An old Texan I know told me once that some Texas natives consider transplants like me to be immigrants. The state had been an independent republic at one time so this otherwise ultra-rational woman wasn’t as bat-shit crazy as she sounded. But not everyone living within its debt-ridden borders had wanted to go it alone. So when Washington eventually offered debt repayment in exchange for statehood, Texas accepted. Fussing and rumbling—no doubt—at what it had sacrificed to its balance bleeding ledgers.

Texas pride amuses me to no end. Everything really is bigger here, including the propensity to exaggerate. Yet outrageous as her point had been, it made an ironic kind of sense to me, less for the history behind it and more because my parents were bona fide immigrants. Now here I was, their second generation American daughter, being told that some saw me as a foreigner in my adopted state.

No flag-waving Texas nationalist, the woman had only meant to offer insight into the beliefs of her fellow Texans who’ve watched their state get overrun by newcomers for more than a decade. Between 2012 and 2022, over four million Americans moved to Texas seeking post-recession opportunities and— if they were among the almost one million from California—a lower cost of living. And that isn’t even counting those other immigrants. The poor ones risking everything to cross hostile borders, also in search of better, more secure lives. The ones Texas governor Greg Abbott now sends north to tell Washington exactly what he thinks of federal immigration laws. And—I suspect—the federalism he’d rather do without.

I came to Texas by a chance invitation and did not expect to stay. But it grew on me for its laid-back Southern hospitality. And then repelled me for its second amendment purism, racist voter registration laws and cruel abortion ban. I’ve managed to tolerate it overall because of Austin, one of the few cities in Texas most likely to defy Governor Abbott and the conservative state legislature. And because other Californians are here, though natives often blame us—and the big California tech companies that followed—for making the city unaffordable. I’ve managed to make a comfortable life for myself here by luck and by grace. Though even after more than a decade in the Lone Star State—nine of them in Austin—I still can’t quite call it home.

I tell anyone who asks that I live in Texas. But when they ask where home is, there’s hesitation. I own a house in Austin; I will probably live here indefinitely. But home? Somehow it feels wrong to say Texas. Almost as wrong as it would be to say California, where I was born and spent the first twenty-odd years of my life. My immigrant parents were European tumbleweeds with no real ties to communities. They had a home on the outskirts of Los Angeles, the one where I grew up. But that home was in many ways a satellite to the European cities where they came from. Because home was always there and never here. In the same way that now, in the twenty-first century, the Internet has become my elsewhere community. Maybe that’s why my parents poured themselves into that house, planting trees and grass everywhere. To create the roots and ties reminding them that home really was where they had landed.

The white stucco house they renovated and that I still see in my dreams is a memory now that belongs to someone else. Santa Monica, the city in Southern California where I was born, disorients me with its pricey crowded newness. Berkeley, where I studied then lived for almost a decade, is still recognizable despite the gentrification but now untouchable for anyone earning less than six-figures. Then there’s the green and gold landscape I remember so well. Water shortages, wildfires, floods and mudslides will reshape it if the earthquake predicted to rip the state apart, does not. One day—perhaps in my lifetime—I may not recognize California or the cities I knew there at all.

So while I may not really be an immigrant to Texas, I might as well be one. I speak without drawl or lilt, but always with a hint of slack-jawed West Coast slowness; and like an immigrant, I exist between worlds, unable to return to the place I knew because it no longer exists. Yet not quite able to fully integrate into where I am despite my fondness for it. Even the plants in the tiny garden outside my living room do not burrow into native soil. They sit atop it in raised beds or pots. Thriving, yes, above the poor soil over which they grow and sometimes brutal heat. The way I have managed to grow on landlocked prairie subject to fits of humid heat to which I will never become accustomed. Not after years taking the cooling vastness of the Pacific into every cell of my body.

It’s a small comfort that 10% of the people who have arrived in Austin since the rush started a decade ago are from my state. As is knowing that Trader Joe’s, the iconic California grocery chain, moved here the same year I did. I never bothered shopping there when I lived on the West Coast; now I love just visiting and roaming the aisles. In the way my father loved spending time at his favorite French restaurant in Santa Monica reminiscing about France. And the way my mother gushed over pasta she could find only at the Italian deli on the city’s east side. Just like we make it in Italy. The best. Separated—voluntarily and not—from what we know, we tumbleweed immigrants create homes from what we find. Because home is not a place. It is everything that keeps us close to the memories that make us who we are.

Women. The earth. I think about both these days because both weigh on me with heaviness and urgency. Each is mirroring cracks and stresses in the other like a physical call and response. I chide myself. None of this is fact. Only the intuitive leaps of a mind over-trained in the poetics of literature.

Yet still I leap. And now that habit is working overtime and particularly when I engage with the news. The same week CNN headlines proclaimed that rivers all over the world were drying up, on quieter pages it shared the insights of eight American women living in overspent bodies. Exhausted as the rivers, they’re facing challenges and demands that exceed them. Yet they carry on and will continue to carry on. Until they can’t.

It didn’t surprise me to see women and rivers featured in the same week. I live with a form of madness that sees everything connected to everything else in one way or another. Besides—and as indigenous people believe—we are the children of the earth. The Great Mother. So as the earth suffers, so do those who like the Mother also bear children. Both have bodies that make life possible. Both are governed by the same systems control the earth and created this age we now live in: the anthropocene.

The Greek root anthrop speaks to the human; the suffix -cene to our current geologic time. To the recent and new. Taken together, the word speaks of humanity. How humans have become the dominant factor in planetary evolution. But does not say that this evolution is man-made devolution, emphasis on the “man.” Industry and the pillaging of natural resources for profit has been the province of men, of patriarchy. And like women too often have, the earth has surrendered to abuse, mostly without complaint. No longer. Now the earth responds with monstrous rages. Of drought, flood and fire. With loss of life and a catastrophic rate of species extinction 1,000 to 10,000 times the natural rate. The planet is out of balance. And all beings must pay the price.

For centuries, we could more—or less—rely on climate patterns we could read in the stars, wind, sky and earth. While never 100% predictable, were predictable enough. We could say with more or less certainty that rivers—like the Colorado, the Rhine, the Loire, the Yangtze—would flow on all continents. Other watery bodies, created and natural, like Lake Powell in Arizona and the Great Salt Lake in Utah, would fill. If not from rain, then from the melted runoff of high mountain snows. Variances would never be so extreme as to vaporize those bodies into the atmosphere and leave behind a dry, brittle earth unable to support life. The Mother could withhold, for a season, sometimes more. Or during Ice Ages, for millennia. But that withholding always came to an end; balance would return.

That reliability is gone. But climate change is not real, say some. Science is a fraud. These nay-sayers and deniers: these are the people who are most likely to believe that life-giving human bodies exist solely to benefit others. Offer comfort and pleasure. Provide labor for the industries that abuse the earth. Serve those who control those industries and society itself. Their justification? Ideologies rooted in Darwin, in the naturally-ordained dominance of males. Or beliefs built around a white-skinned God created in the image of men. A God too often used by men to justify their supremacy over all living beings, including the earth. And their dismissal or calculated disappearance of what does not suit them.

In the United States, the law that protected uterine-bearing people, gave us final say over our bodies has also vanished. What remains is imbalance. This is what I see now when I look at a map of the United States. Only ten of fifty states offer unrestricted access to the abortions that were once our right. Eleven have banned it outright and the rest offer conditional access that could be revoked by legislative fiat at any time.

Knowing this, I feel the imbalance in my body as an anger that will not go away. I think of the eight CNN interviewees and read their words over and over again. The already overwhelming challenges of the many roles women play—worker/breadwinner, mother, daughter, sister, wife—have been compounded by those created by systems in post-pandemic chaos. Now we feel the despair of disempowerment. Confesses one 35-year-old, I’m fragile as a piece of china. I am cracked, broken and tired. Just like the earth.

If anti-climate change advocates rely on denial, pro-life advocates rely on wilful scientific misreadings. Or rather, transforming scientific doubt about when life begins into absolutes, like this pro-life Wisconsin website: “[Human embryologists have concluded that] embryos are very young human beings. Pre-born children.” The movement claims to liberate women—transmen never enter the conversation—by offering “life” as an alternative to “murder.” But that only enslaves uterine bodies to the violence of state coercion and the lie of unlimited resources. Climate change is not real. Science is a fraud. Without speaking its name, these wilful misreaders of science act for patriarchy. And for a system that “tamed” the rawness of America through dispossession and human exploitation then dared to call itself a democracy.

This disruption of nature will alter life as we know it. Through migration away from the ravages of flood, fire and drought. Through conflicts over water and eventually, temperate, arable land. The question isn’t how these changes will break us but how much. And the disruption of the American body politic through the battle over abortion? No doubt that will break apart a union that once appeared whole. Not that it was ever perfect or without other perennial divides like race and class. But uterine bodies will only deepen the divides that already exist.

Indeed, the disharmony we have created in her rhythms are no mere inconvenience. They threaten us and our blue-green planet home. We look into the rivers and lakes of this earth, the bodies that offer us the water with which we cannot survive. Rather take comfort in the abundance of nature, we see man-made destruction, like the drying of the world’s rivers, everywhere around us. Nature is reflecting the very worst of us back to ourselves. Teaching us—or trying to—that the way forward is not through the narcissism of patriarchy. But through the humility of self-recognition in nature. And in every living thing on earth.