The System Doesn’t Want Us to Be Well
April 4, Airplane Home, My Journal
I’m watching the ads in the airport, the movies available on the plane, the coffee and the alcohol in so many cups as we sit 35,000 feet over the blue, gulf waters. It is a constant barrage of promised happiness, over here or over there. The amount of inputs one has to refuse in their attention in just a single day to maintain some connection to who they really are. The system is so antithetical to our wellness. Stripped of all our capacities to tune in and know what we really long for. And then our own inherent ability to live into such a longing, by the very nature of it being there.
These feelings are familiar to me, and they’re becoming more refined — more encompassed. I wonder where they’ll lead. I have the mind and heart to live and create something different — in both the very way I and we live our lives — and how I use my lifeforce to create pathways for others to walk. Could a structure be built for people to be well? For a multitude of diversity of life — in preference, expression, knowing — to feed each another? That uniqueness is the greatest threat to a monocropped culture. What is a container for our wildness where each person’s knowing and distinct expression is given power? What is the antidote, through a more enlivened offering, to post-capitalist modernity?
5/13, Home, My Journal
We all must long to know where we come from, no? To find the stories of a time when each of our peoples were well — full of agency to survive and sovereignty over how this would be so. To when our children were cared for and our elders didn’t die alone. To when our security came with the relationships to the seeds we kept that fed us. Oh, yes. We must all be yearning for these stories somewhere in our hearts. To know that it was possible. To hear the stories of strength and resilience before modern-day comfort told us it could all be easy. To re-find the laws of the natural order that we thrived within for tens of thousands of years.
Of course, we’re told the opposite. Savages. Barbarians. Filth. Starvation. Dying Children. Those tales as the hatchet to the thread to all that came before us. How else could we be convinced to live such a lie if we knew what we really once were, before conquest for the sake of feeding a system that will never have enough. We’re hungry to hold that Life back in our hands — some whisper of a reminder that all we need is right here. It must be possible — this moment and this unfilled longing and this return must be written into this time here. There must be some way to re-weave that thread. Some thing must be touchable here. Or, I wouldn’t feel it in my heart to long for.
