I Can’t Make You Love Me
Caperton Swamp, Louisville, KY, January 2022
To love any form of wildness in these quick and destructive days is to wake up every day with two promises:
Your heart will sing.
Your heart will be broken.
Maybe you just sighed because you understand what I mean. If you really know, then you may have tipped some bourbon into your coffee and gone to the window to stare out at the bird feeder in silence for twenty minutes.
If you have no idea what I am talking about, then I am writing for you.
One of the saddest songs I know is Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me”. The story goes that songwriter Mike Reid wrote it after hearing a news report about a man who got drunk and shot up his girlfriend's car. The judge in his case asked him if he had learned anything, to which the man replied, “I learned, your Honor, that you can’t make a woman love you if she don’t.”
I can’t make you love the natural world if you don’t. Let’s set a more realistic expectation for this relationship.
I would simply like the killing to stop.
Holy shit, I know. How dramatic. But I’m not wrong. Our disconnection from the natural world has resulted in a lot of death. I don’t just mean delicate mussels in invisible streams suffocated by pollution. Everything about our relationship with the natural world is extractive: where we get our lumber, how we irrigate and harvest our crops, who mines our diamonds and the components of our cell phones and how new neighborhoods are built.
It’s a habitual outlook on life driven by many factors: the deep communal wounds carved into the topsoil of our consciousness by colonialism, industry-serving religious practices thinly disguised as righteousness and mercy and the barbed inheritance of Manifest Destiny.
I can’t heal all of that at once. I am still working to heal these wounds in myself.
What I can do is hold up the things I love and invite you to consider them. I have a dear friend who can not abide the sight of a snake. She and I have discussed that she wants to save natural spaces so the snakes can all go there and be as far away from her as possible. I accept these terms.
I will not knowingly leave anything out. I will try to balance the potentially over-romanticized bird sightings with the misery of ticks and chiggers. I will bring you the perfect sunrises and the sudden deaths.
Finally, my goal is to be approachable. I cling to my right to get things wrong on my way to getting things right and to learning from those who know better. If you have a comment or concern, just email me and bring me your experiences and your studies.
Welcome back to the Wild Commonwealth.