-------Springtime in the Mountains-------
The
cedar trees are dancing
to
birdsong
and
with the wind
As
springtime
unfolds
in
the mountains.
Today
I am reminded
to
the magnificence
of
imagination
How
the seed
who
in
autumn fell
Now
manifests
the
dream.
It
is hard to be hopeless
or
to not think
in
poem
When
all around
the
small green leaves
of
this kind Earth
Begin
to
slowly
open.
-------
-------Hush Money-------
Race
is a construct
made
up
by
the
oppressor
A
strategy
to
conquer
by
erasure and by
division.
First
he
takes the land
and
the stories
that
grow with it
Then
incarcerates
with
wages
and
walls
around
the Common.
Whiteness,
white people,
we
must know as hush money
paid
to us
by
the elite
A
transaction
of
privilege
for
passivity
in
the face of exploit.
Burn
it
I
say.
And
remember
the
seed within,
For
indifference
is
not worth the letting go
of
who
we
truly are.
-------
-------Logger-------
It
is easy
to
blame a logger
for
the felling of the forest
For
they
are
the ones we see
Chainsaw
to
the
tree.
It
is easy
to
blame
And
float
along
the
surface
But
less so maybe
to
look a little deeper
And
interrogate
the
wage
itself,
The
profiteer
and
profit,
The
wooden framing
of
one's
home.
Few
are not complicit
in
the felling of the forest
So
before
we
blame
another
Let
us look
within
ourselves
Then
turn and face the system
that
puts people
after
wealth.
-------
-------Ode to Fannie Lou-------
Complicity complicates
the idea
of freedom
Calling into question
incarceration,
the homestead and borders
As projects
of an occupying
nation.
Is it possible
to be liberated, oneself,
while others remain in chains,
To live unbound from ongoing
conquest
as a settler on
unceded land?
Is it possible
to here belong
and not confront the dis-belonging?
I do not know
or seek
an answer
But question
rather
to disrupt indifference
And make some room
for more
to see
That no one is
until
all are free.
-------
-------Wider Circles-------
Solitude is not escape
nor a means
to hide away
But more akin
to the ripple of
A stone
dropped in
the Sea.
-------
-------
Individuality is spoken of, often praised, by the
puritan-minded patriarchal capitalist, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps
world, as if doing things collectively or asking for help is a weakness. In
this mindview – being so-called “disabled” or mentally ill is also seen as a
weakness. It is rooted in the body as a tool of production.
Capitalism needs labor to extract and materialize
wealth from the natural world. If one is “unable”, or limited, in some way to
participate in the machine, one is often disposed of. Eli Clare talks about
disability not as an individuals “handicap” but as a systemic limitation put on
individuals by the able-bodied supremacy, or ableist world.
Infrastructure, laws and discriminatory beliefs are most
often the limitation to a person who has a physical or cognitive “disability”
from living their lives in self-determined ways - it is not the persons fault,
or on ourselves to blame. To suggest this complicates this country’s ideal that
“all are created equal”…the Creator has created all of us as equal, yes, and
every one brilliantly and beauty-fully unique. It is ideas and systems,
however, that continue to create and institutionalize inequality. Beyond these,
it is liberating to re-member, that no matter what the world makes of us, we
are still and forever the magnificent stone, a being of infinite worth.
-------
-------
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.
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.
-------
