On this blue evening, both an expression of the blue-d hue of the my room reflecting the sky's tone and the somber sorrow of my unmet needs for connection in my own community, I reflect into this website and what I express on here.
As though I may speak to the ghouls of myself—the ghastly reawakened and tenderized only by tapping into the unsayable—and helping them integrate into me. To widen my small self. I feel as though this website can be a trap.
A trap rather than a cradling hospital that hospices those alive-yet-dead parts of myself internalized as the cycles of isolation, disconnect, and disorientation from this collapsing system we find ourselves in today.[1]
Because right now, I am feeling between the disconnect between the imagination of what I write about and as and the patched realities of which I expressed. Both those parts of myself so paved over by modernity and the wild sweetgrass that still remains, longing for my attention and care, as our systems institute forms of eco-cide and murder under the misnomer of 'lawn-care'.
And this reflection of this website being a trap was so spurred and contributed to by a random Internet escapade when I came across a CrimethInc. zine, This zine which only appeared in my web-crawling as it was named Self as Other : Reflections on Self-Care and I was searching for an essay my friend wrote by a similar name, hence the query: "Self as Other". In one of its passages there is an expression that I so deeply resonated with:
Like many survivors, I can isolate myself while engaging in the stereotypes of self-care. I may look brave or even enlightened as I take up yoga or running, write glowing reviews of books on self-acceptance, and channel my emotions into elaborate art projects and self-revealing blog posts. This form of self-care can feel less like liberation and more like solitary confinement. Sometimes what I actually need is someone to show up at my house with take-out, sit there while I pick at my food, stay with me until I’m falling asleep sitting up on the couch, and then send me to bed and tuck the blankets around me. Occasionally that happens without my asking. And sometimes I have to bravely reach out and alert someone that I need to talk, or cry, or most of all just not be alone. There are times when not insisting on taking care of myself is the most radical form of self-care I can practice.[2]
So, I may seem brave or enlightened or grounded, taking up the action of writing what I write and sharing what speaks to me. Though, I also recognize how my expressing here nourishes my needs of expression and stoke the flames to keep those parts of myself alive. So, I come to this realizing that I can also be participating in the stereotypes of self-care. Of that academic back-breaking, spine-shattering endeavor of speaking about things yet having no skin in the game. No skin in contact with life's friction. And no vulnerability to being hurt, harmed or even affected because words, theories, and ideas can so abstract life into categories to formulate, postulate, and basically mock. In our unfortunate crypsis to be this mockingbird that mimics the life of others though speaking about them rather than to them or the people directly near to us.
I can call out practices of the commodification of the world, yet I still run the risky practice of creating the proverbial jack-in-the-box—truth wrapped in the play of inaction and commentary. As commentary, the subscripting of events, is so attractive in a world of filled with flimsy appearance and gossip. Since we can speak about troubles without embodying the same trouble that could actually address the wound. To be in that painful place, witnessing violence, and being able to disarm the many sides of the Cerberus created.
As we are leaving the bygone times of self, other, and mediator, as we are transitioning into some a little more mysterious. We are collapsing our identities that have so separated ourselves to the world. And we are unfolding the origami that has so contracted ourselves in folds of disorientation.
So, I wonder, how can I de-stereo my listening from the frequency of the familiar and performative?[3] And to listening in intimately into the deep oceanic conveyor belt of life that connects us all yet is so deep yet present that it travels our oceans hidden from the people of the land. The very people who had once emerged from that ocean—ocean as mother as we were born from it (*perhaps even as it—the ocean recently emerged as oceanic land-becomings).
As transformation takes place at the pace of the Earth's own movement—that magmatic flow of its core. We are most moved at plates tectonic, as the Earth's works of pottery, so shaped by the convergence, divergence, and tensions between the continental plates have so served us this split unity. Where we have these lands that have arisen from the depths that so speak to the abundance we often take for granted: the ocean that provided to us as the foundations of our life.
As Kaza Haga once observed, change does not happen at the stage of political curtains being pulled or the ticking of the time that so pressures us but true transformation takes place only in marriage to presence. Being fully there, unsuspecting that "change" is even possible as we start to embody change itself. We transform and shed our tears and tears for how much loss we have faced in the worn social fabric. This garment that no longer speaks to our culture but to our woven separation to each other and the land that we live.
And I want to reflect: I may speak to these unsayable things—my dreams, hopes, and desires etched in this constellation of safety in the enclosed space of my skull and this website, though it may not reach to the edge of practice and action. As it is so easeful and comfortable to be in this solitude, as I find no loneliness there, yet as Kazu Haga and many others also once recognized and said: all transformation and transmutation happens only in relationship. And though I have found sensuous belonging and companionship within myself, I still want to fiercely live out the change I want to see in the world. To embody the nursing gentleness that acts as balm to the convictional, stern unhospitable ways we so bomb this Earth with.
As I am realizing through the practice of writing and creating, it's so comfortable and easeful to consume what we are given, then to create and give birth to parts of myself so in touch with life. Given how I need to both hospice the parts of myself dying, in collapse, and to midwife those parts of myself in the process of emerging through the shattered cracks of my old identity.
And to kite back to the fragility of myself, I am going to be more aware of how I may exit the wound by writing about it, rather than feeling it so deeply that it simply spills from my expressions. As I become that bleeding place. And I want to explore: what would to mean to care for oneself outside of the paradigms of the closed container and the boxes placed where healing can occur? How can I act as the box-cutter and be the trouble that is so needed in the violence in the appearance of peace. And to perforate those spaces of the Procrustean to honor the crustaceous desire to release the shells of protective, knowing that I am willing to be hurt. By how I no longer feel that donut-y hole in the presence of conflict—as there is a hidden wholeness underneath the illusions of sacrifice, gain, and loss.
A hidden key when the locks of tension may be so blinding... I so long to know that key as I know the unlocking only happens when fully in touch with my heart. Fully in touch with the tension in presence that I once so lacked in my own life.
- [1]
- I do not say 'our' systems because who would want to be in possession to something in collapse? We do not 'own' our systems as we are one part in its whole matrix of function, yet that is not to say we are not responsibility. As there is this illusion that we need ownership, an expression of both fear and slavery, in order to bestow responsibility. Yet if we look to where ownership is now expressed: how we have a body rather than us being bodies, we can peer into the disconnect that ownership has on any healthy relationship. (Back to text)
- [2]
- "Self as Other: Reflections on Self-Care." CrimethInc., 2013. https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/zines/self-as-other/self-as-other_screen_single_page_view.pdf. (Back to text)
- [3]
- Something that is so in touch with social media's jest towards how we have lost our lives in a drama—a performance in the plastic and superficial rather than an enlivening rapture with what is truly intimate. As social media self-mocks with its post-ironic expressions of "performative" peoples yet forgetting how social media has commercialized the idea of the performative. And that posting on their platforms expresses that trauma of performance through likes, comments, and shares. (Back to text)