waywardthought

We are captives, even if our wheat grows over the fences, and swallows rise from our broken chains. We are captives of what we love, what we desire, and what we are.

Pain must be recognized in its historicity and as the articulation of a social condition of brutal constraint, extreme need, and constant violence; it is the perpetual state of managed depletion, of broken bodies and shattered persons, of soul murder and kinlessness. It is the embodied experience of stolen life and social death.

If we do not do this work, if we do not collaboratively call into question a system of knowledge that delights in accumulation by dispossession and profits from ecocidal and genocidal practices, if we do not produce and share stories that honor modes of humanness that cannot and will not replicate this system, we are doomed.

“Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.”

Love After Love

“Listen: Notice the sacredness of where you are. The mysteriousness of where you are. This is a different notion of indigeneity altogether – not a provincialism, nativism or exoticism that objectifies identity, but a living breathing vocation of noticing the enchantment that is around us, in us, with us, wherever we are.”

“Today’s movement must be so rich that it cannot be reduced to either one of two preset outcomes: victory or defeat. It must be so prolific that it spills through its containment, composting failure, reworking the meanings of success, celebrating with experimentation, unlearning mastery, and doing the tender work of listening to the perpetual conversation between hope and its many shadows. Today’s movement must go beyond an aspiration for a better world or publishing manifestos on how to arrive at a lovelier arrangement; in realising how those very desires and visions, however lofty, may be instigated by, conditioned within, and reinforcing for the familiar, it must press towards the strange, the yet-to-be-wanted, the ugly, the monstrous, the not-quite-fundable, the yeah-I-like-what-you-say-but-what-do-I-do and other such practicalities. It must bring together unholy alliances, plastic and activist, altar and faeces, fruit shavings and favelas, fugitives and money, gods and endings, rapture and rupture, hope and hopelessness. Somewhere in the compost heap of these loamy gatherings, this dirty assemblage, a young shoot might tenderly break through. An emissary from a world we do not yet know.”

“Death needs a new cosmology. Death is not a black hole where things cease to be. If you want to live well, keep death close. Hope includes hopelessness and grieving is showing gratitude for that which has been lost. What would it be like to treat grief as power? Even our hopelessness as a form of decomposing and falling away that is sacred.”

“The times are urgent, let us slow down.”

I have decided to find myself a home in the mountains, somewhere high up where one learns to live peacefully in the cold and the silence. It’s said that in such a place certain revelations may be discovered. That what the spirit reaches for may be eventually felt, if not exactly understood. Slowly, no doubt. I’m not talking about a vacation.

“I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. […] These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them. That I could find meaning in the intensely personal nature of my life.”

“But then it passed, as all things do.”