“What Breaks Your Heart?”

Alice Willitts and Polly Waterfield Talk Extinction Rebellion

 

 

Crowd-phobic introvert Polly Waterfield is an Alexander Technique teacher and printmaker who has surprised herself in her sixties by becoming a climate rebel. Her cross-generational friendship with poet and garden designer Alice Willitts has grown since they met through singing. Alice asks Polly about her calling to join the Extinction Rebellion movement.

Polly I’ve always found activists really scary people, plus the guilt factor, you know. The activists I’d been around previously, it felt like they were doing the right thing and what’s my life for? As though not being an activist proved I didn’t care—like there’s only one way to care. 

Alice Yet you have been drawn to the Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement.

Polly To my absolute surprise because I’m so not a joiner! XR is fluid and very creative but, even so, I find it all difficult and outside my comfort zone. The main thing I think that makes it possible is its profoundly non-violent ethos—this is at the core of it. 

Did you see David Attenborough giving evidence to a parliamentary select committee recently? He was being grilled by twelve politicians who didn’t seem engaged, and they wanted him to tell them what to do while subtly putting him down. What got to me was how they were so not alive whereas he was wonderful and quite emotional. He spelled it out, how bad this is going to be in so many different ways, and said that people ought to fly less, said all these radical things. He looked tired; you know, he’s into his nineties and he’s speaking out. 

Alice Speaking out is tiring though and can be disheartening. Maybe faced with such political inaction he feels pessimistic? 

Polly Actually, towards the end he was asked if he’s optimistic and I was moved by his answer. He said he doesn’t know what the future holds but he sees no future in being pessimistic as it leads to inaction. He feels an obligation to get up every morning and to do what he can. There he is doing his absolute best and these politicians are crying what should we do, what should we do without really taking in what he’s saying. It’s their job to take action!

Alice Do you share his sense of duty? Is that what turned on your rebel?

Polly I’m certainly trying to figure out what has changed in my life because I am definitely pre-XR and post-XR. The issues aren’t new; it’s not as if I haven’t been aware of them, and I’ve tried to live in a green way, but it’s always been about the inner journey for me. 

Am I really an activist in terms of getting out there? The weird thing that’s happened since doing the April rebellion in London—and you know I was there blocking the road at Marble Arch—well since then, whenever there’s been something going on I haven’t been able to do it because I’ve been busy or working. Then I think maybe it happens that way because I don’t really want to do it!

So I was fretting to my small local group about maybe not being a bona fide rebel. A lovely young man whom I admire and who’s right there at the centre of XR said we need biodiversity in the world and we need it in our own little group too. It felt so inclusive, especially from a young person.

Alice So it comes down to belonging for you?

Polly Yes, absolutely. I like the self-organising nature of the movement. It’s a grassroots, organic system so that although there’s a central XR and there are things being decided—and it’s sometimes not altogether clear how that happens—the movement is growing through cells forming and reforming dynamically, and that’s exciting as a model for change. 

I remember the first XR thing I did was that die-in here in Cambridge. I knew there would be a few people from our choir there so I thought OK, I’ll go. We were all thinking what’s this die-in about but then we walked through to the Grafton Centre and it turned out it was a lie-down protest and I thought well I can do that, I teach people how to lie down for a living! There were speeches and they had David Attenborough on loudspeaker talking about the crisis which was good. It was freezing cold. 

Alice Yeah, it was freezing! I came down after the die-in to march and sing through town; we went all the way up to Shire Hall to read out the manifesto and bury a child-sized coffin and plant a tree. The wind was vicious!

Do you remember that early nervousness of people seeing their faces in the newspapers and wondering if they’d be arrested? How did you feel about taking action in that early time before XR had really gone national and global?

Polly For me that first die-in didn’t really feel like an action. It was the day when I joined the swarming at the top of Hills Road and actually stepped out into the road to stop the traffic that was really big for me.

Alice Presumably that was that after you’d been on the Non-Violent Direct Action training day?

Polly Yes, and I didn’t know anyone at the training but I knew I wanted to be there, even though I felt pretty uncomfortable. There were about twenty of us and it went very well and, to my surprise, I found myself able to speak! I’ve had a lifelong thing about not having a voice; it goes very deep, not being able to make myself heard. I had the experience there of speaking up and really being heard.

I loved how they invite you to stand up to show your solidarity with other people’s interests or ideas. I think I said something spontaneous about the inner and outer landscape and the ways we navigate that relationship, and quite a few people stood up for that, so I thought: oh, okay, I’m not on my own.

Alice Yes, I like that action of physically putting yourself in the space for someone or something that inspires you. It’s so simple and powerful. We’ve all been in those work meetings where you say something that feels risky and others might nod, or look away, but you don’t know who’s really with you. The strength that comes to the room when we physically step up on someone’s words is very empowering.

Polly Yes, it’s embodiment, and that’s what my work as an Alexander teacher is all about. Even when it came to tackling the issues that will arise in rebellion, we used our bodies to explore the issues. For example, we were asked ‘How arrestable are you?’—this end of the room for ‘I’m quite happy to be arrested,’ and that end of the room for ‘I wouldn’t consider it’. In this marvellous way, you can place yourself according to how you feel and there is a place for you wherever you want to be. 

Alice  So for you, maybe it’s realising that you were already an activist and here are your people?

Polly Oh yes. You see, lots of my generation were campaigning in the ’70s for all the anti-nuclear stuff but I wasn’t an activist then. I was dropping out of a successful career as a classical violinist, which I suppose was my way of protesting the system but also surviving. I actually moved to the Findhorn spiritual community. Now there’s this groundswell again with the energy of the young people. That is what is amazing, the energy of the younger generation coming through with a desire for change. With Youth XR and the school strikes, wow…

Alice And urgency, a real sense that their futures are being destroyed. A need to say to the people in power, Stop, don’t do that!

Polly Yes, all the necessary energy and idealism. For me, it’s incredible. With my small Affinity Group (AG) which was allocated at the training day, we acted straight away and set a date to meet the following Monday. I went along and was able to say, I really don’t know if I want to be here. A few of the group are long-term or committed activists but I felt heard.

Alice Can you describe what belonging to an affinity group allows you to do?

Polly Well we support each other; it allows us to land. XR isn’t just about being on the streets and doing actions, but also about modelling a “regenerative culture.” We recognise the need for reflection and recuperation, demonstrating the kinds of inclusive community and communication that are desperately needed right now. There is a lot of emotional intelligence in this movement. So, in my AG, we make sure we aren’t only talking about actions and logistics, and that the men aren’t speaking more than the women! 

Being part of a big organisation can feel distant, but with XR they put you in a small group that you know and can be active with at a local level. For instance, I posted that I’d seen a university professor was doing one-man BP petrol station protests and that I’d like to go and support him. Another woman from my group came with me too and that made it enjoyable, despite the traffic fumes.

Alice Talking of posting on social media, how do you manage the amount of information pouring through the various channels?

Polly Frankly it can be completely overwhelming.

Alice I find that I feel initially energised, seeing all these amazing, brilliant things happening in the world, but that often when I put it down I actually feel diminished somehow.

Polly Yes, deflated, definitely.

Alice And it’s an odd feeling isn’t it, because I’m genuinely delighted by all these creative, meaningful, informative things, and they’re happening, not just being talked about. But why can they also make me feel disempowered?

Polly I think it comes back to embodiment again. There’s lots of online trainings going on for XR but I wouldn’t do them because I need to be in the place with other people, physically together. I completely agree with the stuff about social media. I also follow the Climate Psychology Alliance strand on email, and there’s far too much but occasionally useful things come up, so I keep following.

Alice How do you sift out what’s important to you?

Polly I just scan it and hope for the best! But actually the answer is I read too much and then there’s too much going round in my head. Then I’ve been hanging out online with people I don’t actually know, but many of them think the world as we know it is going to end soon. Which may be true, I certainly don’t know. 

I recently met someone who said that the key thing in these times is to find what it is in the world that breaks your heart and then plug your energy into that, whatever your gifts are.

I thought yeah, that’s brilliant. So I’ve been thinking about that a lot, about what it is that breaks my heart. And it’s the way that people behave to each other, even within families where people are supposed to be close, and the way generational hurt is passed down through not speaking about it. I think of my mother’s tragic life which was never spoken of; she could never speak of it. I watched her suffer and dwindle over her lifetime until she died when she was a year older than I am now, embittered and emotionally totally alone. That is the damage of not speaking about the context in which we live.

Alice And this silence worries you because it connects in some way with your feelings about climate change?

Polly Yes. The context we’re all living in now—the emergency that we and the earth are in—is not being spoken about in general, in public conversation or in the media. So that thing in XR of tell the truth, it’s so important. Let’s recognise the way things are. It’s difficult and risky to tell the truth but without that life can’t be lived.

Alice Do you remember that first week of the April protests in London, when I was supposed to be running a poetry session in front of the houses of parliament and my childcare fell through? How devastated I felt at not being able to go?

It was the right time to be making the big public protest—the right action at the right time. It had been well thought through, was timed perfectly politically and it felt like we might not get an opportunity like that again. We have a weakened government preoccupied by Brexit, and we can be heard now. There aren’t always times when your voice can be heard but this is one of them, so we have to put bodies and voices out there. We’ve got to show up and tell the truth.

Polly And these protests have changed the national conversation in an extraordinary way. Whatever you read now, they’re talking about XR. Has it changed things for you too?

Alice You know what, not being able to go and ‘do,’ and having to ‘be’ with that, it brought upthrew up personal realisations—and it made me take actions closer to home, less dramatic maybe, but still significant. And it also made me value those actions. I accepted that I can only do what I can do at this stage of my life:, bringing up my children, working, writing. It helped me value my writing actually. There, I can make a contribution that doesn’t involve being in the front line of activism physically but joins up my values and actions.

Oh, and I also had to face up to my own vanity! Not being able to say, “Me, me, me, I did that, I was there,” when I wanted to be counted in the most prominent way because it felt important to be saying publicly this needs national action. It’s one thing to be privately doing good things for the planet, for the human race, for the precious ecosystem we rely on, and another to be publicly doing them. And that’s what you’ve been sliding in and out of too, isn’t it, how to marry up inner and outer intentions?

Polly Yes, and whenever I’m in a group of people I try to say something about the situation or XR, often in quite scary ways. For example, I’m on a team that is organising a conference for Alexander Technique teachers about our work in education. On the way to our meeting, I thought about the school strikers and how they’re saying we’ve failed them. They’re seeing all these challenges ahead and I thought, why don’t we ask them what they need from us? I didn’t know how my colleagues were going to respond but it was received very well, so now we’re going to have a panel of young people including some school strikers. That feels good. 

What happened next? Polly asked Alice to help her uncover and write her personal story of becoming a rebel which became ‘Bones,’ told in Polly’s own words. ‘Bones’ appears in Channel Issue 1.