superpowers activated
I’ve been reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass very slowly for the past few weeks. The book explores the relationship between Indigenous wisdom and scientific knowledge to cultivate a re-understanding of the world and our relationship/s to it. There is — inherently — a magical-ness that sweeps and overwhelms your senses when re/discovering the historical and sacred knowledge of this earth, of this world, knowledge that has been tenderly cared for, loved and preserved by generations. It is — by far— one of the most beautiful books I have ever read.
I have been thinking a lot about poetics and the beauty we find in words to form the perfect sentence or a string of thoughts that feel like the sun or the moon or the potentiality and might of a galaxy. It is an intimate act, that of translating a feeling into an understanding, history into earth, knowledge into the world.
“It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that the Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination."
— Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I am left thinking of all the ways of knowing, all the historical articulations of our understandings of this world that have been willed not by science or history but by way of the poetic, by way of beauty, by way of spirituality, by way of magic.
I am left thinking of Sylvia Wynter who I hear again and again and again screaming from the rooftops.
“Human beings are magical. Bios and Logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities […] And the maps of spring always have to be redrawn again, in undared forms.”
— Sylvia Wynter
Our language, reconstructed from an insistence to expand in this world and the hereafter, is as wide as the sea, as all encompassing as the trees, for generations yet to come, for a belief in the unknown, for faith, for hope, for undared forms, for the that which will have had to happen and that which will be again.
and I am but a believer, again and again and again, always in the magic that we are and always in the magic that we will be.
*short and sweet to close out the year. thank you so much for being alongside me for this ride. may you use your powers responsibly (lol do whatever the fuck you want to do with them) and to say, see you on the other side xx
anyways, here are some other readings that touched my heart this week:
