You’re right not to feel normal anymore, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith, but that doesn’t mean you should curl into a ball and give up
Having been traumatised by the Canberra firestorm of 2003, and then impacted by this summer’s bushfire crisis which culminated for me at Malua Bay on New Year’s Eve, I am left with a feeling of discombobulation. We saved our house by deciding to stay and defend against all warnings to evacuate, yet I am still afraid of further bushfires. I don’t feel normal any more. I feel life has changed into a Mad Max movie that could reappear any moment with loss of power and communications.
Columbia Law School professor Jedediah Purdy wrote a remarkable 2016 essay about getting back to nature as a way of navigating politics, particularly in times of fear and collapse. “I have been hungry for naive responses to nature, as I have been for naive political lucidity,” he wrote. “These days, when I see a flock of birds in synchrony, I feel as if a dimension of awareness has opened that is not occupied territory. I feel this other site of consciousness, this fast-banking incipient intelligence, is a rip in the curtain drawn between the world and me.”
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