoreline, which is intensified by the length of the winters and the long laborious process of spring.
After rushing home on a last-minute flight from my time studying at Cambridge University, just days ahead of the closing Canadian borders that the novel coronavirus has brought about, I feel at home undergoing isolation within the landscape of Kingston’s slow spring. As a student of philosophy studying the work of the 20th century French philosopher and political theorist Simone Weil, I have spent the past two years trying to understand the possibility of love and beauty in the absurdity, absence, and suffering that so often impinges upon the plans that we set out for our lives. According to Weil, when we are faced with the void of existence or the gap between what we thought our lives would be and the reality of the world in all of its imperfections, we are given the choice to fall into a lower void of despair or to rise into the higher void of love. In the lower void, we find depression, stagnation, malheur. In the higher void, we find love, caritas, action: we set our philosophies to work. Indeed, Weil is infamous not just for her thoughts but also for her constant attempts, however ill-fated, to live those thoughts. Camus famously referred to her as “the only great spirit of our times.” This notion of a higher void that puts suffering to work in order to love more deeply sounds appealing, especially when we are pulled down into the quagmire of grief and doubt. In these moments, Weil claims that “man, having come to the end of his human faculties, may stretch out his arms, stop, look up and wait.” (Gravity and Grace, 166.) It is in the ensuing silence that we can cultivate the skill of paying attention to the surrounding world. This simple notion of attention is the tool that can allow us to move into the higher void. Attention is the first step in a process that Weil entitles decreation, a release of the egocentric reading of one’s self as the centre of the world in favour of a perspective that sees one’s self as a part of a larger ecosystem. It is like the shift from thinking the earth is the centre of all of created existence to recognizing the sun as the centre of the solar system and eventually even recognizing the solar system as a part of an expanding multifaceted universe. Although her main theological affinity is to the Catholic church, the notion of decreation is distinctly Eastern and Weil studied a number of Hindu texts, including the Bhagavad Gita. It is a process of releasing our attachment to our own ego.
While much of the world has been asked and even forced to stay home in order to prevent the catastrophes of COVID-19 from spreading too quickly, we are struck in the face with the absurdity of our helplessness in the face of this virus. By cultivating an openness to the world around us through a meditative mindfulness, we are not just cultivating our own mental health but we can use this attention to become actors for those who do not have the strange “luxury” of this silence: the grocery store employees, the personal care workers, the nurses, the doctors, the people at home with small children or elderly relatives and no income. Now more than ever, attention must be paid to the needs of these people. In attention lies the saving power: we are struck with our interconnection to all beings. We are like the raindrop screaming in a high-pitched voice: “I am a raindrop! I am a raindrop!” as it falls from a cloud and suddenly, splashing into the ocean below, we are forced to realize, in fact, we are the ocean. On Sundays, the bells of St. George’s church ring out over an eerily silent downtown Kingston, reaching my apartment along the water and I am struck by John Donne’s poem: “No man is an island, Entire of itself.” I suppose the bells have rung out every Sunday since I first moved here three years ago but in the silence of the pandemic, my attention is heightened, and for the first time, I actually hear.
Of particular interest to my own study of Weil is how we can think through environmental degradation and the climate crisis with Weil’s decreation. The beings that we share this world with are not only other humans, and our interconnection with our surroundings does not stop at the category of homo sapiens. The virus has shown us this interconnection in a painfully forceful way. The increasingly heated, nationalistic, and racist debates about the origins of the virus showcase an effort to reassert divisions and categories that have been shattered. No matter how leaders attempt to carve out blame for the pandemic, the entire world has been utterly changed and the world of human beings has been brought to its knees. It reminds us what we all know but so often forget: every particle on this earth is enmeshed in a web of interconnection. As humans are forced indoors, we get a glimpse of the animals who have been here all along as they begin to show themselves: two foxes have moved in down the block from my apartment complex with their skulk of kits on the grounds of an empty yacht club, and twice now I have witnessed an otter merrily lunching on a fish head where students once spread out blankets, played ball, and threw endless empty alcohol bottles and trash.
My attempts to cultivate attention to my surroundings have become more urgent in the time of COVID-19, but urgency is the opposite of the type of attention that Weil recommends. Her notion of attention is not an effort but an openness, which is arguably much more difficult, especially as we all become media junkies, standing at attention and awaiting the bing of the phone. Bing, how many dead, bing, the famous person who has died, bing, the service that has closed down indefinitely, bing, the reasons we cannot get personal protection from the virus for our health workers, bing, when we should panic, bing, it’s now, isn’t it? Bing! I think it is time to panic now. Bing! Bing! Bing! This type of attention is the antithesis of what I am seeking. It is constant circling around what feels like an unstable widening gyre that will only bring about unfavourable thoughts and actions.
So, it is on my morning walks that I am most successful at cultivating the attention that Weil prescribes. In particular, I have begun to take stock of the hierarchy of what one encounters along the rocky shore. In particular, what is “natural” and “desirable” as opposed to what is “synthetic,” “unnatural,” “trash.” Along the trail in downtown Kingston, the beautiful slabs of rock and the small stones between them are themselves artificial in that they have been cut, brought in, and arranged aesthetically. But of course, we categorize these rocks as natural and desirable whereas the soda bottles, colourful tampon applicators, grocery bags, and array of plastics are considered undesirable and out of place.
On one particular morning, my attention focused on a yellow plastic tab the size of my pointer finger, nestled between the rocks. The colour of the plastic was actually quite lovely, a pastel yellow among the grey rocks and the colourful algae. I dislodged it and noticed how the lake had wrapped a bit of seaweed around it. A passing couple yelled out to me, “Looking for fossils?!” I smiled and nodded. The ecological theorist Donna Haraway invites her readers to “stay with the trouble” of environmental degradation and climate crisis rather than washing one’s hands of it. To do the latter, would be to pick up the little yellow piece of plastic and throw it in the trash can at the bus stop along my walk home, where a city worker would bring it to the city’s waste management and it would be delivered to a landfill where it would sit for approximately 100-1000 years, depending on the estimate you read. Picking up garbage and tucking it out of sight while maintaining my sense of the “natural” that belongs on the lake and the “synthetic” that belongs in the landfill, is often my first reaction. Admittedly, I would feel rather chuffed with myself for throwing it away: an upstanding member of the community beautifying the shores. And while picking up garbage that a waterfowl or fish may ingest is important, it strikes me that hiding the plastic in a location that is not my own backyard is not in the spirit of Haraway’s suggestion. Instead, I decide to stay with the cheery little piece of plastic wrapped in seaweed. I take it home and place it on my desk. I google the words stamped into the hard plastic: “2 COMPARTMENT TANK.” Not without disgust, I realize that it is more than likely a piece of a plastic septic system. Reasserting my commitment to stay with it, I resist the urge to rush it to the garbage can but allow myself to be moved by the urge to again wash my hands thoroughly, a ritual we have all taken up in the face of COVID-19. The plastic I have refused to hide away is itself a part of an apparatus meant to hide away human excrement. I am a bit disappointed with the crassness of the metaphor harvested from my attention, but humans certainly have a difficult time taking responsibility for their own shit.
While my own practice of attending evidently needs more time, a refined attention, according to Weil, is the origin of both genius and prayer. Attention cultivates ethical action and responsibility to others by allowing me to begin de-centering myself from the world as I perceive it. As someone who has lived all of my life with the comfort of indoor plumbing, I certainly have an undeniable responsibility for this little bit of plastic refuse but what exactly that responsibility is, I am unsure. As a human whose research demands travel and who is lucky enough to be able to continue my PhD work from home, I am both responsible for the virus and for the others who must continue to go out to their jobs despite the risks. So, I wait with the responsibilities I had not realized that I hide, and I stay with the trouble that washes up on my city’s shores.
About the author
Kathryn Lawson is a PhD Candidate at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She works on ecological philosophy, phenomenology, philosophy of religion, and aesthetics.
Her dissertation places Simone Weil in conversation with ecological philosophers and is entitled Decreation for the Anthropocene.