Essam Temuri
Laying down on my bed, overlaid with black and silver sheets, messily spread out over the bed, my smart tv blares the youtube app through its small speakers. Definitive clicking is hard to discern over the loud fans running throughout my small room — for I tend not to turn on my A.C. — as I press the arrows on the remote, scrolling through the various videos that I’ll watch, maybe. Most of them deal with video games, some sport games, but others, story-based games that are slower-paced. I click on one of them, a video that showcases the story of the video game Journey, a game that features a silent protagonist that traverses through a vast desert, wondering what happened to his society — a society that was once reaped with gargantuan monuments and many individuals just like him, all flourishing, only to fall without the monuments intact, every one of them covered in sand.
Indeed, it’s strange that I chose to watch this once again, and then again, and then again. For, I don’t usually come back to stuff unless there’s something deeply going on in my thoughts. I mean, beforehand, I was wafting through my twitter feed for the past 30 minutes, flowing through the discourses of the day, observing the hate-filled vitriol crawling through my phone, demanding me to listen to every news that dealt with the environment. It was painfully overwhelming. So, I decided to tune into Journey once more, a perfect allegory for climate change — as I see it.
See, I needed hope, some optimism in my life, after watching the Amazon forest fires, the polls of the Canadian elections, which showed the Conservatives and Liberals nearly tied, and watching the progress of Hurricane Dorain — a particular gauge to observe the extreme effects of climate change that are already occurring, and which will only get worst in the future. So, I look at Journey, the video game, one more time, on a beautiful Saturday morning that has the vibrant rays of the sun penetrating through my window, whitening my entire room as I stay fixated on the massive mountain summit that the protagonist of the game has to reach, particularly to understand some form of deeper knowledge — perhaps about its society, or maybe about something bigger. But, the knowledge seems almost elusive, even when the protagonist reaches the top of the summit, crossing into that blinding white light that seems like another world, one filled with less obstacles.
That’s when I turn off my t.v., and head outside — without my headphones, or my phone — putting on my red and white shoes as I exit from my wooden, burgundy door. I head to a trail just off my neighborhood, an intact forest that slopes up to a suburban abode that Americans tend to enjoy. But, I’m more interested in the grassy fields that smooth the landing of my shoes, with swarms of individual insect species flying about in that wide-open sky, seeming covered with gargantuan trees, with leaves still flying about from the branches of them. It’s noticeably darker in this shaded area of my neighborhood, with the rays of the sun now only coming through the sliver of the treetops.
I can’t name any of the tree species, nor any of the insects gracefully waltzing around in the sky, just the frolicking rabbits and squirrels leaving and darting towards the bushes, and up various trees. I can only describe their actions, their movements, in absurdly vivid words, fully reaped with emotions as to be utterly useless to a real scientist. Then my insecurities take form once again in my mind, all jockeying up to the brim of it as if to make the loudest case for my attention, which I try to ignore, but to no avail. Even in this outside world, where the wind easily flows gracefully around my body, where the rustling of leaves sweetly plays a symphony through my ears — giving me a break from car noises, from remote clicks, from music with intense bass blaring forth from my speakers — I still can’t ignore my thoughts that accuse me of being a fake scientist, someone as too emotional to be one. In fact, it would seem that as I continue to walk on this trail, some of the grassy blades rubbing against my ankles, I feel evermore intensely — as compared to the other world of screens that endlessly blare forth knowledge that do nothing but numb me.
I try to close my eyes, focusing on the soothing water slowly prodding by from the North Fork stream, which will eventually drain into the Bull Run watershed — I think. Opening them once more, I realize that this trail is bound to tell a story of its own — one that doesn’t seem to be completely written. Two possible scenarios run through my head: either this place will be a future sight of development, where houses would be placed upon as to appease the demand of a growing number of people coming here from Northern Virginia — I mean, part of it is already subject to development; or, this place would still stand as a remnant of a natural part of the world that seems to increasingly vanish before our eyes.
At this point, my mind flashes back to Journey, the video game with a cryptic story that I only watched an hour before, but which is now evermore clearer in my mind, a mind that has a tendency to flutter back and forth at random intervals, even when I observe various pollinator species flap towards plant beds laid alongside the short trail. Everyday, I can’t seem to get a break from climate change, from biodiversity loss, from land use changes, and from the various ailments affecting our environment, but on this particular day, I go back toJourney also, and find out what it taught me, as well as this trail, and the natural world in general.
I realize that old stories have the capabilities of solving modern problem — old stories like the Hero’s Journey. The Hero’s Journey is an old narrative formula used in ancient myths like the one of King Arthur, and which survived to the present day all the way to Harry Potter. It tells of an ordinary person having to achieve something greater than themselves. And, that’s what Journey shows also; in fact, when the protagonist reaches the summit of the mountain, she reaches the ultimate boon, the completion, where he’s able to receive the ultimate knowledge. And, I receive it here, in the midst of a climate crises that invades my mind at every waking moment. It appears as the final words from the soundtrack of the game:
Na me plaignez paz (Do not pity me)
C’est pour cela que je suis née (I was born for this)
Maybe we are born and able, even in this age, to be responsible stewards of the planet. All we have to do is perhaps change the narrative, the story that we tell behind it. And, maybe I was born for that.