A B O U T
M E L A N I E F I N N
I’m a writer, a mother, the founder and director of a small healthcare charity in the remote Tanzanian bush. I am a wife, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a friend, and possibly, an enemy. I was sexually abused as a child. I’m a runner, a skier a swimmer, a hiker, a midnight rambler. I have saved lives. I love building fences and collecting wild mushrooms. My life is extraordinary. I have been down the Grand Canyon in a raft and to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro, I have ridden my horse through the Mojave desert in the moonlight, I have listened to Faure’s Requiem while watching a rainstorm in Serengeti. I’ve had an affair with a rock star and a movie star. I have witnessed my 10-week premature babies tended by nurses and doctors until they thrived (and oh, I am so sobbing-grateful for that care). I struggle with my anger. Everyday. There are still lentils on the ceiling above the stove from when I banged down a pot so hard that they erupted upward, a volcano of pulses. I’ve decided to leave them there as a reminder that I am not the calm, wise woman I aspire to be. I’ve had three abortions and five miscarriages. Every one, I grieve. Still. But without them Molly and Pearl wouldn’t have come into existence. I worry about how we are so disconnected from the natural world, and this impacts our culture, our politics, the choices we make in everyday life. We cut a lawn when we could leave the dandelions for the pollinators. We murder vast, complex, interconnected kingdoms of fungi, plants, insects, rodents, birds and mammals when we clear a path through a field. What we do to farm animals and zoo animals is repugnant. I slam up against my hypocrisy when I think about social justice, equity, poverty, racism, religious and sexual persecution. I know that whatever I do I’m going to injure someone or something somewhere.
Part of me accepts this as the dull indifference of the Universe, how death strings life together like pearls; and part of me frets about the way I must at least create a balance or contribute to a counter-weight. I help under-resourced people learn about their health. We eat vegan four times a week. Most of my clothes are second-hand. My husband and I have rewilded our land here in Vermont. I struggle with the knowledge that we are so deeply fucked as a species, we are self-destructive and we’re going to take as much down with us as we can – sea otters, swallows, elephants, innocent children, kelp forests, worms, wolves. 99% of species that ever existed have gone extinct – a fact that terrifies me and reassures me in equal measure. I imagine the clean slate of regeneration when we are finally gone. I feel guilty at the wood pulp used to print my books. All those trees. And the polluting ink. I look at my daughters sleeping with their old rescue cat, and I think: maybe we’ll be OK, we’ll be innovative, we’ll recalibrate our relationship with the nature, with each other, we’ll end poverty, or at least the sick immoral inequity of it. And then I think about how little I can move the needle, either way, good or bad. In the vast scheme of things, we are utterly meaningless. Even the worst and best among us get rolled into the giant croissant of time, flour dust. I always come back to a stanza in Auden’s poem Atlantis, which I first read in a lover’s tent in the Usumbara Mountains in Tanzania in 1991. I had travelled for three days on broken roads and a goat track to reach him, only to find he’d buggered off to Tanga with a German nurse. But he’d left Selected Poems, a bottle of cheap local gin and half a pack of Sportsman cigarettes on the table:
If, forsaken then, you stand,
Dismissal everywhere,
Stone and snow, silence and air,
O remember the great dead
And honour the fate you are,
Travelling and tormented,
Dialectic and bizarre.
Stagger onward rejoicing...
Stagger onward rejoicing...
