about me

What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to man. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth.
—Seathl, Duwamish chief

There is better than here. That is the prerogative of the dispossessed. The dispossessed of whom their 'here' and their home is diminished in relation to their 'there' or neighbor.

What is so characteristic of the dispossessed is that their bodies are not their home. They are strangers to their souls. And the suffocation of this culture is not known to those benumbed of the language to even name the condition.^[1]

As this condition is not something immunological. Perhaps in the lamest meaning of that word. As the condition of the world has been and always will be wild.

To put it one way, the wilderness of the world heals not from cure, solution or a solipsism of fixing but from falling ill. And from disarming so that the arms of the world no longer shape themselves in horror and blood but become vessels of transformation.

Francis Weller spoke it in a more circular way:

"Psyche, however, is not confined to the deep interior of our lives; it overlaps with the wider world and perhaps, in these times, is most evident in the sorrows and suffering of the earth itself. Our personal experiences of loss and suffering are bound inextricably with dying coral reefs, melting polar ice caps, the silencing of language, the collapse of democracy, and the fading of civilization."^[2]

And what I am deeply concerned and in sorrow about is how the dead zones of the world are mirroring in the dead zones of our culture. Those places in our culture where I can feel so flattened, dull, and numb facing others who seem to be flattened enough in an amorphous shape that there is no expression that things could be any other way.

I am sad how I can speak this though I know reclaiming my shape outside of the phantasmagoria of digital, conceptual, and rational identities allows me to touch the wild premise that we are not one thing. Weller put it in a naked way: "The personal and the plantary are inseparable, as is our healing. Loss binds us together in a potent alchemy, confirming the heart's intimacy with all things."^[3]

And from this, I wonder, what is man without its beasts? What is man without the wild imagination that can brew up these potent potentials of hope and potions of rage when what could runs so far from what is? What is man in severence from the very entangled emotions that speak to how we all feel the pain and tremors of this Earth? What is man without its beasts of queerness? Of the longing to diverge the 'ought'-ism of these times? Who are the beasts without a home that welcomes them tenderly?

I wonder and I wonder. And I see that these times call me to return to the sensuous. Of feeling, breathing, and dreaming. Dreaming not in the sense of some other-worldly place. But the dreaming that occurs when the borders between days and dreams collapse. Spiraling, yoyo-ing, and stitching back the heirloom of social fabric nearly forgotten.

"We forget that we are all tangled together in this nest of life, that the air we breathe is shared, as is our water and soil, and that everything is bound together in a seamless web of life. When we forget, we are able to do untold damage to our watersheds, to one another, and to the entire earth."^[3]

That is a soiled premise.

[1]

Wendell Berry characterized this condition in his characteristically charming way:

"There is a fair chance that he will die of suffocation. [...] He does not care much and does not know why he does not care." (20)

Aptly describing the condition where curiousity is lauded yet not the most encouraged by medieval institutions where the forsakened knights and mages of morality shut our interests down in childhood. He then spoke this in reference to how the world specialization has uprooted any sense of grounding in a self-responsibility guardianed by living community and a self-expression mothered in sovereignty and sacred sharing.

"What happens under the rule of specialization is that, though society becomes more and more intricate, it has less and less structure. It becomes more and more organized, but less and less orderly. The community disintegrates because it loses the necessary understandings, forms, and enactments of the relations among materials and processes, principles and actions, ideals and realities, past and present, present and future, men and woman, body and spirit, city and country, civilization and wilderness, growth and decay, life and death—just as the individual character loses the sense of a responsible involvement in these relations." (21)

Which directly speaks to this moment in history where though the world is increasingly becoming more 'globalized', the world also becomes globular and bubble-wrapped in insular, deflated senses of identity. Where we no longer can relate to ourselves are guardians, lovers, and mothers of the Earth but of consumers, destroyers, and things of this Earth. Bodies on this Earth in competition rather than compassion. (Back to text)

[2]

Preface XVI, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, Francis Weller (Back to text)

[3]

Preface XX, Ibid. (Back to text)

[4]

Preface XX, Ibid. (Back to text)

why I write

Changes alters its course in the absence of expectation.

When we are born, we are the change we wish to immediately see. The wailing, protesting, and expressing sensing abilities we have are so fiercely vulnerable.

And through a reciprocal environment, we develop, grow, and feel most fulfilled when attention is shared. When needs are met as feelings are honored.

Many speak of the magic of undivided attention. What could also be considered magic is how change, fully unknown to us, is magical.

And with my experience of writing, expressing change through reflection. Where I am bemused in clarity reading back what I wrote and revealing the mystery that I am and continue to be. I have had this felt sense of grief.

A love for the loss of expressing. With how talk, speech, and writing have been lost their sensuality and authenticity in how we can go about days without expressing what our souls so deeply long for and feel anguish to.

I then realize change diverges expectations from reality enough so that a prarie of clearing can open our mind so wide sometimes our hearts stretch so long we break. Only if there is this brittleness that comes from a paltry, partitioning mind that divides space from time. One from another. Good from the bad. Ugly and the beautiful. And how we can so easily follow the amnesia and anesthesia of this time and forget interdependence. How our inner worlds are so deeply starting to reflect this outer world. Burnout literally expressing how we are burning up all that brings life under the premise of progress.

And how if I connect to the magic of learning and writing, I see that magic is not found by fully comprehending my experience or even by fulling controlling all is within my ability to control but in releasing. In releasing all expectation and diving in a falling in gravity's caress. Pencil kissing paper not because of weight but because of how leaden and dimming it is to not write. To not marry the broken and the beautiful together in sensitivity to how both often compliment each other.

To fully attend to my experience without expecting even something 'new', 'novel' or 'original' knowing how mountain stream, ocean, lake, puddle, and sewage all hold the emergence of life. Emergence that escapes anything time-bound. As Francis Weller put it (and many others): what we are now living through is an absence of the ordinary. And it is up to our choosing to embody that. To alter courses of generations beyond by crossing thresholds in choosing life. To live in reverence to life and the Dark Mother of creation so hidden in our culture.

Is there not such a binding spell in unraveling the mysteries of change? And bleeding the pain of becoming who we so fear by reflecting in tree, ink, and heavy metal? Perhaps not as all things spellbound are not as much binding but breaking, opening, and fissuring.

I resonate deeply with Alex Dawson's longing to write:

Why I Write

Because when I was a girl,
maybe seven or eight,

already so battered by this
life, I realized that a pencil

looks an awful lot like
a witch's wand.

As through writing, I touch the rooted magic of feeling the contour of language in its coarsest quality.