Doorways and Dishes: How to change the world

Ann Cognito
Sep 7, 2021
3 min read

My phone stopped working, so until I was kindly loaned this interim phone (thank you, Extinction Rebellion Ottawa), instead of working — I wrote.

I am a small gypsyhermit in a very large world.

I’m told I have severe agoraphobia, but it took years to diagnose, because I would always rather be outside… because the fear is not about the largeness of space. It’s about the nature and population of space.

There’s a general image of agoraphobes being recluses who rarely, if ever, set foot beyond their own doorstep. My own feet have always been looking for ‘beyond’ and I don’t even have a doorstep.

I don’t want one, either. I have a hatchway instead, and it opens out to everywhere water can go. I have a tent vestibule, and it opens onto all the paths I could wander.

The doorways in the ‘civilized’ places, the places we conglomerate in and construct and claim, only open inward, and they hurt.

They open into the deafening chaotic tangles and muck of things that don’t make sense and things that aren’t real.

Or they open into claustrophobic boxes where dead air and straight flat lines and counterfeit colours and synthetic smells and incessant electronics crowd around and squash me into corners my lumpy rounded edges can’t fit.

Both directions are clogged with heavy webs trailed by people who don’t know they’re tied, and hurt each other because they have no time to look beyond a now that doesn’t actually exist any more.

I trip and fall and collect bruises inside and out. I get hopelessly lost. My brain can’t think. My soul can’t see. My heart can’t breathe. I itch and burn and my body rejects what it can’t deal with while absorbing more because it can’t keep up. I can’t keep up — I panic, I burn out, I drown. Maybe I feel how the Earth feels.

Glitter and paperwork can’t hide the damage inflicted on the Earth by the ways we live, or the fried and frazzled connections between us… and between us and the world.

The world calls anyone willing to hear her. She calls through forests and seas and mountains and wide open spaces, but also through parks and gardens, even potted plants and passing birds. The small ordinary pieces of the world need at least as much attention as the stupendous ones.

I think we all know that. We’re part of it all. But our perspective is skewed by lack of connection. Somehow we got so used to comfort that it came to matter more than life. The thing is, though… it’s all extra. It’s not needed. It can be let go without true loss, and not even missed as deeply as we expect… because it’s not really that important.

Changing is like doing dishes: the prospect of the chore is worse than the warm water and clean things ever are.

There’s a saying that life is not about finding ourselves, but about letting go of everything that isn’t ourselves.

But what if we take the layers off and something bites us? (Yarrow, or coconut oil, or attention to the cause I can attest to all.) Or we’re cold? (Bundle up, fill a hot water bottle, get a better tent; there are always better ways to be warmer.) Or what if there’s nothing underneath…???

Part of my (unfinished) Human Ecology thesis was about how terrifying it can be to let go of the layers between us and the world. That’s why it’s often hard to clear out a wardrobe — clothes are part of that layer, part of the world but also of our self.

I won’t finish that thesis. We have too many layers. What we think of as losing is really opening a doorway.

it’s hard to step through a doorway, but once you have, the whole world is still there. Life is there. The future could be there.

With hope and determination,

Ann

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https://chuffed.org/project/climate-emergency-sailboat

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Thank you… your help means the world to me… and yes, I’m still trying to get to updating the budget/maintenance log/needs file!

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