Tag: becoming

Updraft

Passenger notes at dawn.

An atmospheric river pours dreams through the night, drenching our words and pooling at our feet. One takes us in its boat, drops us, picks us up again, evades us in its thrall and escapes upon waking. We spend so much of each ride asking how it will end, and will it? And what if it won’t? Until we end up beginning again.

When the end escapes us, where are we? Climbing through spirals of remembrance, children at a playground, one and another occasionally stuck, fallen, left out, carried away. The arrangement shifts constantly, like mountain weather.

From here, we cut swaths of sky for new wings. Once lifted, we rain intentions into our shadows, raising the tides against the impact of the next one to drop from these clouds.

Becoming Unbecoming

Undoing: an anti-manifesto.

In the spirit of helping, we began to work together, and in the process, unmade ourselves. Now we live in a hall of mirrors of our own creation, accompanied by nightmares and jokes. Some of these are our creation, others not, but there are no guards at the door. There are no doors either, so you get all kinds.

Don’t walk through here barefoot. There are shards of utopias all over the floor. If you look at certain times of day, the light playing in these is a wonder to behold. 

If there are any unbroken ones out there, you can keep them. Heroes, too. We are done with all of that. Keep your mastery, your individual agency, your sense of your own significance. In our madness, we think human beings would be a good idea.

Let us play. The game is you are not yet and neither here nor there. The game is care. The game is adapt. The game is laugh. Let us begin. Begin by stopping right here.

***

Inspired by, and with borrowed phrases from, the opening of Hyposubjects: Becoming Human, by Timothy Morton and Dominic Boyer.

A Joyful Noise

The transformation of silence.

How to speak, that what would live may live,

even if bruised. Even if misunderstood.

Death will come anyway, with its final

silence. Why rush its hand?

If fear is here anyway, let us use it. Your

silence will not protect you. There is

love here, even in war. And company,

in the refusal to swallow a tyranny 

of silence, the refusal to comply

in becoming the next casualty.

In becoming, may we live visibly

to speak, share, spread life

creative and continuing

in growth,

to find 

the others.

***

Inspired by Audre Lorde’s “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” from Sister Outsider. Italicized phrases are Lorde’s. 

Listen, Jonah

From inside this whale.

Let me take it back, what I once said about the flesh, before I felt the teeth of this machine. Now I say, give it back, my breath, a firstborn placenta, let me bury it. Don’t touch, I say now, but the cameras are everywhere, groping.

Now an overhead voice like an airport announcement, what do you think you are doing? Anything unattended in the age of terror will be removed by airport security. What do you think you are? What does it mean, in at this point, to answer back? 

I’m keeping the body, take my voice. Watch the tent as it tears, this is the belly of the whale.

Kick, Jonah. Do you think this is time around us, and was it here before now?  Let tired vows disappear by this remaking while another womb confronts us, an old beginning.