Im looking out a dirty window wearing a big jacket. The space heater in my studio is making an almost inaudible noise. Here I am, moments after an argument with my partner. It was that kind of disagreement that feels like you can push play and watch it spool out.
It is the kind of argument of this moment of life: work, caring for children, little time and even less energy. It is the kind of argument that goes from tired to tired.
It is the kind that I feel just about to erupt under the surface. It is the kind I mostly have with myself. I feel it like a gentle ripping that once it gets going can open up to include many aspects of life.
I write about this today because it is present, alive, and real. And also because I think this moment is impossible many ways and it’s not our individual fault. A few weeks ago I wrote about collective care, about how we conceptualize difference, about imagining suffering and its’ severity as our responsibility as well as our gift as a collective species.
So back to the argument, I’ve heard that we are herd animals, that we have and do live best together. Images of children being passed around by safe, caring adults. Cooking responsibilities shared amongst many hands. Intergenerational weaving together of care.
I think that as a person, I’ve been lucky. I have been in this kind of community occasionally, there is some kind of cadence to it, I’ve found it mostly organized by a powerhouse matriarch whose orbit is intricately woven and maintained. When invited into this, wow, it’s amazing. Babies, generous food, jobs to do, a sense of how to be right in the world.
There is definitely some magic to it. Alongside a lot of hard work and negotiation.
But for today and I’d guess many of you also fall in this camp, that situation is not the one you live in. And I am curious if we can try something else…I wonder as we recognize the humility of living under many overlapping systems of oppression if we can also feel what that holding feels like as people who live here on the earth with all the other beings. Can we be held, energized, and encouraged by more than humans?
I’d like to play with the experiment of noticing gravity as expertly holding my children between earth and sky,
I’m curious about about how when my porous but also hydrophobic skin gets wet it lets in the right amount of water it needs.
I’m hungry and enlivened by witnessing the birds as the argument I participate in goes on inside. What songs are they singing in response? What do they need to tell each other about our disagreements?
Now don’t get me wrong, I think much of the tension and lack of the moment personally and collectively is created by humans for humans in exploitative systems leaving us disoriented and in need. But I also think our imaginations are incredible tools, and even if we don’t feel held by our belonging as earthbound people, could we imagine it? What would that feel like?
—
Reading:
Sorrowland: speculative fiction about: black power, mycelial expansion, all the kinds of love, place and place and place, and the roundness of time
Listening:
mostly to winter
and also back to Japanese Breakfast in the early evening
Doing:
writing a new chapbook with the miraculous cohort at Poetry Forge, through A Body of Work