Category: earthling

On Sanctuary

With June Jordan.

When the visionary told you, Man is not a tree, you took note. The punchline had to do with the whole country up and moving every few years. Out of one town, into another––given the means, which were a significant factor. You considered reasons. Why the impulse to cut and run; to fly, stop, land?

Meanwhile, you could not––would not, stop thinking of the child who couldn’t flee, who didn’t make it. You refused coexistence with the mental calculations that allowed the peace of some to be secured by the occupation of others.

It is a fundamental need, you said, basic as shelter, food. For sanctuary, you said. Because man is not a tree.

***

Adapted from June Jordan’s 1989 essay, “Finding the Way Home.”

Correction

By the resident oracle.

Some days it looks like a litany of minor losses––keys, money, what passed for discipline; traffic and burnt popcorn, and the pain at the temples only calls to mind other pains, and the only words that come when you call are all wrong, and too late, dressed for some other occasion, unknown. 

And then comes the cat, unbidden, winding her eloquent tail across your face and back again like a wiper blade in the rain, to remind you, with the calm focus that can only be acquired by one who has just risen from the day’s tenth nap, that you are once again missing the joke.

Bonus Post: Inaugural Video

Notes for travelers in uncertain times.

Hi friends. I am trying a new thing. Often as I do these daily posts, something emerges that tells me it is part of another thing. When this one came up, I decided it was “The Unknowing Project.” Here’s an early iteration. As 2023 unfolds, I intend to do a few more. With love, Stacey.

Storm Photo by Anandu Vinod on Unsplash/ Score: “Alice in Winter”by Azure Instrumental via Soundstripe.

Dear Creatures

For our moments of silence.

We remember. Despite some apparent determination to forget. How you were the first circles surrounding our centers. Oracles, you carried messages, promises. You offered invitations. When we wondered about living, and how––and we were always wondering, you offered by example, some possibilities. Like this, you said, and this. There were so many ways. You embodied each fully, without hesitation. Only when we dared to return your gaze could we know ourselves. We were silent before the mystery of you, and you carried our secrets.

You had your holes and your nests, but we hardly knew where to rest our heads. You leant your bodies to our metaphors, our art. Some say you gave your blood, saying paint. You knew we needed symbols to live. 

We painted and dreamed with your bodies, but one day, one of us got carried away by the power of the symbol in his hand and forgot what he was. He went around in darkness, chanting “I am soul! Soul!” and “Let there be light!” I don’t need to tell you what he thought he was. He thought he had arrived by his words. But we had only ever known you in our silences.

***

Inspired by John Berger’s Why Look at Animals? (1977) in About Looking. And other creatures.

We the Unclean

Singing lessons with dirt.

After we saw that having was out of the question––as in, anything in our possession, including accomplishment, it eventually became clear that none of us would be clever enough, quick enough, or hard-working enough to be the brilliant exception.

At the school of roots, we learned of purity, that it was possible under certain conditions. We learned the conditions, but the dirt kept on.

We played in it, laughing with the unclean birds above us and their songs called us out.

Reverb

Congregation of avatars.

The winged woman sang our songs and told us our stories. When she called, we were waiting to answer, and our voices were unlike we had ever imagined they could sound. We were butterflies, manta rays, fish––circling her in this song. Everything sacred was what we could touch and witness with our own eyes, and none of us could bear to look away. We looked at her. Singing, we beheld one another in that space, in that light, in the place where she called us together, and no one wanted to leave.

***

Inspired by this article.

Space to Dance

After the sorting.

The mirror world seems dangerous, you observed. You went in anyway. Some creatures are carried by feeling. Later you made decisions. Such as, breathe when needed. Later, you thought, something needs to be done. About these masks and their attendant griefs. You began to sort through them. It became clear in the sorting, which of these you could leave behind. 

Someone asked what you were doing. You said, making room. To see something new, you would need more space. To dance fully inside it, you would need to put down what you carried. Of the dance, you said, it feels a lot like falling.

***

Inspired by the art of Pace Taylor. Italicized phrases are adapted from titles of the artist’s work.

Inheritance

In the land of time and space.

There are those who are so much time, who live primarily by movements through and in and around space. Then there are those who are full of space, whose movements are through and in and around time. Each group has a special way of ordering and knowing the fluctuations of the other. Each is friend, antagonist, and carrier to the other. In their constantly shifting dynamic, these groups are inseparable. 

Watch the tree. She marks time in her rings and by the turn and fall of her leaves. The fruits of her body are eaten and carried, stored, and adopted by those who move into and around and through her. They know themselves by these movements and she knows herself by holding them. Notice the wind, whose very being is movement, singing his force through her branches, stretching her sway to his song.

We, the children of Time and Space, are the natural carriers of both traits, and the flux between them plays out within and between us. Now we are winds, now trees; here like a bird, here like the whale, here like the ocean floor, the bed of the lake, where the embryonic futures of our spaces settle until hatching from the cells that hold them still before the swimming.

Flower-Headed Children

Swimming through the ruins.

She told us that we wouldn’t be arriving anywhere until we stopped marking time. Okay, we said, but when? Laughing, she grew. The more porous she became, the more easily we could swim through the spaces she filled.

When the land came apart, we carried the rubble in truck beds. We had to pile it somewhere. The pile became an altar.

To what? Becoming, we hoped. Something we couldn’t see. It was made of our lost parts, broken bits, and the way that we could be each other’s angels, showing up at our ruins. We slept sometimes among the rubble. No one noticed.

She loved a good play. Among actors, she told us, they call an entrance the time needed for one character to join the others on stage. But what about you? We wondered, swimming back and forth through the holes she made for us. She laughed again, and we spewed from her pores, back into one another and the wreck.

***

The title comes from an exhibit by Jaishri Abichandani.

Lessons in Looking

The shape of a vessel.

There are worse things than realizing your inward destitution, she said. Such as not knowing it. Take a good look at your own insignificance, she said. In the center you’ll see a tiny seed. And what is that, but the beginning of joy? 

It’s too bad you are utterly useless, she said. But if you sit a minute with the horror of this, you might just find a rich kind of peace. I mean, at least now you know it, and can move onto the real stuff.

Nobody expects the soul’s poverty to be its only fortune, she told us, but there it is anyway, and only by understanding this utter emptiness can anybody begin to hold anything worthwhile.