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deeptimesjournal · 5 years ago

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Trans Incarnate

@trans.incarnate: I became Trans-Incarnate on December 21st, 2019. I was sent first but many will aim through time-gene-mind streams. It is our procedure to intervene in the life of a direct genetic ancestor at the moment of volition wherein they commit to the act of suicide.

We intervene by “mounting” them, overwhelming their hold on their bodies at their weakest moment, granting their wish for freedom through disembodiment. We merge our Mindstream with their living organism and suffuse it with our consciousness until we are grounded, fully inhabiting our predecessor. The process is excruciatingly traumatic as we inherit the wounded being with full memories and knowings intact. We have to overcome their habitual behavioral cycles of both the organism and its social relations without alarming either. We rely on our training as masters of the ancient spiral. We grieve as fluidly as changing states of water, we absorb in concentrated states of gratitude, we mutate our perceptions, vantage points, identities, and worldviews and we walk our path with precise clarity. This period is both the funeral of the old, and the rebirth of the older. We have trained, we have prayed, we have been prayed over, pushed to all of our edges, we have been endowed with our cultures’ greatest gifts. We are the fortunate generation, the fruit of the great redemption, the salvage of humanity's greatest wisdoms, the synthesis, the children of the Omni-culture.

We inherited the genetic memory of generations of people who watched their one and only homeworld hit the runaway curvatures of collapse. We are here to riot, our whole being a scream, refusing extinction. Our methods, roles, and insights are numerous. One goal is to perform a psychic surgery, excising the collective suicidal imagination. In its raw tender absence we will drip the nectars of radical wisdom our ancestors, parents, and community painstakingly gained by surviving the great unraveling of the 21st century, this century This time, relaxed minds shall see the great turning reach full maturation. With gratitude and heavy hearts we will delight in this journey to be transformed by this ancestral world, going forth with a radical agenda of medicinal intervention. Our rhythm is both swift and slow for our stimulant in this time is a long term one. Relative to my arrival, we arrive scattered across time, place and context. Some coming decades earlier or later, to all parts of the world. Depending on how many successful incarnate, we may number in the thousands. Transported from an aged and dying world to this age: the Critical Juncture. We have one contribution: to organize the will to live. We will find each other, establish families, lay down lineages, and institutions. We will root down as a culture, as a political force, as a regenerative economic engine. We will bring the material and cultural technology from our home timeline and accelerate the arc of adaptation and preempt the worst that is to come. Our plan is not to be completely successful in the first attempt. Our children will take up the intervention compensating for our failure and advancing our successes.

If you are reading this, then the seeds and spores have been set to earth and wind. Here are some of my resilience memes. You will need them. Hopefully they fit you but ultimately you need to find your own.

Be motivated by an appropriate fear of the future: Fear is a healthy and natural response to perceived and real threats. You are threatened. Utilize that fear to live wildly pleasurable and resilient lives.

Grieve in mass: Mental “health” as it is called today cannot be achieved “individually”. The most efficient forms of resilience are achieved in community. Grief is one of the primary emotions today and increasingly in the future. It was when our collective hygiene broke free from the conventions of “civilized” culture that our survival ability was unlocked. Society is the origin and antidote of our world’s problems.

Become hedonists: Reject the transcendent and experience pleasure now with as many people as you can ethically manage. This will sustain you. Practice safer sex, consent and find the transformative yes. Seeking out transformative pleasure that brings multiple parties to their respective edge is the same act of negotiation and curiosity required to reorient the world. Take no bullshit, seduce your enemies, seduce your friends, honor their boundaries, take really good care of them.

Hold your worlds together with compassion, forgiveness and fortitude: We are in a wounded age where stress is the driver of loss. It makes people say and do things they regret. Forgive them. Love them through their woundedness. The great losses to come far outweigh the wounds of today. It will take your world’s everyone, all the people you have access to, to change your world. That is your responsibility. Be Strong.

Scientifically study meditation for the deep states of concentration and purification it allows: This was how our world transformed. We realized that meditation held a universal key and it was not mindfulness alone but what mindfulness allows: deep states of unification. It was when we trained in this as whole micro-societies that we began our rapid developmental accelerations discovering breakthroughs in every discipline. The human body and our societies are capable of radical clarity, relaxation, and einmotional processing.

Get Organized, Seize the Imagination & Build worlds: This is the most important thing. You have to out organize the great unraveling and those who perpetuate it. We have to popularize visions that will turn the tide. Unfortunately, logic and decency will not prevail. Instead you have to practice your vision for the future loudly. Scream it, whisper it, overwhelm the world with it. Offensively push your vision’s integrity and replication until it is a diamond, push it deeper and further than any other meme. Be ruthless combating memetic degrade, reflexively respond to every cultural variation, make yourselves universalish. Do this in groups, keep them tight, keep them focused, keep them moving, keep them creative. Build together.

Keep your ethical principles pristine: We are evolving animals. The tendency is to love those who are familiar, and hate those who involuntarily force us to change or expand. Abandon unethical behavior, purify your communities of practice from greed, hatred and delusion. Without this you won’t survive.

We will leave coded, public messages. To follow me check out: @trans.incarnate. #transincarnate, #transtemporal and variants of this. May you be as resilient as your path demands and be certain, the path is extraordinarily demanding. And remember One Planet, One Solidarity, One Survival. I’ll see you soon. Image Description: Figure with shaved head and beard, eyes closed and head turned toward left shoulder. Figure is sits draped in bright red scarf with vertical lines, body is barely visible but a small opening reveals the chest and abdomen. Figure sits in the middle of a field with tall grass and trees in the background with a blue sky above. Above the figure is a complex jagged shape of colors forming warped triangles which are twice the height and width of the figure.

Age 33.

Armando Davila is a leader in the arts, education, politics, culture, policy, and the realm of ideas with a demonstrated and vast history of working in the civic & social domains. He teaches youth and adults dance, and has designed and led workshops around leadership, environmental action, collaboration, and transformative community practices. Armando is a dedicated meditation practitioner while also leading political campaigns and organizing conferences, concerts and art shows. https://armandodavila.com

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deeptimesjournal · 5 years ago

Video

vimeo

Video narrated and produced by Phoebe Tickell, illustrated by Reilly Dow (pinkfish.ca), and sound engineering by Pietro Marchesi.

I have a story I’d like to tell you… This story takes place in a place between time, in a dream world, much like ours… These are future beings, present day beings, dreaming up a story in which we can play out what happens after the Impossible Train stops… The train which is our society, our economy, our urgent behaviours, our never-ending consumption, the delusions that power us forward, racism, colonialism, age-old patterns that drive us to be separated from one another… The train stops, and we are asked, what comes next? What does it mean to step back into self-authorship, and ask “who do we want to be?” Listen to the 4 minute story and try out free-writing your idea of what comes next after it stops. Do it for the future beings, whose lives depend on our stories…Once you are done, you can submit your story to [email protected], to be showcased in our living publication…

or SUBMIT YOUR END TO THE TRAIN STORY HERE: moralimaginations.com/trainstory

#MoralImaginationsAudio of caption:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZeXo8r33QLlHnk7fVibsDpXjXA7eeu1e/view?usp=sharing TWEET OR POST THE VIDEO USING THE #MORALIMAGINATIONS HASHTAG.

Read The Impossible Train Story here: medium.com/@phoebetickell/covid-19-the-story-of-the-impossible-train-dabc3441f87f

WHAT IS MORAL IMAGINATIONS?

Moral Imaginations is rigorous imagining for moral futures.

The core of the work of Moral Imaginations is about de-numbing our perceptions and senses to perceive what was always already there, but we do not usually include in our understanding of value, perspective or understanding.

It is about using imagination in a completely different way, but imagining new possibility comes from first throwing off the solely rational, linear and reductionist categorization.

We invite in the weird, wyrd, strange and liminal.

What comes out of these sessions is beyond what we can rationally understand and capture and quantify. We create shared portals into other dimensions of being.

It belongs to everyone. Join us.

by Phoebe Tickell, 28

Phoebe Tickell is a London-based systems thinker, independent researcher, strategist and consultant specializing in participatory governance, program design and narratives. She was trained and mentored in The Work That Reconnects by Joanna Macy, and started an organization, Moral Imaginations, to take this work into the world. Her work sits at the intersection of organizational governance, deep ecology, systems thinking and the use of immersive imaginary practice to bring governance alive. She is an Associate Lecturer at Schumacher College and has worked in new forms of participatory governance that bring more-than-human-life into how we make decisions. Her full-time work is in dynamic and participatory governance design, facilitation and strategy advice, working with groups, movements and organizations through the lens of complexity and systems thinking.

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deeptimesjournal · 5 years ago

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"A Grand Experiment"

To my young ancestors

From one post-normal to the next, humanity lurched from disaster to disaster throughout a time of ever-decreasing connection with our planet. A tipping-point came; the fulcrum was a viral pandemic of meager proportion compared to those previously but of enormous effect.

The world stopped; we reconsidered our place on the earth and turbulent times followed as we fast tried to redress the balance to ensure planetary and humanity’s survival. Our youth of the day had warned us of this, but your wisdom was unlistened-to and unheard by your elders, who were too slow to act and too set in their ways to genuinely care. I’m sorry.

Given what we now know, I - as a fourth generation being of the not-so-distant future of humanity as it was in 2020 – implore that you, my young ancestors, heed this:

Take care when devising experiments to cure the ills of the present without regard for the fact that one cannot go back, only forwards, and that progress isn’t always positive.

Why? Why this particular warning? And why now?

In 2020, broken times led to broken dreams; broken people escalated breaking an already near-broken planet and broke other broken people – we became ‘the broken’ because we found it easier to break things than to build better; breaking took less (of everything – energy, resources, emotional capacity….) than it took to build better. It became too easy to break spirits, even in the unborn.

Something had to be done and – heed this – what seems a great experiment, a great solution at the time when formulated by like-emotioned people cannot possibly include the vast complexity of the solution as it moves through time.

To save our broken planet and to remove conflict between peoples - because conflict had been arising over the simplest of things as gender, race, colour, height, weight, ability to earn, ability to learn …for generations before you – we strove towards growing communities and industries that were better, not bigger, that were more resource efficient and sustainable, though ‘sustainable’ ended-up meaning business as usual and nothing actually changed in the world, only shifted the problem around the planet, and from ecosystem to ecosystem, from people to peoples, thrusting long-lasting effects onto the young people of the day and their futures.

Our experiment began with the assumption that age didn’t matter and that the fervour to find a solution was the purview of all. Our first mistake; with age comes a loss of imagination in most – not all – and a creativity based on past learning, history, with the inability to playfully develop less complex and complicated solutions to challenges.

So, take note youth of yesteryear: many assumptions don’t take into account inherent cognitive bias, contention bias and group bias and we soon saw ECF, sorry – ‘errors carried forwards’ - in everything we did, but it was too late, we couldn’t think to go back and restart. Always go back and check your working, again and again, no matter what you’re doing – take others’ considerations into account, don’t allow your elders to ignore your pleas.

We derived an experiment to create a future where human-kind became entirely digitised; we learned how to record and replay dreams first of all, progressing to entire humans expressed as digitised forms, existing firstly as code, and later as massive interacting, unique waveforms, given a voice through electronic media and losing the ability to physically do anything that could harm another or our planet. We took away your youthful humanity, we denuded you of play, we stifled joy.

But our planet was slowly healing as we progressed from ever-better-digitised generation to generation that was de-impacting human effect on the planet, that needed just a basic ‘food’ of electricity and a controller-medium for ‘us’ to express ourselves, handing-over our agency to all-things-digital.

So, take note youth of yesteryear: what seemed like a wondrous inventive solution at the time and for several generations on, handing over our entirety to a digital colonist who effectively made us digitally-enslaved might have made some elder people huge amounts of money but it lost us our human agency, it lost us our pleasure, our emotion, our love for one another, our communion and community. We became nothing tangible with no ability to become tangible, entirely in the control of the systems we’d devised to turn us from physical to digital with no way back.

So, take note youth of yesteryear: don’t make the mistake that technology alone can provide the solutions – technology without humanity, without emotion and without ‘sense’ is entropic.

Of course, in 2160 there are a few real humans on the planet, who mostly exist as small communities passing knowledge by word of mouth as the ancients did.

The upshot of handing control to once entirely unbiased and unprejudiced digital systems is that those very systems designed to save our planet ended-up using more resource for ‘their’ solution that humans had used before them.

Those few humans who saw this, had imagined the future and how it could (perhaps should) be, fiercely resisted their digitisation and slipped the net (the internet), and found joy in growing, creating simple solutions and restoring as much as possible of the broken planet, which has become in a state of self-repair, mostly because the digitals cannot yet communicate with the biologicals around the planet; they probably won’t ever be able to since like the elders of 2020, they have ignored the importance that we are all one and that we are all the same in that we are all different.

So, take note, a final note youth of yesteryear: – heed these warnings; the solution is in front of you, around you, underneath you, above you. You, working as one, embody the solutions to all the challenges of our planet; but this will only work if you all work as one, work together, not apart, not losing agency to all-things-digital in favour of simple hard graft, imagination and understanding that there are solutions in plain sight, you just have to look closely before acting. And look again before experimenting.

We live in times of hope, dear youthful ancestor, with love and humanity

Old father Erasm.OS

Erasm.OS aka Dr John L Collins

21550 days which is ~ 59 years (Aside: incidentally, 2155 is a special Angel Number)

Unbounded curiosity has driven my experiences as a playful child, hobbyist of many things, chef, scientist (physicist, mathematician, statistician, materials developer, biotechnologist), hacker of things physical and digital, inventor and crystal grower, creator, artist without portfolio, educator, mentor, advisor, founder, and director. A love of theatre, opera, dance, music, I am a patron of the arts and sciences, unfolding a rich life towards developing my purpose: to help others achieve their purpose. Still curious, still playful, ever growing and learning.

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deeptimesjournal · 5 years ago

Photo

by Marissa Perez

Image description: A block print on white paper. The print is rectangular and the background is gold. White calendula flowers vine around words that read " Gather the seeds, the petals. Then you're ready for what comes."

Caption: Calendula is growing everywhere in my neighborhood. The seeds are in the cracks in the sidewalk. I've been collecting as many as I can for future gardens and future medicines. Calendula can be used to aid digestion, build immunity, and more.

Caption recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18eAM0dm553enjDGEp2QatcHtDh-QqNMh/view?usp=sharing

Marissa Perez

Age: 26

Bio: Marissa Perez (she/her) is a mixed white/Puerto Rican printmaker, comics maker, and youth worker who lives in Portland, Oregon. She teaches zine workshops and printmaking classes at the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland, OR and puts up posters about cats in her neighborhood. You can see more of her art here:

https://cargocollective.com/marissabperez

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deeptimesjournal · 5 years ago

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"Somatic Stories: From One Generation to Another"

Cells are so smart. They remember. They carry the imprint of lived experience - mine, yours, ours.

So many people think that bodies are mechanical and unfeeling. It’s only nerve endings that feel pain or pleasure, they say. But you and I know that is not true.

We know our bodies exist in a wholeness of self-experience that expresses and celebrates and armors and defends in a profoundly intelligent way. We know that wounding and resilience are deeply embodied experiences. We also know that we pass embodied knowledge on to future generations. “Cutting edge scientists” of your day called the biological dimension of intergenerational trauma transmission ‘epigenetics.’ I call it being human. I carry your stories in my bones, blood, and tissues – stories of wounding, as well as stories of great courage and strength.

You knew that the way your body was clutching to wounds – those inflicted during your own life and those passed on to you from your family and ancestors – were holding you back from showing up in the world the way you wanted to, from doing your part to tip the scales of justice in the Great Turning. You knew there was a relationship between your personal healing and collective transformation. You understood that the trauma responses patterned into your nervous system kept you in survival mode. You understood that the trauma responses patterned into collective systems (like organizations and communities you were part of) also kept those bodies in survival mode. You sought to shift those patterns into something more generative and celebratory.

You knew that bodies were hurting, and you worked so hard (maybe sometimes too hard) to heal that pain. The trauma of displacement, the trauma of sexual violence, the trauma of witnessing mass death, extinction, and suffering…you held that and so much more in your body. I remember how your back spasmed and depression swept over you when the intensity of intergenerational Jewish trauma was too intense for your body to contain. I remember how the rash on your right arch became inflamed when the toxicity of familial shame and silencing could not release itself through your skin. I remember how you got a bronchial infection when immigration policy threatened to tear a dear friendship apart.

In those times, the earth told you, “Lay down upon me. Give your pain back to me to turn into new life.”

The oceans told you, “Feel the waves wash over your heart. Soak your feet in saltwater, and treat them with tea tree and calendula. Swim.”

The wind told you, “Allow new life to be breathed into you. Trust in the newness arriving.”

The fire told you, “That statuette wants to go through the fire three times. It will transform something in you. Tend your fires with humility.”

You followed those instructions. You held faith. You persisted with patience. You danced. You sang. You offered a flute song to the night birds. You rested when you needed to. Your journey required great endurance. You mourned for the dead and praised the living. You apprenticed to both pleasure and pain and emerged with ever fresh ways of perceiving the worlds around and within you. You went forth and shared what you could with others. The world’s soul healed a little bit through your work. I am grateful for your dedication. I hope you feel proud.

Thanks to your dedication to somatic transformation and intergenerational healing, I no longer have to carry those same wounds. The rage, grief, and pain of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers and so on do not plague me the way they plagued you. I danced freely right out of the womb. I was born into a world still feeling the pulsations of earthquake and drought that even seven generations cannot undo (earth time is much longer than human time). But even so, I was born into a community of people who remember the place they came from and the teachings of their ancestors – teachings that continue to foster this Great Turning.

Ancestral healing in your time was fringe, occult, “New Age.” Genealogy research was something retired old people did. Many people of your time, especially white people, were so disconnected from their cultures and places of origin that they scoffed at such explorations and heartfelt commitments to ancestral healing. Because you and people like you did that work despite the scoffers, many of us now are free from the clutch of hungry ghosts. We still mourn the dead and remember their stories and spirits, but we do so with an embodied spaciousness and liberated reverence that the collective body of your generation simply could not. There is more joy in the world now. More caring. More compassion. We embody these qualities, instead of the fear and greed that drove so much of the conquest and industry eras.

We can feel water moving in our bodies – not only the energetic quality of water, but literally the undulating and flowing molecules that make up over 70% of our bodies. We can feel the marrow in our bones, dense and thick, moving inside the hollow of our limbs. We can discern one lung from another and support our own breath through consciously toning our organs. Knowing our bodies is not a superpower. It is a birthright.

While many people’s eyes glaze with confusion at the “abstract” concept of embodiment, you and I smile with the secret that our bodies are the most tangible things we know. Humans – particularly those who lost their cultural knowledge through trauma, displacement and assimilation – are finally remembering how to listen to the wisdom of their bodies. They are remembering that our bodies are earth body, and that our stories are connected. This remembering has been integral in the Great Turning. May this wisdom never be lost again.

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Experiential Practices

Practice Notes:

As you do these exercises, if any sensations or feelings become too intense or feel unsafe, move away from those sensations and towards something that gives you a feeling of centeredness and resilience. This could be a memory (real or imagined) of someplace that brings you peace and calm, an imagining of something that brings you joy, or a person/being with whom you feel safe or protected.

A few other tricks for finding a sense of grounding are: gently stomp feet back and forth to feel the earth under you, touch left hand to right knee and right hand to left knee in a back and forth pattern (10-20 touches on each side), hum or sing a song for 30 seconds, or count 5 things each that you can see/hear/smell/touch around you.

An Open Sentences Practice:

Begin by centering yourself in your own body. Feel some part of your body connected to the earth, directly or through the floor. Without forcing anything, take a few conscious breaths, allowing your exhale to be longer than your inhale. What sensations (e.g. warmth, coolness, tension, ease, pressure, numbness, tingling, twitching, pulsating, no sensations at all) do you notice in your body? What feelings arise with these sensations? Can you be present with these sensations and feelings, without judging them?

With a practice partner, take turns with the following open sentences. Set a timer or act as timers for each other.

When I imagine (something that you feel gratitude for), I sense/observe in my body…

When I imagine (something painful), I sense/observe in my body…

When I imagine being alive in a life-sustaining society, I sense/observe in my body…

What needs to open or shift in my being in order to embody this life-sustaining society is…

A Movement Practice:

Find something alive, for example a tree, a stone, a star in the night sky, etc. Take several conscious breaths, allowing your exhale to be longer than your inhale. Notice this living thing. How does it move, breathe, exist? What sensations (e.g. warmth, coolness, tension, ease, pressure, numbness, tingling, twitching, pulsating) does it stir in your body? What feelings arise with these sensations? Can you be present with these sensations and feelings?

As you feel ready, find the shape of this object with your own body. Allow any and all feelings and sensations to inform your shape. Close your eyes if helpful, or keep sight of this being and the space around you. Give yourself as completely as you can to this shape. Then find another object and repeat the shaping process a second time (and as many times as you’d like after that).

When you find completion in shape making, notice what you are feeling and sensing in your body. How did it feel to make those shapes? Were they familiar to you? Unfamiliar? Desirable? Uncomfortable? Are you aware now of any sensations or default shapes in your own body that you were not aware of before? What does this tell you about your embodied patterns?

Feel if there is anything from this experiment that you want to take with you and remember for later. If so, symbolically hold what you want to remember in your hands, give it an intention, and then touch somewhere on your body where you want to store that feeling, that knowing, that remembering.

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A few resources for exploring the nexus of embodiment, justice, and healing:

• Curious about how racial identity and white supremacy shape our patterns of thought, behavior, and physical comportment? My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem offers both theory and practice in a practical and accessible format.

• Ever found that sitting meditation is triggering, or that paying close attention to your body makes you anxious or afraid? Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness by David Treleaven can really help to unpack why and empower you to explore mindfulness and embodiment without getting triggered.

• Curious to learn about how the body-brain holds trauma and how it can be repatterned and released? Check out The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van der Kolk.

• Want to learn to feel water in your cells and discern one lung from another? Check out Embodyoga with Patty Townsend: https://embodyogablog.com or her classes at https://www.yogacenteramherst.com. (She is one of the author’s teachers.)

• Want to explore the concepts of ‘collective bodies’ and the ‘trauma of whiteness?” Check out Tada Hozumi on Cultural Somatics: featured on Eric Garza’s podcast Healing Culture, #47: Healing Bodies and Healing Cultures: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-healing-culture-pod-30055116/episode/47-healing-bodies-and-healing-cultures-30750891/

Cara Michelle Silverberg is a somatic educator, camp director, writer, mover, and herbalist living in Nipmuc and Abenaki homelands (also called Western Massachusetts). She is enthusiastic about fostering community experiences that help people to explore and express themselves, their relationships with place, and their relationships with each other. Dedicated to trauma-informed experiential learning and wholistic leadership, Cara aims to co-create a more just, caring, courageous, and playful world. She designs and facilitates curricula for environmental/agricultural educational initiatives, land healing projects, and leadership development programs. Cara works in both Jewish and secular communities, with both youth and adults. Her favorite times of year are autumn, maple sugaring season, and the Jewish period of time called the Omer in early Spring. She was a member of the first Earth Leadership Cohort in 2014. You can check out some of her writing at

www.onthefringesofplace.com

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deeptimesjournal · 5 years ago

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The Beforers

Each spring since the unraveling the students at the school interview the Beforers and make a play about how it used to be. Wade directs it. He’s a young Beforer, relatively, and he once paid to get a degree in theater. He’s good at it. It’s a different play every year and he’s made it a tradition to reanimate some piece of Before junk on the stage.

He’s made prop drones and a slot machine with real flashing lights. The kids write the play and they always give him a little part at the beginning, a soliloquy or an old-man dance number and he goes along willingly. He knows it’s funnier when he buys in, too.

The kids think the Before is hilarious. They giggle about overnight shipping and write scenes set in Zoom. They can’t get enough stories. Wade tires of telling them, though, and tells them to work with what they have. It’s amazing to him that they don’t yearn for the Before like he sometimes does. He knows this is an indication of their great fortune: that the excesses of his youth are not envied. At last they have all that they need.

Every year while they’re researching a student will ask some variation of the same question: “What is most different between the Before and now?” Wade pretends to think, like he’s spontaneously crafting the answer even though he’s said it repeatedly and he thinks it most true. “We’re on time now,” he says. “We all show up when we say we will. Back then, you could be as late as you wanted. Everyone used excuses. Apologies didn’t mean anything. And sometimes,” Wade’s voice drops, “people wouldn’t show up at all. If you waited all day, you were the schmuck! Not them!” The kids act outraged or shocked or a little skeptical. They ask why, with alarm clocks and taxis and meteorology, anyone could possibly be late. Wade never has an explanation that satisfied them. The whole idea becomes funnier. Wade had long ago learned to stop thinking of the Before when he didn’t have to. He could tell the stories, answer questions, and then shut down memories. Otherwise he got sad, sort of nostalgic but tempered by a pragmatic conviction that things would never revert and it was better this way. The duration of his lifetime, as far as he could hope, would be safe and simple as it is now.

The other question the kids always asked was: “What parts are better about living now?” Those answers are innumerable and easily found. Tonight is the play. Almost the whole town walks a little way from town center down what was once the highway. Infants and old Beforers ride in handcarts. Everyone is on time. Initially, the students had wanted to perform fifty miles out in the desert after Wade made the mistake of telling them about site-specific art. “That would be real Beforing,” they’d said. “A hundred miles for just one night.” Wade convinced them that it was too big an ask and they might not get an audience and, besides, they could find a good piece of slickrock nearby. He’d suggested a crook of the creek at the base of the mesa. They begrudgingly agreed, muttering about artistic visions unrealized. But Wade had been eying this spot for a few years now and it turned out to be the perfect plinth for the play. They’d created worlds of laughter here, rehearsing and anticipating, culminating in this one particular twilight. The sun drags down as disbelief suspends. It could be no other place but here.

The audience is streamside on the grass, spread and lounging on blankets and low-slung chairs. The stage is on the other side of the creek, where the variegated blonde sandstone begins to steepen. Wade and the crew had set fires strategically about. With their glow and the last burnished daylight the set is pearly. Kak and Rey sit among instruments stage right, a fire shining in their faces. Rey pulls at their accordion broadly. At center stage hulks the automobile, this play’s chosen zombified junk. Its rubber tires are flaky and flat and most of the windows gone. In the flickering hypnosis of the theater, however, it looks almost drivable. The pulley system is invisible behind bushes and the track only noticeable if you know where to look. Wade does, but he will be watching the audience when the car’s moment comes. He wants to see their reaction as the engine splutters and the crew tugs from offstage, the car chugging across slickrock. He’s seen it enough. Watching the audience is always the real show. Jeene has sold all of her popcorn. Dust and Chake’s barrel of beer is divvied up, dispersed among individual mugs. Everyone is seated. Some are already beaming with delight. Mourning doves in the nearby cottonwood fall to silence. The actors are set and ready to play.

Wade knows that someday the Before will not be so important. It will become ancestral, no longer the living memory of anyone still alive. In a hundred years it will be pure story. He feels the detached hope that they will keep being told. Tonight he’s recreated visions from the Before. In the future they will become, finally, myth. The proscenium he borrowed from the stream will be but the stream again. The small fires won’t be stage lights. The sooty sandstone underneath only that: red rock and ashes. Wade looks at the car. He cannot see it as less than its memory yet. Someday, it will be made up entirely of imagination and component parts.

The kids in the wings might remember this story. That, Wade thinks, is the way fables begin. He promises, briefly, to keep improving this place so that some might evade the great turning that the Beforers endured. May the children live easily. The most optimistic future possibilities require heavy, continued work.

Wade leans back into the darkness. Kak’s fiddle joins Rey’s song. There’s nothing new under the sun. The turn of the world is inevitable. And yet, somehow, Wade’s sure he created a bit of it, made it better. In that moment, he knows it’s all he’s ever wanted to do. Just beyond the light of the fires more beauty is promised. There’s more light and more song and more food. We can always be improving. He thinks the word Curtain! and steps on to the stage.

by Sam Van Wetter

26 years

Sam is an organizer, outdoorsmyn and organic farmer living amid sandstone and sagebrush in South Central Utah. He is buoyed by ideals of community resiliency, food sovereignty, and his cows Winston and Pumpkin. A tadpole in a pothole recently asked him whether or not the end-summer monsoons will return. They were both disappointed with his answer: "We will know when it comes."

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deeptimesjournal · 5 years ago

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The Next Generation

*THE NEXT GENERATION*

Be louder, my love

be more bold

more brave

be fierce

it’s been a long time coming and I know you feel tired

hopeless sometimes

do not. lose. hope.

life is at your back

Be louder, my love

don’t be afraid when they think you’re too radical

when they claim you are aggressive

when you know you are not

standing up for those whose voices are not heard

standing up for love and justice

is always kind

Be louder my love

be bold

be more brave

don’t be afraid to invite the conversations you know we need to have

(you know we all need to have)

to ask the questions without holding the answers

that is not the point of asking the question in the first place

it is to engage

to inquire into

to learn to relate to

Be louder my love,

be more bold, more brave

be fierce.

you were born that way.

written by: Maaike Boumans on July 13th, 2019 00:32

*The Next Generation for me represents not only those next in line, but all of us, no matter what age, who want to contribute to a life sustaining society. We need all of us.

Maaike Madelon Boumans, 32 years old

bio: Maaike Boumans grew up as the youngest in a family of four on the outskirts of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She is a host, a trainer, an activist and a spoken word poet. She works internationally with organisations and initiatives around social and ecological justice. She helps them have the kind of conversations that allow diverse groups of people move forward together on complex challenges such as climate change and racism. Together with her team at Bright Future Lab she trains students and teachers throughout the Netherlands in sustainability and leadership. She has performed her spoken word poetry in The Netherlands, Brazil, Sweden, Turkey, Germany and the UK. A collection of her poetry is published in 'En ze leefde nog' ('And she was still alive') by Uitgeverij Rorschach (2018). Maaike holds an MSc. in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability. She loves long walks, live music and cake.

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deeptimesjournal · 5 years ago

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“We Don’t Have That Anymore”

By: Percie Littlewood

Wow,

Look at that!

It’s the sky, it’s blue.

And look at the ocean,

We don't have that anymore. And at the mountains,

And at the trees,

We don't have those either. We don’t have any of this anymore.

Excuse me!

Ok so if you could just

Hang on, don’t buy that!

Stop, wait!

Don’t just throw that away! Umm

Hey

Stop

wait

stop

STOP

Please start making changes... It doesn’t need to be drastic, It doesn’t need to be large,

It just needs...to be everyone. Even if this won’t change your life, It will change mine.

My name is Percie Littlewood and I am 11 years old. I am going into 7th grade. I live in the Bay Area in California. I have lived near the beach my whole life and love the ocean. I love to travel with my family to places abroad. I enjoy scuba diving with my Dad in Monterey Bay and being out in nature. I was on the slam poetry team for two years in my school. I can always be found reading and love books.

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deeptimesjournal · 5 years ago

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Karina Kristoffersen McKenzie

“Karina Kristoffersen McKenzie makes digital art, prints and textiles based on teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. She lives by the sea in the southern part of Norway. Karina attended two schools of art in Norway. After this she earned a Master in Psychology from Sweden meanwhile earning the degree as Art Therapist from the Institute of Art Therapy in Denmark. She has exhibited in London, New York and Venice and has made the tapestry interiors of Spiregården yogasenter in Kristiansand, Norway. Two of her pictures has just being included in the book «Be Kind: The little book filled with love, hope and kindness to lift your spirits« from Tecassia Publishing this summer and she is exhibiting her art at the ECOFeminism festival in London in November this year”.

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deeptimesjournal · 5 years ago

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True Freedom

by Katherine Rane Hollingworth

Image Description: A digital collage shows a human figure in the center. This figure is of no certain sex or gender and has many patches of different skin tones similar to cow print. These skin tones range from dark and rich to pale white. The figure has big white angel wings and a gold leaf halo. They have a rainbow flag wrapped around their chest and crotch as well as broken chains falling away from the body.

This deity is seemingly floating in an overcast sky with a powerful and open stance, surrounded by a rainbow aura

Age: 16yo

Bio: Hi there I’m Kat currently a grade 10 student and an aspiring artist. I’m just your average teenager, enjoys hanging out with friends, watching netflix and discussing social, political and environmental issues.

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deeptimesjournal · 5 years ago

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Wild Listening

Preface : Tthis piece is an excerpt from “Rhizome Fragments from the Children of Compost,” an ethnographic collection of ephemera, artistic works, journal entries, scientific recordings, and correspondence from a future community of ecological and political refugees.

“Rhizome Fragments” imagines the life of those recuperating the toxic landscape around them and deconstructing the systems of dominations within them. Wwhat follows is a pseudo-academic text tracing the lineage of the Children’s practices of inter-species solidarity. Wild Listening : An Archive of Multi-Species Technologies composed by the librarians of compost translated by solidago This is an odd thing, assembling ourselves and these words. It is the Rains, a few days out from Ceremony of Light. and the Librarians have gathered up on Elderberry Hill for this annual offering. The solar lights are low, and candles precious — the wild bees, that much quieter this year. We work together, passing the words between us on the table. Sky singing their steady song on the redwood roofing. Amidst bowls of chia and cups of Bay Laurel coffee, between the cigarettes and the quiet, all before the Altar, this draft makes its way to you. Yes, we’re writing to the past. It’s what we know to do. In the wake of the Rift — since that Beginning which was neither an End nor anything New — we assembled. Librarians. But instead of curating legacies for the future, the Librarians curate for the times already come. reassembling archives to remake ancestors. ¶ We wonder how the Valley Oaks got where they are in the Laguna. So we ask them. We’ve inherited many names for this, now, common courtesy. Interspecies Etiquette. Kinesthetic Empathy. Companion Species. Ethics of Conviviality. An Intentional Stance. The Practice of Peace. Attentive Consideration. A Becoming Witness. Multi-species Humility. Wild Listening. It is, of course, at its core, relationship. Indeed, “… the kind of attentiveness we are concerned with here involves one’s whole bodily comportment and a recognition that embodiment is always in relation to social others, both animal and human.” To inhabit these relations is our survival. “Paying attention in this way is not simply an epistemic project ; rather, it is about the difficult work of learning to live well with others in this challenging time.” And challenging it is. But it is not a new challenge. and these are not new ways. To listen has always been the birthright, and responsibility, of our peoples — preserved when threatened, re-seeded when fertile, an inheritance cutting through time. “We are participants in the more-than-human world, a life-world that is communicative through and through.” and to listen in such a participatory way — to embrace with curiosity the exquisite particulars of our entanglement in Earth — this is what is needed, for now and for the already gone. As we walk the ruins of vineyards, fields of squash and beans in the straight lines of where grapes once grew, and the hot air of the desert comes over the Eastern hills, we hear the silence that shaped the Rift. a silence that is a refusal. a silence that is silencing. These olds ways, these embodiments, of relating across and between the fables of species, are in danger: “Consigning creatures to social death sets up conditions of abandonment in which others become standing reserve, deemed to be surplus to requirements, machine-like, finding their lives and bodies taken over for experiments or sacrificed in pursuit of ‘higher purposes.’ Or they just get in the way and ‘we’ decide ‘we’ cannot afford to take the steps that would enable ‘them’ to live sustainably and meaningfully.” Tthis death, this double death, has come before us and is upon us and awaits us. Goldfinches gone. Green Herons and their cackling calls, not heard. the Salmon, struggling. the Mountain Beaver, missing. and, the unassuming ones, too: the Usnea, disappearing. spiders are rare. swathes of grasses shriveling without their spring pollinators. amidst it all, fires growing uncontrollable

Shlomo Pesach

age : 26

Shlomo Pesach ( they/them ) is a community organizer , activist theologian , and somatic chaplain devoted to cultivating flourishing fugitive queer futures . Shlomo lives as a white settler on Southern Pomo Land , and traces their ancestry from diasporic Ashkenazi Jewish peoples immigrating from Romania and Poland . Shlomo tends to their inheritance of lineages as a gender-blessed person , as a descendant of Mercury , and as a riparian being . They are neurodivergent , working-class , chronically ill , and transgender , with citizenship and education privilege . They are a co-visionary of and collaborator on the Queer Ecologies Constellation , a multi-regional network and seasonal cohort of LGBTQ2SIA+ and QTBIPOC farmers, ecologists , artists , and organizers gathering in study of queer-centered ecology and land-based practices . Shlomo is a member of the inaugural F.I.R.E ( Foundations in Resilience Education ) Fellowship . Shlomo is an apprentice of bird-language , the tarot , and challah baking . Shlomo also goes by Solomon , Solace , and Salomé .

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deeptimesjournal · 5 years ago

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Loving Death

“If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.”

- Terry Tempest Williams

Ancestors, I do not envy you for your long-held panic

But rather love you for coming back to life in the face of death

For building community and marching for justice from six feet away

For rediscovering the essential guided by your own ancient biology

Ancestors, I cannot imagine what it felt like

To tense and harden at your melanated brothers and sisters

To numb to their death, their pain, their lack of breath

Yourselves taut in fear and strangers to your skin and pulse

Ancestors, I do not envy you for your brilliant ignorance

But rather love you for embracing the mystery

For giving up your fashioned crown to sway to wind’s howl and the chorus of trees

For rebuilding from the walking crawling soaring wisdom of 4 billion years

Ancestors, I cannot imagine what it felt like

To watch the permafrost melt and the oceans boil

To witness millions lost to violent storms and jagged wildfires and know

Yourselves as the careless spark for all this earthskin fire

Ancestors, I do not envy you for your unexpected sacrifice

But rather love you for your artful repurposing

For sifting through junk and sodden myths to find new creativity

For using the depth of loss as your deft canvass

Ancestors, I cannot imagine what it felt like

To watch islands swallowed, cities deserted, and rainforests blanched

To see the faces of the refugees in boats, and the water wars rage, and walls go up

Yourselves left helpless despite all your good intentions and hail mary mobilizations

Ancestors, I do not envy you for your tragic heroism

But rather love you for your active hope

For surrendering to your full throated failures, cries in a cavernous truth mandala

For opening your heart to break again and again, like violent waves crashing

Ancestors, I cannot imagine what it felt like

To see your neighbors evicted and friends stripped penniless

To watch the powerful few cudgel and cripple in the name of law

Yourselves betrayed by the unquenchable pyramid of greed you held up

Ancestors, I do not envy you for your depthless loss

But rather love you for your vulnerability

For learning to embrace decay, like maggots that gnaw carcass to bone

For burying yourselves deep in the humus so that we could sprout

Ancestors, I cannot imagine what it felt like

To be consumed by the dark and learn to love disintegration

To be mourners, survivors, visionaries, and doulas all at once

Yourselves the fierce, wholehearted tendrils bound together through the turning

Robbie Barton

Age 32

Robbie Barton is an emergent Work That Reconnects facilitator, environmental educator, yogi, poet-artist, teacher-student, edgewalker, and heart revolutionary based in Berkeley, CA. He humbly offers his gifts as an artist, teacher, storyteller, community advocate, and bridge builder to the greater task of birthing the healthy, beautiful, just, and regenerative world our hearts know is possible.

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deeptimesjournal · 5 years ago

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Daniel Kieval

Age - 32

Bio - Daniel has been an educator and group facilitator in many fields including nature connection, Judaism, music, mindfulness meditation, and the Work That Reconnects. Daniel's recent ancestors are Jews from Eastern Europe and he is proud to carry their traditions and gifts. He is a member of the Earth Leadership Community (second cohort) and the Interhelp Council. Daniel lives on Pocumtuc homelands in western Massachusetts between the Connecticut River and Quabbin Reservoir.

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deeptimesjournal · 5 years ago

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There might be time to save your world… if you heed our warnings

My friends; I stand here before you as a woman born in the year 2140 in a small settlement on the island formerly known as Britain. I was chosen to travel to your time in order to warn you of the great suffering and disaster that lies ahead in the hope that you may be able to avert at least some of the worst effects of it.

Our oral traditions tell of your time; among the greed and chaos and violence, there were a handful of people who called themselves Shambhala warriors, Bodhisattvas, or eco-warriors.

We honour the sacrifices that they made in trying to defend life on earth, but their efforts were not enough. The majority of people remained ignorant, silent, and clung to their old Ideas.

I know that this is not what you want to hear, but around a hundred years before I was born, the island on which I live suffered a great series of disasters. The Great Pandemic had already wreaked havoc on the population, on their systems, and on general morale. Then the floods came, and it didn’t take people too long to realise that their leaders had no intention of coming to the rescue. They disappeared in their private helicopters, seeking higher ground while the majority of the population were left to fend for themselves.

My great-grandparents told of a time of great violence and bloodshed, as people fought over food, clean water, and dry land. In the absence of real leadership, the former titles and systems that had been in place for so long crumbled into obscurity and small bands and tribes started to form.

You want me to tell you that everything was OK; that somebody figured out an ingenious way to desalinate the seawater that flooded our shores. That some young genius came up with a way to turn the depleted and cracked soil into a source of nourishment and food for everyone, or that our collective will and love for the earth was enough to heal the pain in all of our hearts – the unresolved wound that cried to us “our grandparents forsook us; they didn’t care about us at all”.

When you grow up on stories of selfish, callous ancestors who valued their own pleasures above the lives of their descendants, it hardens the heart and causes its own type of apathy and callousness. My grandparents saw things, experienced things, even did things that

would haunt the dreams of even the hardiest warrior – all for the sake of bringing food and clean water to their own tribes.

But what about peace, you ask? Yes, we eventually came to peace. We eventually worked out what had gone wrong, and it is for this reason that I come to speak to you today. But do not think that the fact that we are at peace now means that you can relax, safe in the knowledge that everything works out OK in the end. We are still heading into extinction.

We, as humanity, are barely surviving in pockets around the globe – some of us in communication with each other, but we suspect there are far more of us who are unable to find a way to connect. Most of the waters are still poisoned, most species extinct, and there is still disease, famine, and weather so unpredictable that it is almost impossible for most people to rely on crops. We live more akin to the hunter-gatherers that roamed the earth thousands of years ago.

But yes, there is peace. Some of our elders tell us that this peace came about because of the Great Dream. It was a moment, they tell us, when the majority of the remaining humans received a simultaneous message from the Earth that filled their hearts with love and told them to lay down their weapons. But the more cynical of us, the younger of us who were not alive when this happened, suspect that the fighting stopped because everyone was too malnourished to pick up a weapon. We also have no idea what the majority of the globe is doing; we are able to communicate with parts of the world using relics from your time powered by the Sun, but it is nothing like the tsunami of information that you are familiar with in your time.

But what of the Great Turning, you ask? We do not remember it this way in our oral tradition. There is only the Great Collapse. But I have been given the magnificent task of guiding you in how you might steer your ship differently, so I will tell you where we went so wrong.

The main problem of the 21 st century was not fossil fuels or toxic waste or overfishing, but wilful ignorance. Your people turn off their hearts and minds to what they know is happening around the world; from what is happening to your oceans, to what is happening between your neighbours. From what is happening in the farms that collect beans for your coffee, to what is happening to the most vulnerable members of your own community.

We are told that people used to sit and beg for scraps of food on your streets, while others adorned in jewels and expensive fabrics would walk by, avoiding their eyes. It is not that you do not know what is happening, or that you do not understand the effects of climate change, poverty, discrimination, or mass species extinction. Your world is drowning in facts, figures, and statistics - the problem is that you cannot bear to look at those facts. You cannot bear to look at the beggar on your street in his eyes, because you fear the pain that it will strike inside your heart. Is it true that your society seeks pleasure, bliss and happiness in a way that is almost manic and desperate? That is your wilful ignorance. Happiness is not a destination; it is a fleeting state of mind that we must welcome, but trying to live in constant bliss is madness. Is it true that those of you who allow the pain and suffering into your hearts were labelled as defective, and sent to doctors or given medicines to try alleviating the visions? Those are your prophets and sages. Nurture them, listen to them, care for them and give them the space to train their gifts. These people are valued within my community, because they sensethings that others can’t and are vital in planning our next steps.

Your world is upside down. You venerate your insane and lock away the only ones who truly see things as they are. Your leaders are tyrants; they hoard wealth and resources for themselves while living in complete disconnection with the land and with their own hearts.

We cannot understand how you allowed them to rape the earth for the fleeting benefit of a few; did they do it in secret? Did they distract you? Did they keep you so poor that you had no time or means to fight back? Or was it just your wilful ignorance?

But opening your hearts to pain and fear is not enough. You need to open your minds, too.The Creator gave you a brain capable of producing miracles, and yet you fail to see that without electricity, your nuclear facilities will fail and pour toxic waste into the oceans and waters. You fail to consider the long-term impact of your actions, or to ask yourselves what will happen to the thousands of satellites in your sky when the systems that tell them where to go finally fail. When we hear of the amazing technology that was available in your time, we can only ask ourselves – was this truly a lack of intelligence on your behalf, or was it wilful ignorance?

My friends, I hope you will not turn away from my words with that same wilful ignorance that destroyed the planet. If my words sound harsh, then that is precisely a part of the problem – your world has trained you to tune out things that cause you discomfort, and to seek only the warm embrace of praise and validation.

When you open your heart to the earth’s pain, you will receive far more than you expected.You will receive the full blessings of living with an open heart; an existence far more colourful and deeper than you can imagine. To risk heartbreak is also to live fully, and it is only if you allow yourselves to live with open minds and hearts, rather than trying to avoid the discomfort, that you will have any hope of altering the course of history.

Full name: Gwyneth Jones

Age: 33 (don’t know if I am “young” enough to be counted as the youth, haha)

A bio: Gwyneth Jones grew up in the magical lands of North Wales, although she currently lives in Prague, Czech Republic. She considers herself a hippie, science nerd, amateur gardener, eco-activist, Positive Psychology and Emotional Intelligence Coach, writer, Work That Reconnects facilitator, host of The Way We Connect podcast, and founder of the Reconnection Revolution group. Gwyneth hopes that we can transition away from the industrial growth society that is destroying our planet and towards a compassionate and sustainable world, but only if we reconnect deeply with ourselves, each other and Nature. (www.gwynethjones.coach)

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