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

This week I read pieces 6-8:

• "Mappings of the Liminal"
• "Un-mappings Leading to Everywhere and Nowhere"
• "Pinery Road and Concession 11"

Mappings of the Liminal

Over the past twenty years the acceleration of the global climate crisis has not brought about any transformation where global systems have aligned with the existing planetary cycles that create and maintain life on earth. Rather, there has been an intensification of racial capitalism and its hierarchies, violences that see Black, Brown and Indigenous peoples as sacrificial in order to maintain the wealth of a few elite, wealthy white men.

From within this frame, spatial orientation is relational rather than a fixed territory. From inside this orientation, linear time is a ruse. With this orientation, a division between time and space is an artifact of a way of thinking that is a fantasy.

Un-mappings Leading to Everywhere and Nowhere

This morning, at the end of this world, I ask myself what I would give up to bring into being a different world, to change the air, to change everything. I theoretically sort through precious things to see which ideas are brick walls and which are doorways. I think of the snapping turtle’s shell design, and I think about all the maps I’m missing, even though they are right in front of me. The maps all around us. The ones on the backs of turtles.

Pinery Road and Concession 11

The trees are planted close together, in rows, like corn. They are the wrong species for this place. They form a forest that doesn’t have any parents or language because there is only one kind of tree, and they are all the exact same age. There were only children, and they grew up as best they could.

Reading "Mappings of the Liminal" and "Un-mappings Leading to Everywhere and Nowhere", I felt myself suffocating under Simpson's description of the linearity of time. Thinking back stretching years and years, to periods of my life that feel like lifetimes ago, and buckling and suffocating under the weight of a plank of time that's impossibly long, resting on my head. It hurts at this moment to think about the last time I've seen some family members, or to think about what I was working toward or aspiring to 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 years ago.

It hurts much less to think back to the last spring, and compare it to this spring that we're experiencing now. I'm not sure how to articulate it, but I feel relief in my chest, and look forward to the summer. Trying to reconcile the linear with the cyclical is disorienting and a little dizzying. I try not to mash them together when I can avoid it. I didn't realize how much I preferred to measure time in terms of how often I see birds and squirrels convening in the tree outside where I leave seeds and treats for them, or according to when my dog can hop around in the snow and discover smells underfoot.

I'm also dwelling on something Simpson asked in "Un-mappings...":

what I would give up to bring into being a different world, to change the air, to change everything.

We're collectively organized because we're desperate for ways to stop this genocide being perpetrated upon the Palestinian people. What I would give to bring into being a different world than this one. What I would give to bring into being a free Palestine.

video chat details

In about an hour (at 5pm 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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