wet forest moon folklorist
trying to reconcile the future i want with the future we're facing is like having one foot on land and one foot in an untethered boat sliding away in the current.
at some point my body is not strong enough to hold the boat to shore.
at that point i have to let go once again and find footing on different ground
wet forest moon folklorist
this gets me closer to a more universal human condition. nothing has ever been certain for human beings. suffering has always been on the horizon for human beings. injustice has always lived alongside and within.
some of us have lived under the illusion that order or certainty was a birthright, an illusion we might now call privilege. releasing that privilege creates community, and community is the real boat for humans and always has been
Paul Cantrell
@seachanger
Indeed, and putting both feet on that boat does not lead to a better future. It leads to a desire to detach from reality, to destroy. Utopianism is secretly a form of nihilism.
Your answer — community, and within it, a commitment to always doing the work of making our world as it is a better one, endlessly, out to infinity — is a far better one.
wet forest moon folklorist
@inthehands i still think of this as utopian. i recognize it's a fraught term but i'm not sure what can replace it. community itself is so often created by the act of dreaming of more beautiful futures!
Paul Cantrell
@seachanger
There’s a phrase from José Esteban Muñoz via Avery Trufelman that I keep repeating: “Utopia as a direction, not a destination.”
Paul Cantrell
@seachanger
Yup yup! Found the original context where I heard the quote: the Nice Try podcast, season 1, the “Herland” episode, starting around 30:00:
https://archive.curbed.com/2019/5/7/18514684/nice-try-podcast-utopian-avery-trufelman
I recommend the whole series.
wet forest moon folklorist
@inthehands i like that. the biggest grift from our culture is making so many things into nouns which are actually verbs. we want certainty but there is only change. time to let go of des cartes
Keith Ammann @ PAX Unplugged
@inthehands @seachanger Many years ago, I formulated a similar thought: We will never stand on the North Star, but we still steer by it.
Paul Cantrell
@KeithAmmann @seachanger
That’s lovely.
As the discussion from Nice Try says, the trouble with trying to “stand on the North Star” is that we always learn and things always change, and thus the “North Star” always moves. And since the actual IRL North Star moves too, your metaphor works!
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