Oh Those Alluring Cracks

“There is an abyss opening up before us. It challenges everything we thought we knew about our culture and about nature. We need to look into it and concentrate on what we can see. —Paul Kingsnorth

In case one hasn’t yet noticed, stunning cracks are opening everywhere. We keep being invited to descend underground, to get chthonic, to put a pause on our paving over. The gashes are love letters to extraordinary projects of collusion with sacred untended griefs and extra-vagant (walking beyond) desires.

The ones about which no one dares speak.

We come to realize we didn’t even want presidents/prisons/poisons/patriarchy. We come to discover the foundational myths were lies layered upon lies. A lithographic scam. We reluctantly come to the conclusion that we must become traitors to inherited scripts.

No, we don’t want what’s been sold as possible—We long for impossible inevitabilities. Inevitable beause they were already in us. Down in the dark places, where the new light is born.

Some sucking wondrous wound in us knew this, but like most self/non-self-revelations, it comes barking at 3am, goes to sleep, dreams a while, wakes up with the certainty of a lightning strike, the clarity of ash kin falling from the sky. It arrives with the non-negotiability of an osprey’s talons and grandmother’s healing spit.

An inquiry poured into us, asking just when no one is looking:

How is all this comfort, this certainty, this drive to control being subsidized? What walls suffocate the wonder? What violence required to maintain our prisons? What suffering and losses are balancing the books that we refuse to gaze upon?

The choirs of crevices are singing. Will we stumble into those generous cracks with a grin or a grimace? Will we notice the difference? Rather: Will we notice differently?

Or will we kiss the siren’s cheek as we lay our heads down in the lap of the known?

We just might find ourselves instigating inchoate insurgencies of imaginations beyond empire.

Motivating mutant mutinies against mass-incarcerated magics.

Cajoling co-liberatory composting of colonial coordinates.

Cracks start so small, don’t they? A trickle, via wayward gravitation pull. And gravity rides everything.

Then one day, we’re peering into the attractive abyss of a grand canyon.

Thankfully, we can’t defeat erosion. The cracks are here.

Will we continue to look away? Or will we ally ourselves with what they promise?