Blessings for Our Wild Time (Bayo Akomolafe, Anonymous)
When this image popped into view, we found ourselves instantly comforted: A centuries-old plate unearthed in a London sewer offered a bigger, deeper, more elemental sense of things than we’d felt in a while. You and I are earth; we’re connected deeply to Nature, something that is way bigger than us.
Offering Pipe to the Earth – Cheyenne; Edward S. Curtis; 1910; No Copyright – United States;
We had a similar feeling of expansion out of the frightening strictures of the present moment when we read these words on poetry-evoking philosopher Bayo Akomolafe’s site:
I am quite confident that even as the oceans boil, and the hurricanes beat violently against our once safe shores, and the air sweats with the heat of impending doom, and our fists protest the denial of climate justice, that there is a path to take that has nothing to do with victory or defeat: a place we do not yet know the coordinates to; a question we do not yet know how to ask. The point of the departed arrow is not merely to pierce the bullseye and carry the trophy: the point of the arrow is to sing the wind and remake the world in the brevity of flight.
There are things we must do, sayings we must say, thoughts we must think, that look nothing like the images of success that have so thoroughly possessed our visions of justice.
May this new decade be remembered as the decade of the strange path, of the third way, of the broken binary, of the traversal disruption, the kairotic moment, the posthuman movement for emancipation, the gift of disorientation that opened up new places of power, and of slow limbs.
May this decade bring more than just solutions, more than just a future – may it bring words we don’t know yet, and temporalities we have not yet inhabited. May we be slower than speed could calculate, and swifter than the pull of the gravity of words can incarcerate. And may we be visited so thoroughly, and met in wild places so overwhelmingly, that we are left undone. Ready for composting. Ready for the impossible. Welcome to the decade of the fugitive.
“The End of the Earth.”; Robert K. Bonine (American, 1861 – 1923); 1890; Albumen silver print; 84.XC.979.2352; No Copyright – United States (http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/)
The effect of Akomolafe’s stunning exhortation and blessing is, for us, as Emily Dickinson described poetry: …I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off…
As we lend support to organizations fighting against the destruction of so much we value, and pressure elected officials to take action, and keep attending to — tending — connection, heart, light, we hold in mind the awareness of change and unknowns, with faith in paths we cannot yet imagine, or see.
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