Post-Activism in the Anthropocene.
:::Our Ongoing Search For Home:::
Dear friends. I have managed to come down with some kind of sickness. The doctors can’t seem to pinpoint just what it is. Some of my symptoms certainly run parallel to the common flu. Itchy eyes, sniffles. This time of year in Northern Thailand, people often come down with a cold, or something similar due to cooler temperatures, but this feels a bit different, unnatural you might say. With Climate Change in full swing, one day here along the edge of the Golden Triangle may be blisteringly cold and the following day unbearably hot. One day is very humid and the next dry as a Rajasthan desert. To spice things up, suddenly it is very dusty here. I imagine this is because most of the land in our province has been saturated with toxic chemicals rather relentlessly for several years now. The soil, understandably, can barely manage such a disrespectful beating. And with the trees having nearly all been clear cut for monocrop farms and “development”, oh how the winds do howl, blowing dead dust all around, dust that enters my dry eyes along with the trespassing spray of herbicides, pesticides and greedy forgetfulness. No, I don’t think this is merely a cold or the flu. This my friends, is life in the Anthropocene.
Ah, but I do not wish to get going again on some shpeel about how awful the world is. I fear many of my articles are taking on too somber a tone of late. I keep wanted to write a piece about the importance of joy, and gratitude, all the fluffy buzzwords privileged new aged people love. especially because it is now the Holiday season! I feel it is good to enter the New Year on a high note. It isn’t becoming of me to be as sarcastic and cynical as I have recently become and it’s unkind to display such arrogance to my wife and community. I have good teachers, good mentors. I know better.
It’s very easy to complain and point out the negative in times like these. We all can see it. Hell, we can smell it. What is more interesting though is how we might, if we shift our gaze a bit beyond the tide pool of dystopian echoes, find there deeper meaning within what appears to be but an endless war-funded, consumerist void. So, I ask for courage now from the elders in my life, ancestors, the greater than human world and Stories of old. Forgive me. Now seems like as good a time as any to pick myself back up, even as I lie here in bed, a tower of snotty tissues by my bedside, adjacent an arsenal of ginger and turmeric, lemon, galangal and about a hundred other herbs I am just now learning about whom heroically are doctoring my weakened body back to a stable frame.
And my efforts are in vain. Down again I go. For harder than the bodily discomfort, as so many of us know, is the depression that often comes with physical pain. Although I do not view depression the same way many seem to, writing it off as some sort of imbalance as opposed to an appropriate reaction to how modern people treat each other and the Holy Earth, I do see that it is, like so many of our modern views are, another form of laziness. My mentor Martin Prechtel has little patience for depression, often comparing it to some strange modern form of status jewelry. He won’t let us complain about being sad. He knows sadness more than any of us and has modeled for us just what to do with it, make beauty. Easier said than done of course, but if we can spend hours each day doom-scrolling than surely we at the very least can manage to dedicate a few minutes each day too for learning how to do something beautiful, like painting, playing a musical instrument, cooking, weaving, whatever. There is far too much negativity spinning around us nowadays. It’s truly unbearable and it’s our responsibility to stop this uninspiring festival of bickering. The key, as Martin says, is to…
“Ransom yourself out of the slavery of negativity, the price is your courage to be kind and your vow to feed somebody besides yourself.” -Martin Prechtel
This all being said, I am not a new ager. And Martin Prechtel is definitely not a new ager! I don’t agree with the peculiar “spiritual” demographic who obsess over positive affirmations, make religions out of conveniently manifesting (a certain kind) abundance and avoiding altogether looking deeply into the very real grief of our time. It’s a fine balance to be found for sure. A balance I have not well made of late, hence I am still in bed. Yet skillfully learning how to churn this milk ocean properly seems to be one of the great riddles of our time. How to properly grieve? How to properly praise? How to work hard and also to rest? How to make space for another way to emerge? Both in the world at large and in our own bodies? With our outward actions and with our breath? It all seems to happen somewhere in the middle. With each inhale. With each exhale. We need to keep showing up, working together and getting out of the way.
As this publication enters its second year, I am renaming the title somewhat. What began as an effort to look specifically at our search for home via the experience of cross-cultural, inter-racial eco-village life has evolved into something bigger. Naturally, over the course of the last year, various topics have sprouted new limbs and taken on new forms, both transcended and included the foundation of an ongoing critique on settler/colonizer forms of “education”. To be sure the topic of what we view education to even be for will surface here again and again as we move forward. But as we expand, it seems fitting to acknowledge that the scope of this inquiry and where it has lead requires us to offer this curious container a new set of word wings. For this honor I humbly borrow a term coined by another of my teachers, brother Bayo Akomolafe, “Post-Activism”. And in an effort to aid in the hospicing of modernities belief that insight can be easily taken and gobbled up instantly I refrain from merely giving away here a convenient soundbite as to what “post-activism” is. Instead, I invite you to go on an adventure. Check it out. Dig in (Hint: Explore the works of Bayo Akomolafe). Stick around, share with us what you find. We will be wading further into these murky waters in the months and years ahead…
So yes, I do have some Resolutions for the New Year. I wish to inch closer into the middle, to not chose sides. In this noble collective quest to return home, I wish to access joy in the midst of sorrow without denying sorrow a dignified place to express itself, to learn how to breathe when fires burn all around me while not demonizing the flames, how to hear the Still Small Voice when so much noise pervades. And to always dance, even when I don’t have much of a taste for the song being sung.
So much gratitude to those courageous beings around the world now who are already doing this, generously modeling for us all how to not succumb to modernity’s suggestion that doomsday is imminent, that the best we can do is party, drill more oil, complain or build a bunker but instead reveal to us in the grandest of ways that The Goddess is right here, still thriving, right in front of us. Not just some of the time, INSTANTLY. There is far more reason to celebrate than to despair.
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“Our work is to make sanctuary. To re/turn to this placeless place and decorate it. To catch the bodies discarded by the broken outdoors as the civilizing ethic of whiteness flails under the weight of its own aspirations to hold aloft the mastering self. The rejected stone has now become the chief cornerstone. Such joy. Such joy. Such joy.” -Bayo Akomolafe
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Oh there is so much more I want to share. But let’s breathe instead. The New Year dawns. Let’s give everything a bit more space… A bit more time… The Void isn’t as terrifying as some would have us believe…
Happy New Year! (((…to those who celebrate this one, of many, many, iterations of this particular junction in “time”…………. . . . .
*Why I Sang in the Dungeons: A Prophecy to End the Year 2023 - Bayo Akomolafe
https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/why-i-sang-in-the-dungeons-a-prophecy-to-end-the-year-2023
A beautiful reminder of what a Kind Heart can do from New Mexico family band, Prehistoric Delinquent and the Relative Minors
#MAYPEACEPREVAILONEARTH