Hey, we're going to meet in an hour, and I wanted to remind you about it, and also send along some quotes that I thought about while reading Theory of Water.

quotes & reflections

The present moment—one of climate catastrophe, of ongoing genocide and Nakba in Gaza, Palestine, of genocides in Sudan and Congo—demands that we direct our dreams and actions towards making worlds that refuse capitalism and dispossession and the spectacular violences required to maintain them.

the land has been hearing the sound of us for a very, very long time. The echo asks the speaker to be confronted with their own self-reflection, between the land and themselves.

Many factors influence sintering: temperature, humidity, time of day, weather, who is using the trail and how. But I think of none of those each morning when I’m on the sled. I think only of this idea: that the first thing a snowflake does when it lands from the skyworld is to join bonds, actual physical bonds, with its neighbours.

Listening to this, I wrote down: "This is where we are. We don’t need to be defensive about anti-fascism, but active, engaged and on the offensive."

And: "Masses of people in rebellion create the crisis."

Sintering in particular has gotten me to think much more deeply about the communities that I'm part of - or that I've fallen into like snow - and that I'm constantly sintering with. What unique connections and fabrics am I weaving together with people around me?

I'm also thinking a lot about optimism, pessimism, and fatalism lately; and I was surprised and relieved to see that this has been on the minds of other authors both in this book and over the decades. I think I spoke to this briefly last week, but I gave a talk about "techno-optimism" and its truly fatalist bearings and fascistic qualities. I'm going to re-read Sintering before we get together to chat, because I feel like I need it right now.

By the way, if you haven't seen Rebecca Belmore's pieces, you can look at an album of images of Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan and also Wave Sound.

I still need to figure out what connection I'm drawing, but I wonder if anyone else is thinking of Settler Militarism by Juliet Nebolon. Really that's all of a thought I currently have.

video chat details

At 12pm ET let's get together¹ and chat about whatever we've read this week. The link to join is here (if that doesn't work, the url is below)

https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom

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supporting The Sameer Project

If you can't buy Theory of Water from the bookstore, please consider making a donation directly to one of the Sameer Project's campaigns, or consider sharing a fundraiser with friends. If you can't do any of that, consider sharing the reading group with some friends; if some of them can buy the book from Open Books, or even make direct donations to The Sameer Project, then that would help enormously.