Blessed Moisture Comes to the Mountains! …
I believe it to be perfectly possible for an individual to adopt the way of life of the future . . . without having to wait for others to do so. And if an individual can observe a certain rule of conduct, cannot a group of individuals do the same? Cannot whole groups of peoples—whole nations? No one need wait for anyone else to adopt a humane and enlightened course of action. Mohandas Gandhi
Act as if the future you want is already here. Pam Gregory, Astrologer
A thread seems woven into much of what I’ve read and watched this week: the choices I make today are creating the world I will experience tomorrow and beyond. Noticing the thread in numerous places, I noted that this week there is a New Moon (Thursday, September 14 at 9:40pm EDT in the U.S.), a time in many belief systems for setting new intentions, starting new projects, and such.
This idea that today’s choices create the future isn’t new of course, yet I’m curious at it being so present for me. Curious, not to figure out what my noticing it all around me means, but rather curious to delve more deeply into my choices, my habits and what they foretell. Perhaps to reflect on past choices and pivots as links to life as I experience it today. And, to sense more clearly what a ‘desired future’ looks like to me.
Many questions bubble. What I wonder might I learn from this pondering? What pivots might I make? What revelations might I resist?
As I allow these questions to live in me and others to rise, I leave you this week with another quote that, in a very different way, carries this thread. Who do we need to be to allow the “departed arrow to sing in the wind and remake the world”?
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. Bayo Akomolafe (post from January, 2020)
…With A Dusting of Snow