There’s nothing new under the sun,
but there are new suns.
—Octavia E. Butler, from Parable of the Trickster (1)
This is the time of witches, of ancestors, a thinning veil. The heater cracks as I sit in bed. Spirits knock at the windows.
Jancie and I walked by the Lac-de- Deux-Montagnes, outside the small town we went to high school in. The rural life we knew then is picking up its pace. Amidst the maple trees there are now a coffee shop and small brewery. Carly tells me that the town I am staying in is said to be one of the fastest growing places in Canada. Condo buildings are popping up alongside strip malls. Whenever my mom and I get in the car, she points out the “Vendu” (for sale) signs on the edges of large swathes of forest.
“They’re just going to tear it all down,” she says, bitterness and anger twisting around her words.
I’ve been here for two weeks. My phone’s service is slow, and images and videos take minutes to load, if at all. In the morning, I stare at the water. It tells me the temperature without me needing to go outside. This morning it is a flat grey, slowly moving towards the lake’s rocky edges. It reveals the ice that will soon cover its surface.
I’m five months out of school, and thirty years old. Aside from poetry performances and some art sales, I’m unemployed. My mom and I walk the same path by the water, where we look for animals that live in the patches of trees. She points to a grouping of reeds. Their white tips flutter in the slight wind. “Aren’t they beautiful?,” she asks. “A rabbit lives in there. It’s for sale. I hope they don’t tear it all down.”
I consider the direction of my life. It feels that I am at an impasse. Will I continue down the non-traditional path I’ve been making for myself, or will I seek a new way? Waking up at 4 am to anxious thoughts, I consider whether or not what I’ve invested my time into over the years has been a worthy endeavor. I hear the news of high school friends who own property, have children, are married, and are several years into a career. I can’t help but compare myself.
In the morning, I wake up and journal. I write out my gratitude for the directions I’ve stepped in since graduation—a new book of poems, performances at venues I have long admired, peer recognition. And I also wonder, Where will I go next? How will I make my life sustainable money-wise? Can I continue this path I am on, or shall I find a new one? Who am I?
I remember myself when I remember how many times I have been here before: stuck in the questions, afraid of them, looking for paths towards in dualities and binaries.
I am an artist, poet, and writer. What does it mean to live in these roles? If my words, at least, cannot present creative openings for my own life, and look for paths that expand beyond binaristic thinking, what are they for?
I walk with my mom and see deep-set myths work their way even into personal relationships. The past sits between us. We drive past homes we used to live in, noting the apartment buildings that have sprouted up around them, and the shrinking forest. We gnaw at old hurts, and push our elbows against them. In these cobwebbed narratives, I am irresponsible, naive, and overly sensitive. How do we let go of the personal and cultural myths that encrust us?
Ram Dass, a frequent teacher of mine, said, in a podcast episode of “Ram Dass Here and Now, (2)
“We get so busy being real—afraid of death, needing, accomplishing, solving the world’s problems, doing something about something. And because we are stuck in such a reactive mode all the time, we tune out the wisdom that we as human beings have accessible to us as part of our lineage. Because we’re so busy trying to know the answers.”
These words become increasingly complicated when considering this moment in time. A genocide is taking place in Palestine, there are conflicts in the Congo, and Sudan. How can we not be in a reactive mode? We are overcome by accounts of suffering, and our hearts break. We desire change. How can we not want to “do something about something?” As a U.S. citizen, I am aware the government has long used my taxes to fund violence abroad. I am aware that my taxes are funding the IDF. I am aware that the U.S. military is a massive polluter. How can we not repeat the question, Why?, though the answers fall flat emotionally?
I consider a quote from Ana’s newsletter, “Sporadic Clarity” in which she spoke of the Palestinian psychologist Samar Jabr (she notes: “one of the few Palestinian psychologists in existence”) who said “that the very idea of being “post” trauma is not only a western concept but an incredible privilege. That the Palestinian people had never know a life where they weren’t being terrorized, a life in which their amygdalas and prefrontal cortexes weren’t reacting to their immediate realities.” (3)
Anger can be righteous. I cannot speak in abstraction—the anger against settler occupation and genocide is righteous to me. To desire and call for change, to want to do something, is a way of living in the world. We are of the world, and it asks us not to turn away from it, but towards it. To hold and live with its complexities.
I see how our times are urgent. Palestinians are asking people to speak about them. Bombs are being dropped right now.
And, I see how living in a constant sense of urgency is a way to further brutalise people. To keep them from doing the work of dreaming, long-term planning, and building deep solutions. How can one dream when bombs are being dropped around them? How can one dream when caught in very real grief? My heart aches for the Palestinians wondering if they will wake up tomorrow, for the Israelis killed by Hamas, for those lost.
I feel in my heart the brutality that everyday people and the land continue to face. The violence that occurs in the immediate through genocide and bombs being dropped. The violence that occurs in the long-term, the trauma that lives on in peoples’ bodies, the trauma that seems to have no end.
To believe in a different world is to dream beyond the circumstances in which we see. Narrative is a powerful tool, and we have been sold on so many lies. The language of power does not make room for contradictions or nuance. It says: If you want the bombing in Palestine to end, you are an Anti-Semite. It says: If you express care for the Palestinians, you do not care about the Jewish people killed in this conflict. It does not allow for the complexities which do not condone the killing of people on any level, recognizes the context and sustained violence of the settler project that is Israel, and speaks against Anti-semitism and Islamophobia. But we can hold complexities.
I am an artist, and to be in this role means to feel deeply, and live into contradictions. It is to resist truth when presented in seemingly easy, quick narratives, and instead to ask: Who does this benefit? It is to resist the language of power and binaries, which insists that one entire group of people is Good, while another is Bad. It is to dream of other ways, and write them into the world. I speak the truth of my own life—I unravel it through writing—and through this I learn deeper about how to be in the world. I am speaking from the heart.
If there is a way to live through, and amongst, hopelessness—we are finding it. If there are ways to live in deep unknowing, to speak truth into power, to embody new ways of being—we are finding them.
As I sift through the roles I play in my own relationships—one of them being the role of being overly idealistic—I am recognizing and celebrating the power of sensitivity and feeling. It is not unworthy work to feel and dream. It is necessary work. I refuse to accept mass death as a “casualty of war.” I refuse to not mourn, or to feel connected to death wherever it may be. I will feel these things in their complexities and pain. I will not stop dreaming.
A prayer: May the bombs stop falling. May the money from taxes go to systems which feed us, enrich our hearts, and provide shelter, medicine, and food. May the land be revered and respected. May all people be free. May Palestine be free.
Sources:
Octavia E. Butler Parable of the Trickster
Ram Dass Here and Now
Ana Woulfe/Deeper Clarity, deeperclarity.net
Further
If you’re in the U.S., 5 Calls makes calling your representatives quick and helpful. From what I’ve learned, calling is a numbers game—meaning, the more number of calls the better, rather than the length of the message on the call. https://5calls.org
Singing: Devendra Banhart’s “Heard Somebody Say”
Here’s what we believe
It’s simple, we don’t want to kill
It’s simple, we don’t want to kill
Reading: Giselle Buchanan’s newsletter “We Need Your New Visions.”
The role of the Artist is to bring visions of possibility to the collective.
Spending time with my 98 year old grandma, walking by the lake, moving my body, taking photos of plants I don’t know in the forest.
Questions I am chewing on:
How do we unravel the myths disempower us and others, in the daily details of our lives and in society? How do we parse through the language of power and see how it is used as tools for maintaining and seizing power? How do we see, develop, feed, and create personal and collective narratives which empower us? How do we use language as a tool for shaping change—for being specific in what we desire and embodying alternate ways of being—while also taking tangible steps of action?
Merch
“If there is a way to live through, and amongst, hopelessness—we are finding it.” I will be thinking of this for a long time. Thank you.
This hit me hard:
“A prayer: May the bombs stop falling. May the money from taxes go to systems which feed us, enrich our hearts, and provide shelter, medicine, and food. May the land be revered and respected. May all people be free. May Palestine be free.”