The world is burning: this is a fact. We are living in “unprecedented times” - we are living through the apocalypse all that YA dystopian fiction was preparing us for. We are screaming at the world to listen, we are drinking from paper straws and organising our recycling and walking to work as if that will change anything when 70% of the world’s carbon footprint can be traced to twenty unethical billionaires. We are begging for cheaper trains and being presented with cheaper aeroplanes.

This is not the reality. The dream these days is a job with enough money to survive: a roof that doesn’t leak, friends that won’t leave. A house plant, maybe, and a cat. Enough food on the table not to starve.

We have been told to dream big, and forced to dream small. We have been told that we are destined for huge things, and thus anything smaller feels like failure, like not enough.

The thing I’ve always needed to hear from fiction is this: it’s okay, to rest. To not burn your candle at both ends and a secret, third end that shouldn’t be possible to burn. It is okay to put your armour down, to not make every ache in the world your personal problem.

I approached INSTRUCTIONS as a recipe for myself, for the people I know have felt the same way. I have felt hollowed by the last eight years, I have often looked at my life and asked what the point is of trying to go about the day to day. I needed something to tell me that feeling like a ghost was not a singular experience. That hopelessness, and a desire to give up, was not a singular experience. Sometimes, looking at the news is paralysing. You want to turn it all off, to throw your phone into a ravine, to curl up into a ball and never look at the slowly-burning world again.

The grief you feel at inheriting disaster is one I have felt intimately, and will never fully process. But it’s also important to recognise an alternate, yet just as undeniable fact: the ability to rest is a privilege. Suffering is not a comparative game, and yet it is true that the brunt of climate change is suffered by those who have least contributed to it. Climate change, at its core, is a result of a long colonial history that continues to devastate the world in many ways.

INSTRUCTIONS is not about giving up. It is about taking the time you need for yourself in order to continue fighting. It is about letting go of other people’s dreams and contributing to the world in the way you can, not the way you were told to. The result of INSTRUCTIONS is a narrator who lies among a natural world, at once apocalyptic in its description and yet undeniably thriving. A narrator who becomes part of the ecosystem, rather than walking through it in destruction. Who finds peace and rest - who finds divinity - in nature, and finally understands what it is to be part of a whole.

Is it strange, or horrifying, to imagine your own body decaying? To imagine it feeding trees, and insects, and soil? Maybe.

But what a community, what a purpose, you might find there in that metaphor.

Listen to a Spotify playlist here.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR ANTI-GENSIS

step one: pluck a rib from your skeleton; for now, just one, and any
will do. it should come easy; the rot has run deep for years.
be gentle with it, this second self; ignore the calcium dust between
your fingerprints, the paper feeling of decay; it will be over soon.

step two: walk.

step three: find a space in deep forest: green-dappled sun, jack-o-lantern leaves, populations of ocean beetles, bloody ladybirds, midnight ants.
roots like towers and bridges, roads and waterways. wonder how
you can discover a world of such beauty through the eyes of a dead thing.

step four: dig.

step five: plant your rib in richest, darkest soil, but don’t worry- this is not
an act of creation. God learnt their lesson after growing Eve.
this bone does not have to sprout limbs, hidden far from the sun.
this is only a moment in billions, a moment without breath.

step six: rest.

step seven: rest.

step eight: rest. if you choose, let this be the end of the poem. you are not
this rib, nor the marrow inside it, nor everything they prophesied
when you were younger. it is enough to lie embraced in earth and roots.
it is enough to exist among trees, listening to wind, and wait for silence.

Morgan Greensmith

About the competition

'Writing the Unseen' was a University wide creative writing competition announced by the University's Sustainability team in September 2023. They tasked students with creating a short piece of creative writing about their emotional connection to a place, a secret location, an insect or plant, or exploring the impact of climate change on the natural world. Entries were judged by author and writer Miriam Darlington.

You can find links to the winning entries here along with Miriam's feedback.