walking w/ destruction

: Wisdom of serpent be thine, 

  Wisdom of raven be thine, 

  Wisdom of valiant eagle. 

   Voice of swan be thine, 

   Voice of honey be thine, 

   Voice of the sun of the stars. 

   ~ Scottish Gaelic Blessing ~

Having just taken a walk in the woods near my house,
tracing the marks in the snow left by tiny paws, medium-sized hooves,
I sit down to write, hesitating, not knowing where the writing will come from today.

I have been contemplating this relationship between writing and walking, as inspired by my writing & performance class with gesel & julia.

In class last week, we spoke of a "slippage" (very close to the word 'slip' which has recently crossed my path in the learning of how to make clay coil pots), that occurs when one walks and then writes, instead of writing while walking, or the : after-effect. The effect of the walking felt in the body while one is writing. I was reminded a lot of rituals I have done with CA, learning how to write and be suspended, for example, at the same time. This kind of writing, is most always chaotic : and emergent (revealing something of myself that I had not previously known, a water snake making its way up from the depths where the darkest relief dwells)

Perhaps this writing is coming from the after-taste of my walk in the woods. I feel it, now, coming from my sit-bones. I feel it now, coming from a subtle weight, and a cry? Always a tenderness of hearts. How I hear (and feel) the ultimate forces of destruction swirling around in the collective field at all times. Whether it is self-destruction, inter-personal & social destruction, destroying the environments that hold us. Humans (some) are hell-bent and rather addicted to a destructive rage, I would say.

I want to make a walk about destruction. I had a dream about doing a walk in a landfill / mining facility. I wonder what it would be like. It is with deepest sorrow and calculated curiosity that I continue to track how so many extractive industry sites are built upon sacred sites deemed sacred by the indigenous folks of the land.

I have written on the front page of a book I am reading: in order to work w/ place, we work w/ memory. Memory: the fluid, slippery, and very real poetry of my life's work. I am here to hold and track a historical memory. bell hooks quotes baldwin when she says: "people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them" (representations of whiteness in the black imagination, belonging, p. 99). this vibrates with other threads in me : trauma, story, earth , memory. what are the liberatory practices of holding, housing, and releasing memory? how do we allow for the rivers of history to move through us, fully acknowledged and awake, slow & steady steps toward repair? what is culture? what is home?

As my mind houses questions (as it should), I hold a fierce and steady knowing in my gut. This knowing erupts from the one in me who has been grieving this past week. Grieving a past he didn't know he had. Grieving a future that will never be his, fully. I have come to know, more completely, the one in me who I call Mars. Who is an expression of what Zhenzan Dao refers to as the "true yang": a piercing out cry, why have you forsaken me? The moment of ultimate commitment and a choosing to stay in the hope-less-ness. A decision to stay with the suffering and feel it ravage and re-new you. Oh. Gentle child. He has so much feeling. Completely uprooting the mainstream patriarchal binary gender restriction that says "men do not feel as much as women", because the man in me is the one who feels the most.

Fierce & fluid, I am. And always will be.

Wildness that no longer cages itself upon spectrums but instead speaks to the mystery of one hundred penises, four thousand vaginas, androgynous eyes, breasts, hormones, and chest hairs. every possible combination of genitalia & experience of gender, this is what I evoke and give permission to.

Wildness that meets itself in wildness. Wildness that honors, respects, and complexifies. Wildness that knows full-soul-expression.

 “[t]here are some people who are so magical that we break reality. Rules don’t apply to us the same way, and the laws of the universe warp like mirages in the heat of the intensity of us. … 

[We] are alien in a world that won’t believe in us. We are mythic.” 

~ Seb Barnett (2016)