We salvage ourselves

Recommendations for living. Also twelve questions, one bird, and two poems.

It should be enough. To make something beautiful should be enough. It isn’t. It should be.

- Richard Siken

It should be enough.

To wake up on the earth and be a whole world to those that love you. To keep what's living alive—yourself, your orchids and those you love. To do what you can as you're able to keep this miraculous planet as abundant as it is, this singular speck of outer space, as far as we know the only one to make aspens, antelope, sumac and silkworms, indigo, embroidery, grass valleys and music, whatever the beaver's whole thing is, pottery, pelicans, a whole aquatic ecosphere—mysterious, meticulous, ever-changing by design.

It should be enough to make what you can with what's made from the earth. To love what you can with what's left of your heart, once you first learn about loss. It should be enough to make enough food to feed a whole table. To make a friend, to make fun, to insist on kindness, kinship, joy and justice.

It should be enough. And it isn't.

from Earth Liberation Studio

Somewhere, my doves, we've lost the plot.

We have insurance premiums and co-pays. I've screamed about credit scores before. I am screaming still. There's a chicken restaurant that sells chicken sandwiches and funnels dark money to discrimination. People love the chicken.

There are, not far from where my grandfather grew up, borders made from barbed wire making rivers murderous. There are bombs made out of knives. Bombs made out of uranium mined in Congo, tested in New Mexico and dropped on Japan nearly 80 years ago. Today, downwind of the Trinity Site, there are families with five generations of rare, aggressive cancers to their name.

In one way, I do not recommend it at all, and in another, more serious way, I recommend reading about weapons design and manufacturing. I recommend being curious about the way the world’s been made this way by human hands and why.

I recommend reading about Belgium and Germany in Rwanda and the British conquest of Sudan. I recommend reading about the late Ottoman genocides, Henry Kissinger and Cambodia, Henry Kissinger and Chile, the plantations of Ireland, the Troubles, the First Crusades and the Rhineland Massacres, the Balfour Declaration, the detribalization of Mexico, death marches, the Sioux Uprising of 1862, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, one hundred years of broken treaties and Indian boarding schools, how many languages we’ve lost in the last century (six hundred), the Haitian Revolution and forced reparations to France, the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, the conditions under which Fred Hampton, age 21, was murdered in his sleep by the FBI. I recommend learning about convict leasing, the lack of political will for Reconstruction and qualified immunity.

I recommend reading Mariame Kaba and Lauren Berlant, the Combahee River Collective, Teju Cole and Toni Morrison, Arundahti Roy and Robin Wall Kimmerer.

I recommend reading Aracelis Girmay and Solmaz Sharif.

I recommend reading Revolutionary Letters. I recommend reading poems and listening to poets and Palestinians. I recommend reading and listening to people who understand the Western legacy of ethnocide, extraction and ecological devastation never has and never will make a single soul on earth safer.

I recommend finding your people and looking at birds, also looking at birds and finding your people.

I recommend drinking water and trying to understand the California water wars and who controls water in the West Bank and how, and I highly recommend redistributing discomfort and refusing to keep what you learn to yourself if what you learn can help another heart and mind get free.

I recommend disobedience to the death machine.

I recommend solidarity and socialist tendencies.

I recommend refusing to accept this is the way the world must be, just because it is how it has been.

I recommend low impact strength training and daily stretching and learning to hold your breath and trust your breath and learning to feel your belly and where fear lives in your body. I recommend finding a way to love what lives there. This body has kept you alive.

I recommend exercising your imagination and asking impossible questions. I recommend acknowledging how little you might know, because it’s a chance to learn and learning shows us what we love.

I recommend starting here: we must be allowed to live.

We must be allowed to live on land we have learned and love and when I say love I mean care for, I mean tend to, listen to, look to for balance and honor balance, humble oneself to sustain it, let oneself be made bigger by it. I mean knowing what grows as the seasons go and shifting together to meet the weather, restoring wherever a wound has been made. A wound will be made and when I say love I mean ongoing repair. I mean reciprocity and regeneration.

I recommend reading Anne Boyer's resignation letter and Shira’s prayer and the twelve questions from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers and as you do, try to answer, just to yourself.

shared by Warsan Shire

Now imagine you are fleeing your home under threat of annihilation and read the questions again.

Now imagine the world can be different. It can.

Now read, if you’d like, two poems. One is a sonnet held up to a mirror. One is a promise.

It is not enough.
We are nowhere near finished.

Amen.

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Savage Sonnet

We salvage ourselves. We savage ourselves.
Octobers mean grief, deep into our bones.
Can you spell worship? Do you mean warships?
Are family trees reddening? you ask.
When I say grief, I mean rage. I, mean strong.
I news-water my nightmares. I, blue song
who evaded at least two wars, can’t sleep.
What do histories say to holy books?
That we remain silent, fear for our jobs
when hospitals are bombed? Do you believe
walls sever memories? & is God there?
This didn’t begin with our people, no.
Ask any natives & they will tell you
the lands remember, even when tongues don’t.

The lands remember, even when tongues don’t.
Ask any natives & they will tell you
this didn’t begin with our people. No
walls sever memories. & is God there
when hospitals are bombed? Do you believe
that we remain silent, fear for our jobs?
What do histories say to holy books
who evaded at least two wars? Can’t sleep.
I news-water my nightmares. I blue-song
when I say grief. I mean rage. I mean strong,
our family trees. Reddening, you ask,
Can you spell worship? Do you mean warships?
Octobers mean grief. Deep into our bones,
we salvage ourselves. We. Savage. Ourselves.

Zeina Hashem Beck

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A Rose Shoulders Up

Don’t ever be surprised
to see a rose shoulder up
among the ruins of the house:
This is how we survived.

Mosab Abu Toha

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