----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
I love starting up again responding to Margaratha’s question within love’s reach, inviting into the realm of being noticed all of the numinous amazement and enchantment of relationships in my particular noöshed here and now: the raspberries drying enough to be picked after days of rain; the sugar maples starting to flame at the tips (that I can now SEE because of the wondrous carpenters who have repaired my windows and doors after catastrophic rain); the shared affinity I am discovering as I shepherd a classful of curious students through a process started by a neighborhood group to replant a prairie, and to figure out what it means to decolonize a state landscape; efforts the free vegetable garden group is making to figure out what we can OFFER each time we seek to harvest.
Especially feeling these relations out for size and fragility in this week’s frame of radical aesthetics of multispecies worlding and ecological art, I am also really struck by the insight: We leave shit everywhere. Usually this isn’t a good thing, from our point of view, and from those we’ve shat on: we’re losing things, we’re sullying. But as part of our studies in making a liberation garden, we’ve been reading some texts from Buddhist interpretations of liberation and ecology that suggest interesting inversions toward more accountable relations that could be made of our bad and traumatizing habits. In Shohaku Okamura’s /Living by Vow/, he describes “Emptiness” as meaning “moving and changing moment by moment,” and notes, in contrast to our tendencies to try to control and hold our shit together, that “When we open our hands, we see that everything we need is an offering from nature. If we have something extra, we offer it to others.” So thinking about Randall’s affectionate practices, Lissette’s struggle to translate disparate affect, and Antonio’s slow and concrete building of shared affinity, solidarity and political alignment, I wonder what composting of our shit we can engage in that opens us more wholeheartedly to moment by moment living with open hands, and how radically this could make us able to share rootspace better. Valentine On Sat, Oct 7, 2017 at 12:41 PM, margaretha haughwout < margaretha.anne.haughw...@gmail.com> wrote: > > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- > Hello all, > > I'm driving across the northeast today, watching trees head into dormancy, and thinking about the conversation that has begun this week. Lots to reply to. I look forward to catching up fully this evening and tomorrow -- > > In the meantime, a question for all of -empyre-:: > > What relations are you cultivating with on-humans at the moment? I have just moved, so my relationships are new and fragile: > > hawthorn tree at my studio > crabapples, apples behind my house > wild apples at colleagues house > mouse behind my oven > chamomile and brassicas in my greenhouse > > boneset in the trails > joe pye weed in the marshes > > to name a few > > -- > beforebefore.net > guerrillagrafters.org > coastalreadinggroup.com > -- > > > > _______________________________________________ > empyre forum > empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au > http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
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