In search of a field

Dear One,

It feels fortuitous that I pulled the Judgement card during the same lunar cycle that the US Supreme court ruled, in the words of Ibram X. Kendi, that “‘straight only’ businesses are legit, and policies leading to racial and economic equity are not legit.”

In the waxing crescent I heard Rumi’s quote about the field beyond right-doing and wrong-doing. It gave way to some reflection about what it was like to first encounter the Manitoba landscape. There was a moment in the first or second year of my arrival here where I remember looking over a desert-scape of snow, and felt like the land provided me with the mental space I needed to help my mind process my thoughts.

This quote by Rumi, combined with Bayo Akomolafe’s insight that “how we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis” has helped me pause while processing the Supreme Court’s decision.

This lunar cycle I am wondering about this field Rumi talks about. I am asking if I personally, and if we collectively, need a non-binary vision of judgment?

Since 2016 when I watched the fault-line in the two party system open up seemingly beyond repair, I have been unsettled. For the first time in my personal life I found myself at great odds with people I loved. These lines only entrenched and deepened during the civil protests of 2020.

One of many unsettling things that weighed on me throughout this time was how I could believe I was so right, and other were so wrong, knowing those I was in opposition to also felt the same.

I couldn’t wrap my head around it without feeling like I was abandoning notions of justice all together.

This Buck moon cycle finds me in a place where I can begin to ponder a world outside the binary of right-doing and wrong-doing.

Maybe there is a field. Maybe it is the binary, the “tarred lonely highways of truth” as Bayo says, that is the problem. In other words, “The problem is the problem. The person or community is not the problem.”

Civic society has not provided irresistible alternatives for both the activist and the non-activist – or at least provided the conditions for the emergence of these possibilities. We have become highly corporatized – only seeing the changes that could come from behind the lenses of our roles and bureaucratic processes.

The Times are Urgent: Let’s Slow Down–Bayo Akomolafe

So, as this lunar cycle comes to a close, I am making a wish.

I am wishing for myself, and for us all, new visions of judgements. Something to wake the dead. Something past the death spiral of shame and guilt the system creates. Something that is a vital life force that weaves the web of life rather than divides it.

I am looking for something new, something emergent. A “place of alternative political imaginaries“. Maybe it will look like noise. Maybe it will feel “wrong” or wild. Maybe I am looking for something fugitive.

Can I even imagine what I am looking for when it is so far outside my experience? Will I know the field when I find it?

I hope so.

With love and deep longing,

Alexandra