Rituals for Climate Change
An Interview with Naomi Ortiz about Disability and Eco-grief
in the Borderlands
Naomi Ortiz’s new collection of poetry and essays, Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice, offers an often-overlooked perspective on climate-grief, interdependence, and resilience.
Naomi Ortiz and Stephanie Heit initially met in 2019 as inaugural fellows of Zoeglossia, a literary organization for disabled poets. Since then, they have met over Skype and Zoom from their homes on the lands of the O’odham and Yoeme people, in Tucson, Arizona, and on Anishinaabe land in Ypsilanti, Michigan, for friendship and creative exchange.
Stephanie Heit: I’m struck by the detailed observations you make in Rituals for Climate Change. Even though I’m not familiar with the desert, I feel like I’m transported there through your language. How do you cultivate attention in your life? What creates space for these thoughtful observations?
Naomi Ortiz: This has been a real gift of disability for me. Growing up, if we had a little extra money, we used it for gas to go camping or on a day hike. It was great when I was really little because I could just be carried around, but as I got older, we shifted to adaptations like finding wheelchair accessible hikes or taking drives. Yet, when there is only one wheelchair accessible trail in an entire National Park, the options for seeing and experiencing different spaces are limited.
There were many occasions where I spent a lot of time by myself waiting, in parking lots mostly, but also maybe a little way down the path before it started to get too inaccessible. I’ve seen some miraculous things while people with their backpacks and cameras marched by me on the path. Through a monocular I’ve watched a raven feeding their young on the edge of a cliff wall. I have seen caterpillars of every imaginable color slink by me in the dirt or underbrush. I’ve watched a pack of javelinas run by with their babies. I’ve talked to people who have lived in the desert their whole life about how lizards can jump vertically and horizontally an incredible distance, and people are surprised, they’ve never seen it. Wherever I am, there are also other living beings that enjoy being noticed and getting attention too.
“Canción”
Sandstone cliff walls and formation. A raven flies and their larger shadow glides over the cliff. A flowering plant grows in a patch of dirt on the side of a cliff.
SH: There is such a strong presence and celebration of place in this book. Can you introduce us to where you call home, or as you say in the acknowledgements, “my mentor, the beautiful Sonoran Desert”?
NO: The Sonoran Desert goes through parts of northern Mexico, the southern parts of Arizona, California, and a little bit into New Mexico. Many people don’t realize that the saguaro grows here and not in all of the deserts in the Southwest. There is such a rich tapestry of desert trees, shrubs, and cacti that co-exists and supports an incredibly diverse and rich ecosystem.
SH: Was there a specific event or moment that was the catalyst for this writing?
NO: In my first book, Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice, part of how I defined self- care was through a relationship with place. The desert has always been a place where I could go to be myself and receive support. Growing up, the desert was much more stable than my home life and relationships with people. We listened to each other. Yet, in the last six years or so, I started noticing a lot of changes. The desert has grown drier and hotter. There have been changes in weather patterns, which have dramatically altered how a fifth season in the desert, the monsoon season, happens. I became acutely aware that the desert needed something outside of itself in order to live on—it needed support to survive. I was really thrown into my fear, and if I’m honest, despair, that this landscape needed tending. I found myself asking how as a Mestize, a disabled person, I could show up to support this place I loved? What action did it require?
What could I do? This was the catalyst for the work in Rituals for Climate Change.
“Reciprocation”
A uterus sheds blood which merges with oak tree roots and an acorn, as well as, the roots of a yucca and a yucca seed pod. It gathers at the bottom in a pool to soak into the soil.
SH: How has writing this book impacted or changed your relationship with the land?
NO: It has been an incredible gift. I came across an article in the Arizona Daily Star with the chief scientist from the Nature Conservancy, Katharine Hayhoe. She was saying that when they looked at their surveys, it showed that we’re not talking with each other about climate change. I understand why. It’s hard not to feel powerless and scared. Sitting with my fear, asking the land directly what is needed from me, and doing the deep work of witnessing, not only gives me the tools to talk about climate change with other people but has cracked me open so much wider to my relationship with place itself.
As a disabled person, I understand vulnerability. I understand capacity and the limits of capacity. Those embodied knowings gave me a place to start to build a scaffolding of how to touch what scares me, while staying in relationship with love. Rituals for Climate Change is a book of accompaniment. I accompany the readers as they accompany me through fear, questions, and conversations with the land, to get to the point where I am now, which is able to hold both the love and loss at the same time.
SH: How does living in the Arizona US/Mexico borderlands uniquely position you to engage with ecojustice and the politics of climate change?
NO: As a child of indigenous, multiracial, and formerly undocumented peoples, I was always enmeshed in a political reality of being in the in-between. That political reality became even more embodied as I navigated society as a disabled youth. Living next to a militarized border and driving through checkpoints set up 5-25 miles away from the borderline is part of my daily reality.
Borderlands are constructed. They are created by politics and militarization. They mark a false separation. Growing up on the US-Mexico border, I am intimately aware of the impacts of militarization when it comes to relating to not just a sense of place, but family and culture. How this militarization tries to box and delineate the US and Mexico, which is really just dirt, lizards, and palo verdes a few feet away from dirt, lizards, and palo verdes. It is a false boundary, and yet because we reinforce it in our politics and imaginations, it takes on real meaning.
The ways we define nature are also falsely constructed. Nature is everywhere and yet, as a society, we create boxes where it is acceptable to view land as nothing more than a resource. Nature doesn’t delineate between soil under pavement and bajadas (lower slopes of a mountain). I hold this knowing in the same Crip hand as I hold the reality of my defined limits and need for others to grow my food, for electricity to charge my scooter, for concrete to help me move around and be part of community. I experience nature by allowing myself to witness and love the soil, plants, animals and the ways I impact them by what I need. It’s touching something that’s so complicated while also holding a lot of grace.
Borderlands are constructed with this belief to delineate what is “ours” or “not ours.” Being in relationship with nature is different. It’s about constantly being in the challenging perspective of how we are sharing what exists. For me, that means challenging myself to think much more deeply about what I need and do not need. To contemplate this while also understanding that for climate change to be addressed, systems need to be responsible beyond individuals.
“Home”
Contracted hand and forearm are in the middle of the painting, palm side up. One half of the painting is a daytime desert scene showing cacti and mountains. The sun is the shape of a human heart. Roots go from the soil into the arm. The other half of the painting is a nighttime desert scene. Cacti and mountains are shown in moonlight. The moon is the shape of a human heart. A moonbeam goes from the moon into the arm.
SH: I love that there is a conversation between your visual art and your writing in Rituals for Climate Change. Can you talk about your artistic process with each of these practices? How do the disciplines overlap? How do you know when to move an image onto the canvas and when to move it onto the page?
NO: I was nominated and received a NALAC Reclaiming the Border Narrative Grant to develop Rituals for Climate Change. One of the beautiful things about receiving an arts grant is the permission to not just incorporate written work but also visual work. I feel like in my artwork I’m the most present and in a state of listening. I often don’t know what I’m going to do until I’m working on the canvas. What motivates me in all my work are the questions; I come to writing with questions, and I come to painting with questions. When I am painting, instead of accessing verbal answers, I’m tapping into intuitive wisdom and feelings. Somehow, I capture another piece of the puzzle through my artwork —another way to describe what reciprocation with the land really looks like —how relationship feels.
It was important for me to integrate my artwork into this book of poetry and essays. The land gives so many moments that feel like magic. The way thorns will catch the moonlight and it’s like seeing plants outlined in polka dot/dash pattern. Night is also the time when most animals feed, move through the desert, and pollinate. A lot of cacti will bloom at night.
Capturing the energy of that life and how I feel so inspired and nourished by it, is part of a painting where a beam of moonlight enters my wrist, at the same time as the energy of land moves from my wrist to the other side of the painting into the dirt feeding the desert in the daytime.
SH: In your essay, “Love as Refuge,” you share about your experiences as a disabled young person navigating playgrounds, cafeteria lunch tables, and friendships while being advised by various adults on how to fit in: “To them inclusion is a noun, not a verb.” How does inclusion as a verb from a disability culture and ecojustice framework show up in your world now?
NO: Inclusion as a verb is messy – it is creativity in action. It is failure and it is magical. My needs directly contradict a pristine untouched environment. One of my poems, “Ode to Plastic Cups,” discusses my struggle with wanting to participate in zero waste and yet needing plastic cups in order to drink water. To be inclusive of my needs means there will be waste/trash.
At the same time, as a disabled person I have built a relationship with my capacity. In our society, respecting our body’s capacity or even developing an awareness of what our limits are is highly challenged; I would even say vilified. Limits are treated as failure. My poem “Epicenter” begins: “Body / ground zero / for how we are instructed to control the world.” We need an embodied sense of these in order to understand the limits and capacity of the places we live.
Inclusion means understanding what we need and how we can creatively connect with others and within our communities. Having a willingness to be creative will mean holding the “both/and,” which means needs may contradict. Inclusion means being in the struggle of sharing resources with those who need them (including the soil, plants, animals, etc.).
I think deep down, practicing inclusion means developing skills around our reactions to things not being equal. Some of us will be able to live and function with a lot less than others. Then those needs might change. For some of us, what we need in order to live, participate in society, and be with loved ones will be more energy and resource dependent. The conversation around equity when it comes to inclusion and environmental justice, is deep, and often neglected.
SH: This book explores how to witness not knowing what to do in the face of climate devastation and how to work with grief. What do you hope readers will take away from this work?
NO: Simply put, witnessing is grief work. Especially in the context of climate change.
SH: I want to end by asking you the question you pose in “Storm Procession,” the penultimate poem of the book that features the inevitable power of a monsoon storm: “What does it mean for / my body / this ecosystem / to be unapologetically disabled?”
NO: When I meet someone and it comes up in the conversation that I’m disabled, their response is almost universally, “I’m sorry.” In one of the conversations I had with the land, I was in shock due to a large fire that burned through the Santa Catalina Mountains in the desert near where I live. Fire is not part of the natural life-cycle of the desert. However, we have planted grasses for cattle to make the land more, “productive.” These grasses thrive on fire and are drastically impacting the desert ecosystem.
As I was sitting there, looking up into mountains black with ash, I just repeated: “I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry.” And finally, when I stopped talking and was actually listening to the land, I was rebuked to not put that energy of grief and sadness on the land. That it’s not its to hold. That instead, I need to share the energy of life. I think about that a lot now. I want people to share the energy of life with me as well—to believe that my life is worth living —not from a place of pity but from a place of mutual respect.
Witnessing, grief, and creativity are all big parts of disability. As my bodymind changes and the consequences of loss becomes tangible, I have to process, witness, and grieve, these changes because they connect directly to my functionality. Yet, changes also become an opportunity to build relationships, ask for help, discover creative adaptations, learn from others, and celebrate my own ingenuity. While we work towards harm reduction towards the planet on a systemic level, I want to be in love with the soil, plants, and air around me. I want to notice the gifts the earth gives and celebrate them.
Video produced by Rachel Scoggins.
Naomi Ortiz (they/she) is a Disabled Mestize poet, writer, facilitator, and visual artist who explores cultivating care and connection within states of stress. Ortiz's new book, Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice, offers potent insights about the complexity of interdependence, calling readers to deepen our understanding of what it means to witness and love an endangered world. Their non-fiction book, Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice provides informative tools and insightful strategies for diverse communities on addressing burnout. Ortiz is also a co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Every Place on the Map is Disabled: Poems and Essays on Disability. For their work to reimagine the future of arts and culture they were selected by both the Ford and Mellon foundations as a 2022 U.S. Artist Disability Futures Fellow and they are a Reclaiming the US/Mexico Border Narrative Awardee. Website: www.NaomiOrtiz.com
Stephanie Heit (she/her) is a queer disabled poet, dancer, teacher, and codirector of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space on Anishinaabe territory where she is a white settler in Ypsilanti, Michigan. She is bipolar, a shock/psych system survivor, a mad activist, and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her poetry collections are the award-winning book of hybrid memoir poems, PSYCH MURDERS (Wayne State University Press, 2022), and The Color She Gave Gravity (Operating System, 2017). Website: https://stephanie-heit.com