sometimes disorientation is a portal

three thoughts on binaries amidst the push-pull-something else of spring

Hi sweet humans — how are your hearts and spirits these days? It feels like so much is being uncovered over here, both so slowly and all at once, the way the wind picks up overnight sometimes and clears away the leaves from the winter, or piles them up again in new places. I’ve been reading Ross Gay’s Book of Delights and I really love his way of diving right in to each essay, and how each one arrives at a different depth, so that I never know quite where I’ll land when I begin and where I’ll be when I end. Spring feels that way for me too, most of the time. In honor of disorientation, some thoughts on binaries I wrote down a couple of weeks ago in the confusion of late winter/early spring.

One: Confusion

I want to start by writing about confusion as a nonbinary practice. Confusion is seen as something to get rid of in our culture. In the culture of empire, confusion should be cleared up or away, fixed or corrected. I think the reason I love confusion so much is because it reveals in a low stakes way how our culture approaches people and the land — as problems to be cleared away or neatened/corrected. On the level of whether you understand something “correctly” or not, that seems helpful. But on the scale of whole groups of people and whole places that are different than how you like things to be, and therefore confusing or “alien,” clearing away or cleaning up brings with it genocide, attempted annihilation of people and culture and connection to the earth, and reshapes landscapes from a relationship of mutuality to one of domination and disrespect.

For these and for many other reasons I love confusion. I treasure it when I find it in myself and other people, even though so often when we have a long experience with it we feel frustrated and stuck and afraid we will never get out of it, never understand, never find something that feels solid. I’ve learned to hold off on trying to resolve confusion, to see what shapes it takes, where it leads me towards or away, what being confused brings me closer to or further from. To be curious about why it might be here, and what I might have to learn from it, without applying too quickly the violence of clarity, especially one based in fear of confusion, that wants to resolve and figure it out at all costs.

Two: Individualism

Today I have been thinking about what individualism makes possible — the idea that there could be individual families, individual communities, individual countries that have nothing to do with anyone else, which makes possible things like “x has the right to defend themselves,” which is so funny to me. Who doesn’t have the right to defend themselves? (Under liberalism, quite a lot of people, it turns out.) What do rights have to do with security and defense, or war? What defense is there for destroying hundreds-of-years old trees? When is defense something else? Are we not allowed to defend ourselves even when it is not right? Who allows this thing we call defending ourselves? Maybe I am getting lost here but then again maybe that’s the point. What happens when we get lost in a statement and all it presumes? What histories do we trace back with our questions and noticings and pullings apart?

Three: Where does it fit?

Sometimes I like to play a game called “where does it fit?” (I just made up that name) which involves walking somewhere, hopefully on a sunny day in late winter or early spring, and seeing someone or something that is so awe inspiring and strange that I am stopped in my tracks — today a tiny ancient dogwood tree, no taller than me, four new branches coming sturdily up out of an old grizzled trunk, surrounded by a circle of purple crocuses. An astonishing thing. Where does it fit? Is the dogwood good, or bad? Old, or young? Large or small? How many binaries does it pick apart, just by existing? This is a silly game for a serious practice, which is finding reminders every day that binaries are just one way of seeing things, and honestly quite rare in nature if you spend enough time looking out of the corner of your eye, letting things appear that probably some of the Christians I grew up among would call miraculous, which I think now means something like “unexpected, unlikely, strange and beautiful” which probably if we look carefully enough out of the sides of our eyes, could be all of us.

Sending you much love from the creeks,

Kali

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Places to find me in the next few weeks:

Resistance is Nonbinary, a 6-session class on the binaries of empire and the ways we are always already nonbinary. Pay what you can, starts March 27th and runs for 6 Wednesdays, live + recorded. A good primer on the binaries of empire that shape us and ways we can undo and wriggle out of them.