“WE DON’T NEED GUNS, WE NEED FIRE EXTINGUISHERS” —The EMT shouting this while police held his gun on Aaron as he burned. That is what we’re all screaming.
It is clear: the world is aflame, and only our sacred grief and unlawful love can put the fires out.
From the burnt skin of Hind to the burnt skin of Aaron—these are the fires around which we must gather to return to the web of life.
It is clear: only our creative maladjustment to evil systems can move us off the extinction trajectory.
It is clear: only our gratuitous disobedience can take us off this Highway of Death.
It is clear: only our divestment from Empire can call the hungry ghosts home.
It is clear: we must be dissenters of ‘law,’ in order for sanity to return.
It is clear: Only by becoming traitors to this system, can a new system grow.
It’s clear: only our deep noncooperation with ‘authority’ can put the fires out.
It is clear: the world is aflame, and only our sacred grief and unlawful love can put the fires out.
It’s only a matter of deep time before your dreams come to claim you. To see how you might hold them.
It’s not up to you how they decide to arrive.
It’s only for you to decide to Unrust your Hinges and enter or not.
Every doorway is a threshold—the limen, in Latin. It’s the bottom part of the door and gives us the word liminality, the betwixt & between, passage between two stages.
We sever to make space for what is arriving.
Outside to inside & vice versa.
Sometimes what is leaving IS what is arriving— but shapeshifted with a new look in its eyes.
They might be our own.
That crossing is the key—Magic happens here. All the good deaths & births acquire flesh.
That’s Threshold Living. To live in the door of the moment, knowing everything is perpetual departure and everything is perpectual arriving.
We the yearning ones live for tender intervals thin as new feathers, thick as a feast of hearts.
A brief entree of Sun breaks through, inviting me to the bank for a dip. I recline on rocks reading the grammar of Water’s flow – they come in glyphs of slow swirls and quick sentences that are gone before I can read them. Some things are not meant to be frozen into prisons of meaning-making.
As is my habit, I put my palms on the surface, feeling the vitality of this mysterious being, blessing Water: “‘May you thrive and flow where you need to.”
This River in particular needs this, though perhaps it’s an invocation for all of us.
A different grammar above: two military jets blast over, their earth-rumbling, body-permeating roar persists long after they are visible. This is not uncommon in southern desert lands, as military bases & artillery ranges are scattered across hundreds of miles, stitched between “protected” lands.
I try to pretend it doesn’t bother me. I have a Buddha’s peace-of-mind, I tell myself. But it gets in.
Damn it, every time I hear a military jet now, I think of the ones over Gaza. And of the kites the kids who survive are flying. Spontaneously, I find myself uttering out loud to River, to Sky, to anyone who might listen, “How can we move beyond this wretched Empire?”
Immediately, I hear in return or from somewhere: “You must starve the beast. Feed beauty instead.”
Stop feeding the Beast. Fueling it. Investing in it. Economically, emotionally, spiritually. Divest In all ways.
It reminds me of Arundhati Roy saying, “Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.”
Coyotes yip-yaw Sun back behind a paragraph of clouds. A storm is brewing. Wind kicks up as Sky darkens. I race back to camp.
What much of SoCal has already been experiencing is finally arriving with a dust storm as preface. My chair and table flips over, dishes fly into the arrowweed brush.
I scramble to tie things down, & cozy up in my van, which is shaking.
It’s a reminder: elemental forces can transform things quickly, a truth which actually fills me with some foundational comfort, a dark green trust.
It may have to wait til morning to retrieve what Wind shook loose. What River flowed. What nourishment that is usually given to the Beast was fed to Beauty.
And ain’t we continuously in the practice of retrieving what the Beast stole?
Among the many learnings from the borderlands: border militarization is a monstrosity, whether here or in Palestine. It is foundationally dehumanizing and part of a larger imperial capitalist class war on people and land.
In the Arizona borderlands, hundreds of people die or disappear every year. The remains of 4,000+ people have been found since 2000. The State has absolutely no problem with people dying in the desert. And as we’re seeing with the barbaric stunts of the Texas governor, no problem with people getting sliced up or drowning in the river, & used as political pawns in the process.
It’s vital in any conversation about the border or immigration to ask upstream questions like: why are there so many leaving their homes to go north?
Just as neoliberal economic restructuring created the conditions for massive rural displacement by flooding Mexico with cheap corn, hogs, etc, (e.g., NAFTA in 1994), the U.S. ‘Prevention Through Deterrence’ policies create conditions where people are forced to traverse some the harshest landscapes.
Even in just my own desert meanders, I found random personal items & clothes, & couldn’t help but imagine what must motivate people to walk so far through unforgiving terrain. If they are still alive and if so, where are they now?
It’s heartening so many groups have sprouted up to provide humanitarian relief & harm reduction to asylum-seekers & migrants, like No More Deaths/No Mas Muertes, Ajo Samaritans, Border Kindness, and Humane Borders.
Border Patrol loathes the humanity of these groups, & intentionally sabotages them, whether through intimidation, arresting volunteers, or actively destroying water caches in the desert. Yep, there are videos of BP shooting or punching holes in water containers and canned food.
It reminds me of the videos we’re seeing now of Israeli citizens blocking food aid into Gaza, a population being mass starved as a tool of genocide.
Viewing the warm, colorful murals in the small town of Ajo was heartening, a contrast to the razor wire and armored and armed men that occupy the borderlands. As James Baldwin said, “The world is held together, really it is, held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people.”
Rumi and the Shadow 