Humans have a long tradition of letter writing. While scant in the contemporary western society that forms my own cultural bubble, when they emerge in the form of published works, they eclipse the email, the text, the tweet with a validity that reminds us of something primordial. Letters open us to the viscera of lived experience and to the depths of memory that are not as independent or segregated as we have come to believe our thoughts are. Instead, letters can reveal to us our own yearnings and intuitions.
William Powers, a gifted writer of ecology and community, recently grabbed by intuition by the lapels and drew me into what I can only describe as shared memory. And he did this through storytelling, reflection, and a piercingly speculative imagination. In his forthcoming memoir Ripple, Powers recalls how he searched the bookshelves for a gift to celebrate his daughter’s quinceañera, seeking to overcome the distance between them; he at a New England artists’ retreat and she in her family’s Bolivian homeland. What he needed to express, to clarify, to reify somehow between and for himself and his daughter Amaya was connection in a disconnected world.
He flipped through the titles, some perhaps you’ve read... Jeff VanderMeer’s speculative fiction and Ta Nehisi Coates’s wrestling with racism and Jenny Odell’s reflections on our “sacred inner silence.” The compass point at which these writers triangulate, however, was missing from the charts. So began his correspondence with Amaya, this series of letters, memories, practical ideas, and a seductive incursion into speculative fiction that breaks the boundaries of genre.
As Powers considered his coming-of-age daughter and the troubled world she was emerging into, his topic clarified like clouds reflected in a mountain pool:
How can we journey beneath our conditioning in order to better connect with our instincts, heart, and natural mind... and not the mind a fast society of efficiency molds for us?
Powers’ intimate language expresses an unambiguous, unapologetic vulnerability. He’s writing to his daughter, after all. A fifteen-year-old girl who has noticed the dichotomy between what she feels to be true and what she sees around her. “You can,” writes Amaya in one of her responses, “feel it at times in class or during conversation our minds are unused to the physical world.” As if there is something gray, ephemeral, and ominous transmuting substance into artifice, overlaying our natural instincts toward love, connection, and compassion with “a narrative of disconnection.”
Here, Powers had my attention. He’d jogged my intuition, and I listened, as I read, invited into this conversation on the narrative that surrounds us all; what Powers calls the Story of Separation. This is the dominant story of modernity, one steeped in capitalism and extraction, characterized by a human-centric, imagined, sociological order that aggressively eschews the biological, and finally shaping “our inner worlds.” Think internet, social media, fashion, as well as the more mundane manifestations of our culture: “advertisements for cell phones and soft drinks. Snack wrappers... Corporate branded medications...” Not to mention the daily destruction of nature through pillage and thoughtless plunder.
At this point, I closed my laptop and remembered the eastern hemlock and white oak woods across the road from my home. Obe day, there were young men in trucks with Styrofoam cups, tee shirts with the arms cut to the shoulder. The sound of buzzing chainsaws heightened as the spinning blades contacted bark; deafening cracks as the trees fell one onto the other, branches grasping and embraced by those still standing. They succumbed with silent, arboreal dignity. Then, a different quality of quiet. The remaining trees moaned sadly, enduring their mourning with a shallow breeze in their leaves, while the woodchipper sat idle until the young men could return to sanitize the scene for the builders.
Reflecting on this memory, I consider Powers’ words, “What do I see right now? What do I intuitively feel – within my silent inner acre – that I should do?” These emotions arise from our shared memory, one that is not grounded in the illusion of imagined separation but palpable reality, as tangible as rocks, trees, and water. Powers relates this to a question he poses to students, asking them to imagine what their happy place might be. Invariably, he says:
People describe places that are simple and usually nature-connected. For example: ‘Running in the woods of my childhood.’ ‘Cooking a meal with a few close friends.’ ‘Walking a moonlit beach.’ Why, then, does our contemporary world condition us to desire – and then manufacture for us – so much that is the opposite of our core happiness?”
No one really wants the woods denuded, as I endured several years ago, as is experienced by people in the “Fourth World,” as Powers writes, those “places where the globalization beast barely pauses to wipe its lips.” But we are conditioned for the economy. And as the trees fall, we apply the balm of PROGRESS over the wound in our hearts, further removing us from the source of our being; from who we really are under the façade of Separation. We either accept the new order or rip off the bandage, let our life’s blood spill into the dew, and realize our true connection with nature and each other. But if we do, Powers warns, we buck the “established imagined order and became as expendable as the animal.”
The theme of Separation permeates Powers’ letters. But there is hope because the fear of death imposed by the Story of Separation is really an illusion. Throughout the memoir Powers uses water – aquifers, rivers – as compass points. These are time portals that point upstream and down through memory, finally slowing and spreading out in the estuary where the rivers transition into ocean. So, it is to the ocean our memories return when our bodies become humus, since in truth we have always been a part of the water cycle, rippling through the years, connected to a particular “territory and with a sense of vocation tied to [our] deepest inner voice.”
“You’re an organic body,” Powers writes to Amaya, “which is more than half water. So why not ripple?” Powers’ stories, the practical exercises he scatters through the chapters like fallen leaves, the fictional jaunts he takes periodically to imagine what life might be like for his descendants one hundred years in the future, all seem to be asking what ripples out from your inner voice, that the dominant system would decry as unprofitable, but would make your spirit soar? Perhaps the “stillness within you – the life force – that will speak in its own voice” is telling us “We have an inner sense of destiny, direction, and vocation if only we listen deeply.”
Ripple: An Intimate Exchange of Urgency and Hope Between an Ecologist Dad and His Daughter
By William Powers
Green Writers Press, 2025