grief doesn't make me fragile -- you can come near me, the specter of grief is not a fog you'll get lost in or a ghost who wants to make you look silly or a toxic poisonous cloud. grief is that which holds up my spine. i will not disintegrate at your touch. maybe, actually, my relationship with grief is an invitation and portal to life. i am not a soldier but a sorceress, and grief is the magical dust that allows me to listen, commune between worlds. come, breathe: grief will not fight you. she will wait until you're ready. grief is the watercolor that makes visible the presence of an absence -- it allows us to see colors others cannot see, yet. one day we all see the colors. it hurts though, as your eyes adjust; it may take some time. i'm sorry it hurts and i'm sorry it takes time. she's not trying to hurt you, though, and eventually when you let her in she will refashion you so that you may travel through time: time will stretch, stop, speed up, distort, rewind. you will become otherworldly. and then others, too, will think you fragile when it is actually the brittle ones, the fearful petrified ones endanger of extinction, who cannot traverse the metaphysics of time. you are not brittle -- grief has made you fluid and solid and air: you exist in multiple states and spaces and times! how wondrous and painful and beautiful.
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what is empire in the presence of the ocean?
a sand castle, hastily erected, promptly overwhelmed by waves of judgment. the ocean heeds the verdict of the moon who tells her that the sand is liminal and ever changing, not to be corralled or petrified into prison walls. prison walls, too, will one day be reclaimed by the earth as the sea reclaims the sand. recently, i learned that nations are using sand to suffocate coral to lay claim to territory. how granular do they want to get in measuring coastlines? they call it land reclamation. i call it death which begets death. because did they know that as coral reefs die, the algae that give them their vibrant color (read: life) flee, leaving whiteness (read: death) behind. even the corals know the language of white supremacy culture. after all, the chemicals in coral polyps (which are marine invertebrates, animals, relatives) contain medicines for cancer, neurological disorders, inflammation. did the despots and tyrants, the machinators of death, think more-than-human kin would help them erect empire? silly. the coral warned us what would happen on our death rampage - and here we are, fighting ocean and moon and earth to rush towards ruin. who do we think we are? maybe we are the ruin and refuse. may grief have mercy on us. maybe grief will have mercy on us. maybe, grieve.
what is empire in the presence of a bristlecone pine?
a wave of army ants "swarm raiding" the jungle floors like the rabid violent carnivorous hivemind that they are, flushing out terrified prey. their worker ants, however, only live a few months to a year. they may even catch themselves in a "death spiral," following each other's pheromone trails until they are dead. like ice agents of empire--violent, temporary, futile--decaying itself from inside out. the bristlecone pine has 5000 rings of slow life. how many death spirals has she seen in her lifetime and what can she teach us about how to survive empires? an astronomer in her own right after 5000 years of conversing with the skies, what does she know about the heavens and its own spirals of life and death? if i were to mirror my body to the bristlecone pine, to lean against her gnarled, architectural trunk, what would i hear? she, indomitable and witty, whispers to me the medicinal genetic code for resisting the disease of it all. and to have some sly style while doing so.