Breathe
By Frida Mendoza
For some time now, the phrase "you/he urges you to touch grass" has become popular on twitter, or at least on my timeline. When is this phrase used? When the league of a topic is stretched too far and suddenly the arguments and attacks in networks do not stop growing. At what point do you stop?
As I've shared on other occasions, the algorithms of social networks -especially X or Twitter- look for this type of interaction that doesn't stop and instead of being constructive, you suddenly find yourself fighting with @fulanito9475432134532134 about politics, a quesadilla or whatever.
Not to mention what we have lived through in the last months -or years? of political campaigns. We are about two weeks away from the elections and little by little the waters have calmed down, while others are beginning to churn and suddenly we are living in a sea of incessant news, urgent policies, necessary discussions and exhausted people.
Still, I have tried to touch grass. Maybe not the real one living in this city but I have tried to find in old safe places a few moments to put my head at peace and in writing this column I realized that during this year, of the four books I have read, three have a link to nature:
The first was A Whale is a Country, a collection of poems by Isabel Zapata that I read on a weekend in January at the seashore and it sounds poetic in itself. In the selection of poems, Isabel tells us the story of the dog Laika or of Koko the gorilla and her journey to learn sign language. Short, with different structures, in which you learn about many of the little animals that inhabit this planet.
The second - two weeks ago, just as the election ended - was Tania Tagle's Jardines Errantes (Wandering Gardens). In this collection of short essays I got to know Rosa Luxemburg a little better, I appreciated the insubmissive roses, I identified with being a person who has not had a garden of my own and the love for plants, all in the midst of personal experiences of the writer and that somehow managed to get me out of the reading block I had after reading and rereading so much news that I wish it was fiction.
Once with the unblocking I found myself again with When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams that had been on my desk for months because I had had a hard time to continue it and I found a beautiful prose in experiences totally different from mine and that I could say that I do not identify myself -like her immense love for birds and the desert landscapes of Utah as a young Mormon- and yet I lived underlining her pages for the metaphors she wrote about the care of nature, the conservation of forests, the pain of loss, incomprehensible silences, fighting for an ideal, among other things.
Unintentionally, life led me through careful and oriented narratives in some aspect of the vast nature and I touched grass metaphorically, how beautiful nature is.
But what about those who cannot touch grass at this moment? Leaving aside the political gossip, the election and its constant declarations, I think that everything is overshadowed if we look at the multiple heat waves we have experienced in the country, seasoned with brutal pollution in the cities and deforestation in forests and jungles while an overwhelming series of fires rages in so many regions of the country.
"You don't know how helpless and overwhelming it is to hear how the fire sweeps away everything, the wind, the crackling of the dry trees and suddenly feel it getting closer to where you live," a person I love very much once told me, and her family's house is in the middle of one of the imposing Mexican sierras. No, I really don't know and I don't want anyone to know.
I would like no one in Oaxaca, Michoacán, Chiapas, Veracruz, Jalisco, Edomex, Puebla or Mexico City itself to fear for their homes, for the little animals that fall dehydrated, for the life that is consumed in the fire.
Mexico is gigantic. Its 138.7 million hectares with forest vegetation cover, distributed in forests, jungles, mangroves and arid landscapes, give us an idea. But I think it is urgent to remember this, and in recent weeks thousands and thousands of hectares have been consumed. Another fact is that in just two states -Oaxaca and Michoacán-, more than 120 thousand hectares have been consumed so far this 2024 and four out of every 10 fires, according to the National Forestry Commission (Conafor), are provoked and in the struggle to defend the territory, people also die -only in 2023, 20 people defending their territory were murdered, and in this six-year period, 102.
At what point did demanding that your territory be protected, that no monocultures arrive or that the flight of butterflies prevail become a death sentence? At what point did we get so caught up in political polemics that we forgot that territory - and caring for nature - is also political?
It is inevitable, and urgent, to look around. Stop, yes, touch grass, too. But never, never forget that we all have the right to touch grass.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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