non-linear elder wisdom

on powerlessness, and time

Hi sweet humans,

It’s been a couple of months since I wrote to you! The accumulation of…gestures outward…really got to me over the last little while. I got tangled up in several drafts to you all, which usually is a sign for me to sit down and wait until the words come. I had to wait a while for this one, thanks for waiting with me. I think anyone who writes and has people sign up to read their writing is a lucky, lucky human, and I hope you know how much I appreciate you being here.

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I can’t decide if I should begin this story at the beginning or the end or middle — which is perhaps a good place to begin what I want to try and share this month. I was driving around DC on my grocery delivery shift on a Thursday afternoon, listening to an audio book: Ursula K Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, a non-linear anthropological account of people in a fictional future. I don’t know what it is about Le Guin and the audiobook narrators that the publisher assigns to her but I have never been able to finish an audiobook of her work. I was resigned to this one being the same until Shruti Swamy’s introduction from 2022 came on. (If you can find the book at your library I highly recommend listening to Yareli Arizmendi read it.) There's so much grief about the ways that the land is changing, how little hope she feels for the future, and how what is emerging from her hopelessness is a desire to undo the trudge through linear time:

“But this might make it sound like a novel, a poem, or a dream is the first step into action, another foot into the punishing certainty of linear time. And we don’t have time for linear time, with its demands for hard-won, incremental progress toward a just — or even livable — world.

Can we disobey the law of this kind of time? Can we jump straight from one rung of the spiral to another instead of diligently traveling its curves?”

I’m curious how you feel reading these words, what jumps out to you. What parts of your body light up, shut down, tighten or loosen?

For me, listening to these words from one of my non-linear collective elders — it’s funny, because Shruti is either the same age as I am or a little younger — felt like the sun coming suddenly through a window in the late afternoon and lighting up the room I was in, startling me out of the funk I had been in for weeks. Oh, I thought, I’ve been in despair. I’ve written about despair before, about the ways our culture is so against it, especially in activist circles, and how sitting with it has given me so much insight into the ways my imagination is still attached to capitalism and colonialism — my sense of my own individual importance, the ways my understanding of how the future ought to be and the ways we get there maybe have very little to do with how it will actually happen. Despair has taught me to listen for the people who aren’t tending hopelessness in that particular moment, and when I’m not currently tending to despair, to listen deeply to those who are. I have learned, too, that despair asks me to listen for what it means, as people who are mired in processes of extraction and violence, to imagine a better future. And to ask, and listen for, what becomes possible when I/we despair of that kind of imagining, of that kind of future?

I’m curious how this lands for you in your body. What tightens, what loosens? What lights up, what goes numb?

The next day I read Susan Raffo’s blog entry on the prairies, powerlessness and memory and it added something else, a kind of solid reminder of the earth beneath me. I hadn’t really put it together that despair for me really comes from a sense of powerlessness, from having to reckon with the reality that my individual actions cannot stop the US war machine, an apartheid state, or genocide. It’s one of those things that I’m working on letting live in my bones, in part because the truest things for me are the ones that sound so obvious to say or write. I’m including a long excerpt here in case you want to read it, too.

There is a “new” theory of evolution currently emerging called assembly theory. It’s a weaving together of insights from biology, chemistry, physics and information science in an attempt to understand how life emerges and why, as it emerges, it moves towards complexity rather than monocultures. Professor Lee Cronin from the University of Glasgow says it this way, “Assembly theory provides an entirely new way to look at the matter that makes up our world, as defined not just by immutable particles but by the memory needed to build objects through selection over time." I have read a bunch of different research papers on this and what I think I understand when I translate what I am reading is this: evolution is not about a kind of random genetic movement forward but instead, memory shapes what the next step might be. The organism's memory determines a next step from an infinite set of possibilities and thus the past and the future become one. Memory is another word for wisdom, remembering what came before to help more thoughtfully - which also means chemically/biologically since that is what memory is - determine the next generation. Since we are talking about generations of wisdom, this scientific theory is a story of, well, ancestors.

…I was recently grateful for a Facebook thread that a friend posted, wondering in front of their friends whether or not it was time to reckon with our powerlessness. They asked this question in relation to the ongoing destruction of Gaza, funded by us folks in the US. I had been holding the same question for all of it: Gaza, climate chaos, the fact that there are people who want others to disappear because of how they live their lives and celebrate themselves and their love, and more and more and more. 

Powerlessness is all about the land because what powerlessness asks is that we fall, heavy, to the ground. We stop holding, trying, ideating, wondering, dreaming, storming, forcing, pushing, pulling, appeasing, agreeing, denying, wanting, resenting, daring, taking, expanding, contracting, and every other verb. We stop and instead we face what is rising, the feel it, we know it, we name it, we let it overtake us, which means we fall to the earth.

We fall to the ground, this size of this earth, she who holds water in her belly for when future life will thirst. We fall.

Depending on who your people are, you might have had to do this already. Face the fact that no matter how hard you fight or how smart you are, “they” will come now or have come in the past and will bury you, mouth still open and screaming. 

This origin of this country is an override of powerlessness into an arc of ideate, dream, create, force, push, take, give, want, deny, resent, expand and contract. What matters is the future because the past is dead and gone. A bridge is constantly being built over the histories that are unfinished, reinforced and restructured each time another wide awake challenge comes through. Banned books, attacks on DEI, on critical racial theory, on whose lands we are on in a way that moves far far beyond acknowledgement. This bridge-building over pain and unfinished violence and loss did not start on this side of the Atlantic, its raw materials were shipped on the same ships that brought weapons and plows. People fed, like they flee now, for reasons of despair or hunger or greed or the million things that provoke flight. Many left after generations of the stealing of land, children, and cultural ways. It’s a chain of violence and it goes back quite a bit in time, although not forever. It’s the river of powerlessness that has been forced underground, creating a dead zone where life can’t root itself in.

When we turn and feel the powerlessness, really let it sit here alongside us, we fall. We fall to the ground and then we wait. Our body’s relationship to gravity is one of the ancestors’ gifts. When we fall to the ground, no longer hold so that our bones melt a bit, there is support here. There is always support. Meaning, we do not die. Our hearts keep beating. The blood and lymph and breath continues to circulate, even when we have let go of any kind of holding. And what is below holds, absorbs our screams, our piss, our tears, our never agains.

And then at one point, on the other side of that terror, if we are not surrounded by bombs and violence and the potential end of a shotgun, there is silence. And living in that silence is memory. Generations and generations of memory. Because there is nothing unique or unusual about us. Not a god damned thing. And memory will surge up, help us rise, and from that memory that lifts, those ancestors’ bones and songs and generations of water stored deep underground just for today, those memories will sniff each other, tangle and unwind, and weave into a different pattern, a different moment of evolution that in the short term doesn’t feel that different but in the pattern of years, could bring us someplace we could barely dream of.

Memory work. What stories have been lost and what stories are replaying? How do I seek to keep myself safe by building a monoculture community around me? What are the skills that enable me, you, us to live with complexity in ways that mimic a grassland rather than a war? How am I… and this is, to me, the most important question… how are my fears and my hungers and my desires and resentments and frustrations and beliefs getting in the way of memory, of wisdom as it weaves forward, dancing with what is here to create more rather than less and how do I and we let go of our need to control all of it?

Still here? I so appreciate you. And I wonder what this is adding up to for you, what meaning you are making out of this and all the other meanings that are rushing towards us, surrounding and supporting us. For me, what it’s leaving me with is I can’t jump the rung of the spiral right now, but maybe I can fall down to it.

Sending love from the creeks, and the hawk I saw on my walk in the sunshine today,

Kali