Old Growth ++ AMENDMENT

 

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Depression has been a part of my life for a long time. There have been moments of deep despair and loneliness, fueled by shame and self-contempt, grown up through an emotional isolation and physical separation from land and culture and kin…a missing-of belonging-to. I know in my heart that I am part in a lineage of people who have been in intimate relationship to place and ways of being, rooted in reciprocity and inter-dependence, and that the long history of colonization has separated us from this, as it has and continues to for Indigenous and Black People in this country.

My depression is not separate from time or from place. 

I feel it to be a longing to belong again, to something much deeper than this world and all the imposed ideas of supremacy and duality and war I have been taught to accept from childhood on in so many different ways. In me shame has developed into depression - shame of not belonging to a culture connected to Land, of being the beneficiary of systemic violence, of being without a long story. Untangling from this shame, and the idea's and systems of oppression, has become a deeply healing work for me - reckoning with my history here and these feelings of un-belongingness...as so much of the sadness in me I deeply feel is connected to the unreckoned with experiences of my ancestors being committers, and witnesses, of violence over the centuries, as well as being victims of targeted dispossession and land theft in the old country's (that led us here to become complicit in the same against others).

My depression is not separate from other people’s pain. 

I will never know what it is like to be Black in america, but I feel the tightness in my stomach every time a police officer is acquitted of murdering a person of color, or a trans gender person, or anyone this death culture of white supremacy deems in any moment as “other”. Depression has parts of empathy in it, I feel it. For those who are sensitive and embody the energies of violence and loss and destruction unfolding around the planet, disassociation and other numbing practices become mechanisms to cope and just get by…but at much expense to the spirit, and to a collective liberation.

Depression, I am coming to know, rather as a tough-love-kind-of invitation to make room for the wonder and mystery and play that I, as a child, was shaped by, and am shaped by still…to not move away from the darkness, away from that right-now unknown, but with trust and a longing to live in right relationship, to lean in closer to it. And in so doing re-member the things that have been taken away from us collectively, and begin to work in support to reclaim them.

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Old Growth

-------Old Growth-------

 

The darkness did not come into my life,

but rose up through

when I began to stray from magic.

 

Mystery and wonder and play

taught away

by a colonizer's education.

 

There was no room for loneliness

in the old growth forest 

of a child's mind

 

All the light was used for lovely things

like make believe

and flowers.

 

Despair has tried 

to cut me down,

turn my dreams to lumber

 

But this tree 

has roots much deeper 

than I thought

 

And stories

before conquest

to re-member.

 

And so I have chosen

not to look away

or turn my back upon the darkness

 

But acknowledge it as invitation

to lean in

closer toward the light.

 

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Toward the Obscure ++ AMENDMENT

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I am queer. I have come, more recently, to know this. queer as different, curious, brave. queer as revolt.

When, around adolescence, I learned to measure difference – to quantify one’s acceptance in society by how far or close one was to the white, cis, heterosexual, able-bodied, god-fearing, business class norm (the “naturalized notions of white amerika), rather than continue to see the difference within and between everyone as beautiful, as creation – I began to stray from magic.

Complicity to the extraction of this Earth - of water, land, mineral, forest, soil – and the exploitation of our human and more-than-human siblings, follows not far behind this leaving of home.

It is not our fault, though, this straying from magic. The forces behind it are built into the systems erected around us, kneeded into our muscle and bone. It’s been like this since the European owning class stacked stones around the Commons and began the paradigm of private property and ownership.

But I do believe, beyond the greed and disassociation of the capitalist mind, deeper than the loneliness, there is still the child, there is home, there is the courage that lets us see all life in its brilliance and the love to take down the walls put up in its way.

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Care Work ++ AMENDMENT

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Conflict – as an energy between and within bodies - I believe, can be a chance to grow…without tension there would be no art or revolution (creativity as imaginative objection to normalcy), no gardens (“but where else than the grocery would we get our food!”), no asking of questions, no gravity, no seasons.

Disagreement should not close doors – it should pull us closer. Discomfort cannot continue to hold some in denial while some are held in prisons – it can, though, be used to re-member our inter-connectedness to all life, and dismantle what is keeping us separate.

How much of conflict avoidance is rooted in a fear of change and not knowing, and how much of this is rooted in the fear of death? How we treat ourselves is mirrored in how we treat each other and how we treat our mother the Earth.

To love is to pour corn syrup into the gas tanks of excavators. To love is to call in our comrades and commit to changing learned patterns of harm. To love is to let parts of us die and trust that death is just a beginning - a Spring. To love is to plant seeds, and to listen.

Loving is to pay attention.

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Time to Grow ++ AMENDMENT

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There is a generative, love-filled rage moving within me right now…a deep having-to-say-something need to call in the so-called “fragility” pattern of behavior – or the tendency of people positioned in privileged and systemically advantaged ways to disassociate from others pain (and our shame) to a point of avoiding, and outright rejecting, conversations and movements toward the establishment of human rights for every person. 

As one who is seen by society and the state as white, as male bodied, it can be hard to stand up to the ideas and institutions that give me false power over other humans and more-than-human beings, and challenge all the so-called privileges I receive - many of which shouldn’t be privileges at all, but basic human rights. 

It’s hard to bite the hand that feeds us, but when it is the same hand that has taken us all from Common lands and lifeways that have truly fed us for thousands of years, its in our mutual interest to bite until the hand can no longer hold the spiritually depleted “food” it pushes on us and finally removes its grip from our siblings necks. My life, as a person made "white" over centuries of colonization and conquest, depends on this - on racial justice, on Indigenous Sovereignty, on Black Liberation  – for the system that targets Black and Indigenous and poor and trans gender bodies, is the same system cutting down old growth forests, genetically engineering seeds, poising water, our children and grandchildren. Anti-white supremacy does not mean anti-white people. Just as saying that Patriarchy, and the objectification of women, queer and trans gender people is wrong, does not mean it is wrong to be a man. This is about a system – not about the people trapped in it. Challenging the ideas and institutions of supremacy is an opportunity, and an offering, for us all to get free.

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Time to Grow

 

-------Time to Grow-------

 

Rejecting the idea 

turned institution 

of supremacy

 

Is not rejecting 

the person

it claims to be supreme.

 

I am done with shame.

 

This is not serving anybody,

or anything, 

but empire.

 

I am done believing that I,

inherently beautiful human,

could be inherently wrong.

 

I am done

being used

by the oppressor.

 

It is time to grow up.

 

Time 

to acknowledge the harm

and change it.

 

To let go 

this over-ripened fruit

of complicity

 

So it may recompose

back into earth,

into new life

 

Remembering the dreams,

the love

and possibility

 

That all 

convey 

within.

 

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First the Stone

 

-------First the Stone-------

 

Illness of the mind

is not on us

to blame

 

This is

our body

but not our shame.

 

We are shaped

sometimes twisted

upside down

 

By what happens

to us

and around.

 

The burdens

are not ours

to hold alone

 

We are the sculpture

but first

the stone.

 

For within all 

the pain

and hurt

 

There is 

a person

of infinite worth.

 

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Toward the Obscure

 -------Toward the Obscure-------

There is a loneliness 

in the heart 

of normalcy

A learned-fear 

of change

and anyone a little different.

So I tend 

toward 

the obscure

To the edges and strange

where life 

abounds

And the forests 

meet 

the fields.

We are not alone, Young Blood,

for we are the many,

we are the queer,

The change-makers and children

of this 

kind Earth

Letting go

of what does not

serve us

So that everyone

can get

free.

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