I.

While many courageously fight to revolutionize our governments, industries, technologies, and economies in a just transition to environmental sustainability, a cultural shift to respect for water, earth, and all non-human beings must be at the core of this process. A cultural shift to honoring ourselves and all living beings will support our ability to commit to sustainable solutions. To recognize our delicate position within creation and respect its limits honors creation.

There is beauty and mutual pleasure in these limits. As an artist, I want to amplify this beauty and pleasure in social justice. By deepening our sense and appreciation of the world around us, we may be transfixed and removed from self-occupation. In On Beauty and Being Just Elaine Scarry writes that we appreciate beauty, whether for our eyes or someone else’s across the world. This lack of self-interest around beauty pushes us to ethical fairness. Pleasure (which offers us satisfaction, not excessive indulgence) and the erotic—that kernel within each of us to strive for our deepest fulfillment of which Audre Lorde speaks—are vital tools in this cultural revolution to live in balance within creation. Our pleasure and fulfillment are a part of this world, too! They feed our spirit and bind us into consensual relationships with those around us.

To this aim I admire the strategies of pleasure activism introduced by adrienne maree brown to reclaim our desires within a politically oppressive system, as well as Bjarke Ingels’ hedonistic sustainability, which recontextualizes our work to create healthy designs for all as fun and enjoyable. Discovering our mutual pleasures—what genuinely satisfies you, me, and the natural world will lead us to our strongest political solutions. Authentic collective practices of care, inherently beautiful and pleasurable, can slowly build a passionate consensus.

So let’s begin to “feel deeply.” How do you feel in the natural world around you? Do you feel love, fear, guilt, or anything at all? Do you feel the earthy, watery womb that holds and grows our bodies? Are you suffering from extreme weather events? Do you feel inundated with toxins? Is this world sacred, sacrificial, or both? How do you really feel? Take a moment to pause and reflect. Let’s acknowledge our feelings as a first step toward addressing unwanted behaviors and their consequences in the world.

I feel tired of getting by in a system which chooses to satisfy short-lived desires that have long-term consequences for everyone, especially the earth, water, air, non-human relatives, and BIPOC communities whose bodies and spaces are repeatedly taken to be sacrificial. This feels ugly, selfish, and disgraceful to the life creation has provided me.

II.

Last summer, I pulled out my archive of family photographs searching for wherever water was present—whether in a glass, a stream flowing down the mountains, or the Pacific ocean, 30 minutes away from where I grew up in Los Angeles. I wanted to understand how I was taught as a child to relate (or not) to water. I could see that water and land were (and still are in many ways) something I took for granted, in the photograph’s background, although I was immersed in it. The value of water and land was measured by our consumption of them for our bodies, properties, and individual pleasures—the length and cost of a shower or the rising real estate value of our home. I was not—we were not taught to live within the natural limits of Tovaangar.

Three photographs in particular caught my eye. They were likely taken by my Uncle Andy in 1969, one year after my white American father returned to Los Angeles with his new Liberian wife and son. In one photograph my father ducks his head to the right of the bathtub faucet with a grin on his face, his hairy blond chest and knees emerging from a thick froth of bubbles. In the second photograph, my mother leans back in the bubbly tub with a wide smile staring at my father across from her, outside of the frame. The curtain hangs to the right of her. In the third photograph, they lean in to kiss each other–their torsos emerging from the white foam. My father props himself up along the tub’s edges with his elbows, while my mother holds his pink face in her chocolate brown hands.

I find joy in this rare moment of seeing my parents physically express their love to one another. I am simultaneously struck by the water that caresses and holds their bodies. The water that holds our most intimate parts inside and outside, and spiritually connects us all. The bath, sauna, and sweat are indeed a place of love, and of physical and spiritual rebirth for many.

We experience deep pleasure from water, yet live in a culture which struggles to reciprocate and honor water’s gifts. This massive imbalance is commonly shown in our daily lives—in our consumption of high water footprint products from far away that wreak havoc on their environments, and in flushing our waste/fertilizer that our bodies naturally produce into water. The imbalance is embedded in our culture of consuming without care for our debts. Many of our policies are literally toxic and reflect our throwaway culture as we administer daily pollutant allowances. Last summer as I watched the motor boats happily skate across Lake Itasca—the headwaters that settlers claimed of the Mississippi River—nothing felt sacred. From the start, we pollute for a short thrill disregarding any care for our kin downstream. It’s hard to sit with my shame and continue to feel the gifts of water—more often from the ground these days in the drought here.

Let’s recognize the massive gap between the spiritual and physical value of water in our lives, and our continual poisoning of water that nurtures our bodies. How do you and I confront this trauma and dissociation? For the last year I have grappled with this question. Resting along the edge of the beautiful St Croix River one afternoon with my love, I expressed my fears and hesitations in unlearning and learning new ways of relating to water. I felt ignorant and honestly unsure of how to cope with the painful violence inflicted upon our only world––with my eyes opening, unable to turn away from the ugliness pursued by those addicted to power and greed. I wondered how I might confront this trauma and possibly create new rituals and change for myself without losing my joy of life.

III.

If we are interested in repairing this relationship, how can we start to show up, reciprocate, and honor the natural world? For guidance, I look to Indigenous infrastructures and protocols of care because they are ancient, tried and tested. I look to local activists who put their bodies on the frontlines to protect spaceship earth. I am also inspired by those who strive for joy, despite the deep wounds we self-inflict upon the environment. I am reminded of those who lovingly camp and walk along the shores of the poisonous Salton Sea in Southern California. I am reminded of Anishinaabe nibi/ water walkers like Nokomis Josephine Mandamin and Sharon Day who physically confront this trauma on the land and water by walking great distances around the Great Lakes and the length of the Mississippi River with prayer and ceremony in each footstep. Day tells us that while they walk to heal the water, they are in turn being healed by the water.

Connecting with activists and organizers at the Welcome Water Protectors Center in Palisade, Minnesota, has given me an appreciation for how these warriors recoup their losses between fights individually and together. Upon meeting folks, I could feel, see, and hear their exhaustion, even months after their fight against Enbridge’s Line 3. One weekend last fall I had the opportunity to visit one of WWPC’s cultural camps led by Anishinaabe cultural specialist Jim Northrup and his brother Jeff who instructed twenty-two of us in building and participating in a sweat lodge. This was a beautiful experience that promoted the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical health of all of its participants. Perhaps sweetest of all, this cleansing used very little water. Deeply inspired, I too want to practice both pleasurable and sustainable ways of interacting with water. Soon after this experience, I decided to host an experimental herbal sauna series to begin with others to practice honoring water and simultaneously consider folks’ health. Sweating together is an ancient activity that maintains public health. This ritual takes on different meanings for different people and cultures. It may simply be a water efficient bath or it may have social, spiritual, and/or medicinal significance. We benefit physically when our bodies remove toxins through our sweat glands that we collect in our trashed environments. Sweating re-awakens us to the world: a rebirth!

Infrastructures of care or erotic rituals that promote profound feeling and knowing are powerful tools to cool our ravenous urges to extract without permission from our natural environment. These systems vary widely and may be as personal as a prayer or poem, as sensual as a sweat or sauna, as expansive as traditional plant knowledge passed through ancient cultures, or as simple as breathing, moving our bodies, and drinking tea––inviting plants to heal different parts of our body and spirit. All scales of promoting personal and collective wellbeing are important. What each of these intentional practices have in common is a deepening of our internal feelings and our external awareness. This tunes us to the world, empowers us, and fosters balance. When experienced together, Lorde tells us that these deeply felt erotic activities may lead us to genuine change.

If we want to practice new rituals of public care across life forms, let us first identify the erotic (what fulfills us) within each of us, and then “demand from ourselves and from all our life's pursuits that they feel in accordance.” Perhaps there is a reason that many of our water quality standards pertain to recreation, and there is a way to reimagine these policies to be mutually beneficial for all life. Rather than being extractive or destructive or one-sided, how can we ensure that our recreation is consensual? In the spirit of kinship, can pleasure be mutual across species? Do we know what joyful water, land, and plants look like? It’s time for us to learn how and change our culture, so that our species can continue to grow.

Mutual pleasure breeds sustainability. Private and public pleasures overlap. We can disrupt cultural associations between pleasure and waste, and harness our erotic power to better adapt to our ecosystems. I believe in the power of the erotic–that our depth of feelings connected to others is healing and reparative for us and all of those around us, including our non-human relatives. Repairing relationships with ourselves and each other is part of repairing our relationship with the natural world in which we are a part. Our personal and shared fulfillment gives strength to us individually and collectively.

Takeaway questions for reflection