antidote to helplessness
encounters with birds and the joy of more-than-human kinship
yesterday i felt on edge all day. this heart has been in a continuous heartbreak for years. witnessing genocides, humans decimate each other, relationships of enmity, ecosystems collapse, war-as-a-state of being is clawing at everything we hold sacred.
i listened to a Palestinian friend who was arrested for posting something on Facebook (!!) detailing their experience in israeli torture chambers and the indescribable screams of other Palestinian inmates, political prisoners.
watching what’s unfolding in Lebanon as the Zionist entity transport its policy of life-to-gravel from Gaza to the next spacio-temporal location as black oil rains upon the people of Tehran following empire’s bombardment of their refineries.
it’s hard, it’s all so unbearable.
i ventured out to the land project we are working on to seek refuge, to take a breath and to get some work done, i could feel my nervous system on edge all day, i don’t think these bodies of ours are very good at telling the difference between experiencing the boot of oppression directly or bearing witness to it.
but than, i saw her. we found her tiny little body entangled in some metal net that was laying around. she let us pick her and seemed more grateful and slightly in sock than scared. she jumped from my friend’s hand to mine with ease, i carefully held her, softly brushing my finger against her soft feathers and with every stroke i felt a bit of the black thick residue of helplessness leave my body.
oh little creature…if you only knew how precious this moment is for me…i thought as tears were climbing up my throat.
i came in, heart shattered, now the heart is very much still shattered and there’s much to be done, but i also feel the sweetness of being a creature among creatures. of being with kin.
i wanted this moment to never end. she slowly gained back her confidence and jumped to my shoulder, as if preparing me gently for her immanent departure. as if saying “my dear one, everything must go but we are all, always with you.”
this is an especially surreal encounter for me ever since i started leaving all the hair that is coming off when i am brushing on the window sill as offering to the birds so they can build their nests with it and was longing for such connection.
tell me this world is not entirely alive and animated…
on my way back, with Luna, my more consistent fur kin sitting in the back seat of the truck, i reflected on this encounter and on how accidental and intentional relations with the more-than-human all around us are potent antidote to helplessness.
i also thought about on how kinship stands in stark contradiction to the relations-without-desire of Capital.
the state of terror, these relations of enmity, the fantasies of the Other that devolves out human worlds into despair and destruction and how they are all internalized and inscribed in our bodies, all come crushing very quickly in the face of a pup’s innocence, a bird’s song, the theatrical grandeur of a deer’s antlers or the whimsy of a dog’s thrill before each walk outside as if its the first walk they ever took in their lives.
of course these relations can materialize as no more than a hobby that gives us warm and fuzzy feelings, i don’t think that everyone who loves animals is immediately revolutionary, but it also points us to something else entirely yet very possible if we only take the route.
we are a specie suffering from collective disconnect. in our drive for comfort and luxury we have blurred the boundaries between the Real of the biosphere and the Phantasm of the beyond; between our eternal subordination and inter-connectivity to the forces of Nature and the fantasy of transcending its bare materiality.
a state of extraction has replaced kinship.
extraction as a governing social principle only know the language of the exchangeable, can only account for that which is measured in value against Capital gain. yet life, and all that’s worth preserving in it exists in a realm of the Singular, that which is simply what it is and cannot be measured or exchanged for anything else.
these encounters with the more-than-human are Singular. they infuse life with exactly all that is worth living for but impossible to quantify.
Capital sees a life form and measure it based on how much money-value can be extracted from it and its energy in exchange.
Kinship sees a life form, feels a life form, senses a life form and that is the entire point.
Capital are relations without Desire for all life force is sexualized, abstracted into simulated representations of Things-to-want, infused with Lack. Always teased, never fully and wonderfully fucked.
Kinship are relations of only Desire. Creative life force for its own sake. Nothing to strive for and always being had, ravished by aliveness.
Kinship relationships with the more-than-human all around us an an antidote to the institutionalized helplessness of extraction.
she jumped off my shoulder, flew away and disappeared in the thick canopy, but the essence of this encounter remains, the becoming-animal.
thank you little friend, may you find all the most delicious insects and spiders and may my hair offerings be of use.