Rob Lewis first reached out to me in May of 2019, through my contact page:
Hi Didi:
I became familiar with your work during the Ecosystem Restoration for Climate session at the Global Earth Repair Conference. I'm writing an essay about restoration for Dark Mountain, and would like to revisit that session, but I noticed the video is no longer on your website. Do you know where I might find it?
By the way, I love your way with language, of finding intuitively satisfying metaphors for what is usually presented in dry, quantitative terms. As a poet and writer, that's where I try and plug in, to help shift the narrative to something more human and humane.
Many thanks,
Rob Lewis www.thesilenceofvanishingthings.com
I sent him the link. He told me it was broken. I fixed it.
He sent me a draft of the essay he was writing about the conference. I loved it and sent back a bunch of edits. We corresponded back and forth with 18 emails for about a month, till June of 2019.
In April of 2020, he reached out again about a short video I had made. I was polite but terse. I had returned from India really sick. My stepmother had just died of cancer, and in her dying we had learned many secrets. Various men in my life were seriously stressing me out, and there was a pandemic getting underway.
In December 2020 Rob became my second subscriber on Patreon, and we had another brief correspondence about an article of mine. He sent me the final version of his essay. I didn’t read it or reply.
In February of 2021, he replied to my newsletter saying he liked the way I thought. I didn’t reply.
In January and April of 2021, Walter Jehne cc’d me and other colleagues in scientific correspondence threads with Rob. I was spinning out somewhere, in such intense writer’s block that I couldn’t even respond to emails on this topic. When I thought about writing, all I heard was a big voice that said NO.
I could teach effortlessly. I could take care of chickens. I could take care of my dying father. But I could not write anything real.
In April of 2022 we had the most intense mud season imaginable in Vermont. I nearly died in the hospital of a twisted bowel. My father died. My dog died. My cellar flooded. All in one month.
A week later my niece was born—an unexpected miracle—and life began anew.
Finally I was back out in the world, and I spent a year deeply inhaling company —reveling in the small important breaths and sounds moving in and out of the mouths of my infant niece and my aging mother—after two years of unintentional solitude and silence.
In July of 2023, while I was fostering a litter of 10 puppies racing wildly around my flower garden, I got an email from my colleague Thorsten, saying:
“This article brought tears to my eyes. It is the first time that I read the (his)story of climate science as I experienced it in my career - Millan Millan's struggles are embedded in this greater shift in narrative. Well written, and very important. And very timely, given that:
John Feldman just published his documentary,
Southern Europe is going up in flames and the carbon narrative is blinding us for Millan's findings,
the world still pushes landscape degrading policies for stopping global warming, seeing degradation as acceptable sacrifice.”
The article was by Rob Lewis. I didn’t recognize his name.
I read the article and it startled me awake—it was so unexpectedly magnificent. I sent it around, telling everyone it was the most important article of our time. As I read and reread it, Rob’s name in the byline seemed vaguely familiar, so I searched, and found reams of emails between us. The answered ones, and the unanswered ones.
In September I reached out and said “let’s talk.”
It’s a slightly awkward conversation, but a lovely one, and something about his article and our conversation broke my hard heart back open…so here I am writing again, to you, beloved friends.
Each one of you matters to me.
Didi
Rob Lewis and Didi Pershouse: the conversation that broke through.