Countless Nights Marigolds Supported Your Sustenance
and other ideas towards life-affirmation on this hellscape day
Hey yall, what a fucking hellscape huh?!
I just took a walk with my sister to cry and talk and touch the ground with our feet. It’s very windy here in SF which feels appropriate. It’s a vibe. And we asked ourselves, each other, what is mine to do? Sitting with that question as we move into the next hour, day, week, lifetime, as ever. And as ever, not sure. But not letting my not sure-ness stop me from writing this. As embarrassing as it is, as paltry as it feels right now, a thing I have to offer is words—things I am trying to remember myself—in case it might support your own remembering.
I think the vibe here at Existing Together hq, my office with the most generous plants behind me, what I’m practicing with, is not diminishing or exaggerating the power of my particular attention and where I direct it, but remembering—my attention is my power. What I give my attention to is a significant part of my power, and so I want to give it intentionally, fiercely, clearly, toward aliveness, toward love. I want to not be codependent with news media companies, or with this incoherent entity called “country,” and I want to also be in deep relation with all life. The way I do that right now is put my feet on this floor in this house, I feel all the layers of history and earth in the materials that surround me, in the evidence of decades of sun on the skin of my hands, in the sounds of Arthur Conley’s Let Nothing Separate Us because that song always makes me cry and crying helps me remember what the fuck is going on here.
I’m alive, and I’m here to diffuse and dissolve what gets in the way of the expression-in-action of the love I can contribute. There are a lot of other things going on but that is the thing I can identify in this moment that is mine to care for and steward.
This morning I cried with a mom at my kid’s school whose name I don’t know. I see her and her partner drop their kids off at school together every morning and this morning, perhaps because it’s all so shitty, I said to them, It’s so sweet how yall are always both here when you drop off your kids. And the dad said, Yeah, most mornings we do it because they need the emotional support, and this morning we did it because we need the emotional support. And I looked at the mom and she said, I cried when I hugged my daughter at how massively we are failing her. She cried telling me she cried, and so I cried too.
I cried when my sister told me she was texting with our friends in Texas, a Black couple. One saying to the other, We need to make a plan to stay safe.
The longest pause in writing this was between that line above and this one. Feeling the rage and sorrow rolling through my body while sitting here. Feeling it with you.
—
Some things I know that impede the actions of my love, and so I state them here to remind myself I’m not going toward those things today:
- social media (blessed be that I’m not there anymore)
- the news that comes from new companies (news from humans in my world is welcome, or beings whose news is about affirming life)
- over-caffeinating
- generally giving myself over to apathy
- isolating
Things that support the expression of my love:
- drinking water
- talking to friends, hugging friends
- doing body moves, like walking, preferably outside
- making and eating food for myself and others
- getting to every possible early winter sunset at ocean beach that I can
- praying
- observing my attention and redirecting it toward what is loving and life-affirming as much as I can
- reaching out to friends to check on them
- being patient with myself every time I forget all of this and spiral downward
- CoDA meetings
—
Another thing I’ve been doing lately is trying to write interconnectivity to help myself inhabit it more, to give the movement of it a felt sense. Somehow that feels related / relevant today. I wrote these words last week and printed them on paper and gave a few of the papers to people I met at the witches confluence, and in this age of the digitscreams, wow it felt good to be so one to one, body, to paper, to body, via hands. It was a site-specific contemplation on the paper exchanging hands, so I invite you to pretend I’m right here, handing you a piece of paper with these words printed on it.
—
A Few Notes Towards Awe
This is an invitation to consider this piece of paper, who it might be from. Which specific eucalyptus. Which exact pine. What ways they were shaped into these particular cellulose fibers. What color was the soil, that the roots of this eucalyptus pushed into, which oceans was the soil between. Which birds and bacteria landed on and took flight from its branches, made it home. This pine that is now a home for the contemplation of its own life cycle, this mixed-media, mixed-species, mixed-labor conglomerate called paper you are holding.
This is an invitation to consider where is this ink is from, who harvested which flax plant on what morning in which August. Which synthetic resins were put together with the oil squeezed from the flax seeds, and who instructed a computer to instruct a machine to pour them into their cartridges, and who sat at at desk drenching their eyes with blue light, to design how and where the ink reached the paper. Who stood on the factory line (while wearing polymers that we now call clothing) to assemble the pieces of plastic into the household item called printer. Who left their family for two months at a time to keep the printer in its cardboard box, in its plastic wrap on the pallet, in its shipping container on its cargo ship as it traveled from China to this US of A. Who drove the forklift to move this printer from the shipping container to the truck, and who drove it to Best Buy. Who spent their days under the specific florescent lights on the ceiling in the Best Buy on Geary street, for how many years, before they carried this printer from the shelf to the cash register for me. The printer which formed this ink into the shapes of letters, which make these words, on this paper you’re holding.
This is an invitation to consider which marigold protected which tomatoes from aphids so that you ate it in the form of sauce on your pizza last night, or some other night, countless nights marigolds supported your sustenance. This is an invitation to consider this specific gravity, which is keeping your singular body tethered to this exact concrete foundation, resting on top of a specific intermingling of previous and current species of animals and stars now called land. A specific intermingling of previous and current species of animals and stars is often, lately, also, called your body.
I invite you to consider how someone put on your socks, and opened your pop tart wrapper, and made the sounds of your language to you, before you could, and another specific someone did those things for me. Which now means we are breathing during this moment of our adulthood. We can now wonder at, and perhaps at times lament, the purpose of such a thing as an adulthood. We can also look at any object in any direction and instantly astound ourselves again with the most cursory attempt to trace its circular journey backwards. For now let’s count, (more often and more together) all the ways you belong to the generous congealment of land-body called world. And then count backwards toward all the ways world belongs to the generous congealment of land-body called us.