microbes & metaphors #1
Why Microbes? Why Metaphors? & Why so serious?
Dearest you,
I’ve been nervous to publish this, but when I shared that nervousness with my sister she reminded me that I’ve been writing little essays and passing them around to strangers since I was 9 years old. So I’m summoning little Olivia to remind myself that this should come from my joy and curiosity, not from a desire to “succeed.”
With that said, welcome to microbes & metaphors. Not necessarily in that order.
Why metaphors?
I’m a mama now. Sometimes mamilla, sometimes mamita. Like many parents, I read the same children’s books to my daughters over and over again. Each time I read them I have the chance to study the metaphors and characters crafted by authors and illustrators I have come to admire so much. Part of this study may be to keep myself awake as I snuggle a toddler in dim light. But it also comes from a deep appreciation for the seriousness of stories and metaphors.
The ability of stories and metaphors to hold space for complex and interwoven truths, can serve as instructions for navigating these intense times. Yan Martel’s novel, The Life of Pi, is one example of the ways in which metaphors can be tools for adaptation and survival.
The Life of Pi tells the story of a boy stuck on a lifeboat with a tiger after he survives a shipwreck. The ship was transporting zoo animals and he starts off on the lifeboat with a tiger, an orangutan, a zebra, and a hyena. They all die off in a series of vivid and gruesome events, until the sole survivors are the boy and the tiger. The story of the tiger feels completely real, until we learn that it is a metaphor. Near the end of the book when the boy finally reaches land and has to deal with customs officers, the physical reality of the story is revealed. Each of the animals on the boat represented a human that also survived the shipwreck– his mother, a cook, and a sailor. Each had succumbed to the ocean until the boy was alone with only himself. The tiger.
As a reader, it didn’t matter if it was humans or non-human animals he was stuck with. While the tiger may not have physically been on the boat, the boy's immersion into the metaphor kept him alive.
Why microbes?
Becoming a mother has drastically changed my relationship to myself, and I have been yearning to return to my heart practice of lyrical storytelling. As I near the end of my master’s thesis on soil microbial communities, I am excited to synergize this love with the science I have been interpreting. Remembering that science and art were not originally considered binaries.
In honor of the seriousness of stories and metaphor, I have been carrying a story that has served me as a tool to navigate the challenges of becoming a mother in the pandemic—alongside our collective backdrop of climate change, genocide, the resurgence of ugly fascist ideologies, and robots taking all the jobs in the gig-economy.
In the book I am writing, the metaphor of adaptation to change I am offering does not include a tiger. Instead, I am using the story to hold space for [the ways that we are] the communities of microbial beings with us all of the time. The beings passing between my baby and I, travelling on our breath as I rediscover language with her. The ones that come home from school on my 5 year old’s hands and backpack. The ones proliferating in the moist sandbox in the tropical climate we currently inhabit.
I’m choosing to uplift microbial communities in this story, not only because its the topic of my masters thesis, but because we are in dire need of changing the way that we understand our place in the web of life. As adrienne maree brown describes in Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds its time to understand ourselves not as solitary predators but as interconnected ecosystems:
“...humans so far have generally deified and aligned with the “king” of the jungle or forest—lions, tigers, bears. And yet so many of these creatures, for all their isolated ferocity and alpha power, are going extinct. While a major cause of that extinction is our human impact, there is something to be said for adaptation, the adaptation of small, collaborative species. Roaches and ants and deer and fungi and bacteria and viruses and bamboo and eucalyptus and squirrels and vultures and mice and mosquitos and dandelions and so many other more collaborative life forms continue to proliferate, survive, grow. Sustain.”
In this volatile moment for our world, it is an act of love to reimagine ourselves as thriving in collaboration rather than through competition. As I weave this microbial metaphor into my own story, I invite you to consider: What metaphors help you navigate change? What makes you microbial?
What I’m working on:
Rekindling my drawing practice to gain momentum for illustrating a whole book :0
Analyzing soil carbon and nitrogen data for my thesis to piece together what the microbes were up to when the soil was thawing
Trying to differentiate between “paapaa”, “papa”, and “pahpah” in the emerging lexicon of my 1 year old