the echoes of both/and

the breathtakingly painful experience of trying to hold as much as there is all at once

I’m moving. Gazans are dying. The US government could end funding to Israel but won’t. These three facts keep bouncing around in my head like I’m in a tiny boxing ring bouncing off the ropes — anytime one of them looms larger for me, one of the other snaps me back.

This is a simplified description, because in reality it’s like I’m in a boxing ring with a thousand sides, all these realities competing with each other as a I bounce and spin around from true thing to true thing, each echoing and aching (as my computer autocorrected echoing to just now — thanks computer). The blue jay that woke me up this morning. The laughter with my neighbors as we painted our new place yesterday. The minute feelings in my body as I wake up and see a post that Hedaya Hamad, Director of the Youth and Volunteers department of the Palestinian Red Crescent has been killed by Israeli snipers. I just saw her on video the other day, talking about receiving a phone call from Hind, a six year old girl trapped in a car with the bodies of her dead family members, asking someone to come get her. And I wonder what it feels like in your body, too, this escalating pile of bodies, the little windows into the scale of death and horror. What do you feel? What happens in you? What doors open and close to protect or numb or open you up to what is happening?

Everything in the many pieces of reality breaks my heart open these days. I want to spend my days making endless lists of the tiny moments of joy and delight and wonder. I want to punch every person doing their tiny silly little role to keep the wheels of genocide moving in the face. I want to scream. I want to take a nap.

But where was I? Where were we? Where are we?

I said competing earlier when I talked about the experience of snapping back and forth between realities, but that’s just a phrase we use in English. I put it in there so that sentence would be a little more recognizable. But I think what my experience actually is is more a feeling of acceptance or confirmation of something I have been practicing for a long time, what we describe as both/and.

Binaries separate and divide the world into easy categories. Categories are comforting ways to relate to the complexity of the world. But empires, and colonialism and capitalism have used binary thinking to prop up so much violence and extraction for so long that I think most of us have forgotten that binaries are one way of many to organize the world in a way our brains can understand. We forgot that binaries are a choice, and started thinking of them as the world itself.

And I think what many of us are experiencing right now is a kind of stunned confusion, where good bleeds into bad or evil, the categories are collapsing, and the structures that have so deeply organized our world are revealed to be holding up nothing much at all. Binaries say: this or that, either/or. But life, whether under empire’s shadow or no, is in a thousand million different ways, so much more than even the most broad of two categories could hold. Life is a living breathing both/and/and also this/and this too/and none of these things/all of these things.

Still with me? Where are we now? Are we in the same place?

The experience of the both/and is stunning (like literally the feeling when you fall and get the wind knocked out of you). It’s freeing, it’s expansive. It’s perplexing and frustrating and confusing. It can push you into rage, or running like hell for the safety of the either/or. It can feel like that spark of joy when you fall in love with someone, or have something totally surprising and unexpected and delightful happen to you. It can feel like despair, or grief, or numbness. It can feel like sanity and like losing your mind.

Part of my work over the past five to ten years has been mapping the many experiences of the both/and, by which I mean learning to notice the friction and frission and dissonance of these experiences. Sometimes the both/and means: I am experience both sides of the binary at the same time. Sometimes it means, I’m experiencing a secret third thing. Sometimes it means I’m having ten feelings or ten experiences all at once.

Where are you now? What does it feel like?

I thought this email was going to be about moving, about the feeling of leaving a place and the complexities of what we grieve and what we bring with us. And I suppose in some ways it is. I appreciate you all hanging in here with me month to month as I noodle on binaries and make as much sense as a I make.

All of this to say, it’s a particularly painful and overwhelming time to hold the realities of the both/and — as we witness for the first time in real time, the realities of empire and colonialism that have built up the world many of us live in, the violence that has been happening all around and to us, the violence that is asked of us. And I think, as countries and empires scramble to grab resources before capitalism falls apart under the weight of climate destruction and unpredictability (which means more and more pushing people off the land, killing them, and destroying the earth in the name of progress) the both/and is going to recur and return, and haunt us. If all of this feels totally overwhelming to read, may I suggest Ross Gay’s Book of Delights, a book with a deeply nonbinary understanding of delight. I would be happy to send you some photos of pages that resonate for me.

I’m running a little workshop tomorrow (hahahaha what a silly ridiculous horrifying thing to do in these times) where we’re going to dive into some realities and strategies for holding the both/and and getting out from under the good/bad binary. You can use the code nopressure to sign up for free.

Sending you so much love from the creeks (which we don’t have to leave! hooray!!) and the bald eagle and the truly enormous hawk I saw yesterday while painting,

Kali