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blueprint for an ecosystem or a hierarchy of needs:
I MUST LOVE
I MUST SURVIVE
where our survival is reception of love and our love is selfless action for others’ survival and the head eats the tail forever and is satiated and contented.
I must survive, but can I recognize the difference between love and a paywall?
between care and extraction?
between connection and marketing?
can I recognize the difference between community and grindset? Many things feel true and genuine as we create and share them, but what gets watered down in the checking for engagement, likes and comments and shares and sharing and sharing and sharing. And sharing is caring.
“Sharing is caring” – as an artist/thought leader/influencer/cult leader/grifter (where are you on the spectrum?) might say to a community member/fan/follower/victim.
REFLECTION ACTIVITY (where i have assumed your answers for you):
what exactly would you like your followers to share and why? (and are you surviving yet?)
is that your definition of care? of love?
is survival revenue? is love revenue? (a square may be a rectangle but a rectangle is not a square)
how important is it to you to feel knowledgeable and important? powerful? recognized and praised for any number of things you hope to value about yourself? Safe?
are you afraid?
maybe we do not yell and debate and declare, or charge for our yelling and debating and declaring, out of love nor survival, but rather fear and scarcity and fear of scarcity.
“Lets get in community with one another.” “Community isn’t the right word.” “Actually you are wrong community is the right word.” I am in community with some but not others for this reason and that reason and these reasons. This is hollow that is hollow we are all performative performing performing.
Yes. Its hollow. But the words are there… the concepts still float somewhere beyond their shells we hold empty to fill with coins we can scrounge that we think will help us survive because we are afraid. And we know something tangible sits just beyond us and perhaps the path is clear but...
the path is also full of distractions, not coins, as we tear down the things we have only ever known to be true yet are a lie. as we watch in horror and fear while reality shifts and contradicts or affirms our core beliefs. while we are getting lost in the forest for the trees – pounding down the definition of “right relationship” and “community” and what is or isn’t this thing or that thing until we have extrapolated past the point… we have talked and talked and talked like only the utmost privileged may in a tea parlor, even heated discussion at times, and we have not paid attention - the space around us has emptied, those who could not spend their days theorizing have long since been taken away. The parlor chairs are being removed and thrown to a fire, the lights are being dimmed, we are being dragged out by our feet as we cling to our last hot takes and overcorrections and recalibrations and definitions. And the illusion and greed and conditions for love have come to kill us all.
no, the absence of this is not anarchy. and anarchy is not synonymous with chaos.
I SHALL DECLARE, AS A HYPOCRITE, THAT:
dreaming of liberation cannot be done under the green glow of light-polluting dollar signs. you cannot market your way into community with others. we don’t need another think piece (THIS ONE! THIS ONE!) on how exactly to do community with one another – and no, you don’t need to touch grass (good for you, amirite - take care of your SELF, right?). you need to join hands, dig through soil.
and shut up.
perhaps you do put your mask on before you help others put theirs on. perhaps there is speech required for this coordination. But coordination speech is not declarative, selfish speech. it is a curiosity, a question, and an answer.
and once your hands grasp another, do not speak more debate or declaration or burden them with questions that have been answered in places you haven’t sought. rather, do the next thing that needs to be done. allow your hands to be guided to the next task. allow the others to talk in the room around you, and you listen and your response is to keep your hands in the work. if you must speak, repeat the assignment over and over. but you must be quiet now. our privilege is our ever-more-granular discourse when the words we need to hear have already been spoken and written and plastered as graffiti on the walls of crumbling buildings (whether abandonment, gentrification, bombed out).
stay quiet and then stay quiet again and then again until you feel you may turn purple in the face if you don’t say something soon – and then remain silent once more until you can finally hear it…
there in the distance, do you hear that? Focus on it.
not a single sound, but many, rising in chorus. voices that have already laid a foundation, that are telling you exactly what they need from experience embodied longer than you have existed.
we are amplifying the dreams and parables and wisdom teachings of liberation that have already begun carving the path at countless times throughout our collective histories.
we don’t need more thought leaders and influencers, we need hands on deck, deferring to those who already know the way. we need stamina.
we need a soft determination to simply see the next task to its completion.
BUT HOW CAN I ADVOCATE? HOW CAN I AMPLIFY? WITHOUT LIFTING MY VOICE?
your voice is in your hands
the assignment is a wordless action is a message: I love you unconditionally. I will always love you unconditionally. You inherently deserve my unconditional love.
and when you say this it will be a lie, because all we have are conditions. but you must say it anyway and it is the only thing you must say and it must be from the side of the mouth where you cannot be bothered to look up from where your hands
do
the
work,
slick with the sweat dripping from your brow. the work is dissolving condition so that love can fill all spaces like warm soup ladled into a cup. blankets filling the blank spots between a beautiful body and the street.
and when you have actually worked, someone will come to relieve you when the time is right. they will say to rest and they will pick up the work and you will say I love you and it will be true.
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