words + wishes
reflections on the closing of the year
Hi sweet humans,
In one of my many part time jobs, I’m responsible for writing end of year emails. I love it, actually, a chance to inform people about the amazing work a group of people have been doing all year, which frequently is overlooked or unspoken. It got me thinking about reflections, and the back-forward-now-ness of time, like a tidal river or any river at all, really.
I want to be able to write a non-annoying, non-boring post about meaning making and why it’s nonbinary and also great, but the words just aren’t coming yet, so I’m sharing what I have so far:
if we can’t see what’s happening around us, it can be so easy to be caught up in someone else’s imagination
to imagine we need space (to be free)
and to get that space we need to know what dreams are ours and what are someone else’s dreams
I think in a lot of ways these three sentences are the foundation of why I do coaching + teaching on nonbinary approaches. These approaches help us see what’s actually happening around us. They make space, that we can then use to take a breath, meet ourselves with compassion and care and at times, absurdity. And they help us untangle from things like: other people’s judgment, our own judgment dressed up as other people’s, the nightmare of colonialism, the rigidity of gender rules, our own internal critic that has been passed down from our parents, on and on.
I got curious about other things I wrote this year, and what sentences I might go back and share with you. These are all a tiny collection from my (mostly) monthly emails in 2024. And before I keep going, I just want to say again: I am so grateful for you & your attention. What a gift to be able to blab on the internet for people to read and respond to. It makes me feel like how the water must feel when the sunlight hits it, or vice versa. Something like this ⬇️
from stability amidst change, on my friend jen’s 13 wishes ritual and my nonbinary wish last year:
Every moment we are alive contains infinite possibilities — for pain, sorrow, joy, boredom, despair, upset, pants-peeing belly-filling laughter, on and on. An anchor I have carried with me through all kinds of belief changes and identity uncoverings.
from the echoes of both/and, on moving + genocide:
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.
from when being good means being bad to each other, on moral injury and empire:
I think about how colonialism has robbed people of any sense of relationship with land other than taking, owning, destroying in order to make sure no one else can have it. I think about the thousands of tons of heavy metals and poisons the earth in Gaza has experienced over the past five months. I think about how my ancestors helped cause the little ice age by participating in a genocide that killed the people who cared for the land here on Turtle Island, and how my people have been ruining things for most people in such a short, violent, time. I think about the ancestors who didn’t participate. I think about myself, carrying all of these memories and stories. All of this responsibility. And behind all of these stories I think about the lurking violence of colonialism — that our ancestors were only able to be convinced to carry out such violence because their ancestors had experienced some version of it. I feel simultaneously so much rage and compassion at my people, and at myself.
from sometimes disorientation is a portal, on nonbinary approaches:
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.
from the myth of consistency, on anticapitalist steadiness:
I’ve come to see my disorientation as a kind of gift, one that can remind me to slip away from the grind of endless doing and spend a little more time with the trees and the ground and the clouds. I’ve learned, from watching and being present to spring, that steadiness is not automatically connected or contrasted with the idea of unsteadiness. That these two experiences, rather than battling it out with each other for dominance, exist at the same time, nudging me this way and that, allowing me to notice one thing, then another.
from what can you trust? on letting go:
I’m struck in some ways, writing this to you, how difficult it is to describe nonbinary approaches like this sometimes. That they involve, and perhaps require, things like forgetting, like taking a detour, like taking your eyes off whatever is bothering you and keeping you up at night and seems to have stayed well past its welcome, getting distracted for six months until you realize that the thing that has been frustrating you in its refusal to move or leave isn’t really a part of you in the same way anymore, that it has resolved itself, that you didn’t have to do a twelve point personal improvement plan in order for things to change. That letting go is perhaps a process, not completely internal or totally outside of you, but some combination of the two, or something else entirely, and that you aren’t in charge of it. That what we call letting go is perhaps something to be witnessed, or even to notice after the fact. That we can trust that even when we aren’t paying attention, it’s still happening. Maybe letting go is a way of describing a process that our bodies and the earth know how to do. Maybe letting go is a tiny piece of a much larger network of possibility.
from on order/chaos, and neither, on binaries + binary culture:
Almost everyone alive today lives in a culture rooted in this kind of binary thinking, where binaries are not used as one kind of sorting tool among many others, but rather as a kind of map that lets everyone know where they and everyone else are in a power dynamic/hierarchy, and how to treat each other based on that categorization. In binary cultures, binary thinking seems natural, normal, given, like gravity or sunsets. And yet, the more we study binaries, rather than taking them for granted, the more we learn how artificial and out of sync they are with the rest of the planet, and how much expansiveness and possibility actually exists in the world around and within us.
from and neither, on trying to get out from under binaries:
Wouldn’t you always choose joy over sadness? Wouldn’t you always choose ease over suffering? Good over bad? Right over wrong? I don’t know! I want to not know! I want the intimacy of fucking around, the many many experiences of finding out. I want to break up with the either, the both, the and, the or. Is bitter really the opposite of sweet? Joy the opposite of sadness? Do I really only get one, or only those two things, at a time? How do I know, except what I’ve been told, over and over again? I want to learn for myself, and I want to tell you about it and hear what you stumble into and out of.
from non-linear elder wisdom, on powerlessness and despair:
I can’t jump the rung of the spiral right now, but maybe I can fall down to it.
from everyone is annoying…including you (maybe my favorite thing I wrote this year):
Everyone is annoying. People are annoying! We have weird beliefs (that we really really want to tell you about and get mad when you don’t want to hear). We talk too much. We never talk. We think we’re better than other people. We act like martyrs after creating the very situations we want sympathy for. We get uptight when the dishes aren’t done the way we want them. We never do the dishes. We process differently than each other. We can’t get to the damn point. We can’t see the big picture. We have to talk for one thousand hours before we decide anything. We leap into action without checking in with the people who will be affected by our actions. (I could really really go on like this for forever, all my gripes I’ve been holding onto for years like a dragon, treasuring my horde of complaints). Everyone is annoying. Everyone, fucking everyone! Which is satisfying and superior, until we remember that everyone includes you.
…And that is perhaps the most annoying, tender part of it all. Here we all are together. How might we be to build the world we long for together?*
*I forgot to credit my friend Abe Medoff for this amazing question the first time around — Abe, what a gift you are!
Grateful, grateful.
<3, Kali
PS: Paid subscribers, you are gems of humans & I want to share a little thank you with you…