Co-Weaving Words Beyond Empire

Something we do in some of the Wild Nature Heart classes is an activity called Co-Weaving Words: collect a handful of resonant words/phrases from each participant then create collective poems from this basket of words, using mostly only these words, like ingredients in a collective cauldron. They represent a weaving of our collective truths, as a way of integrating what come through into a shared fabric.

Below is one from last week’s Write Against Empire.

We’re having a second round of Write Against Empire this Sunday evening, and Earth Intimacies Tuesday. The first is for people carrying grief, rage, clarity and confusion, and imagination in a time of imperial violence, lies, and psychic exhaustion. Together we write from the body and heart—not to perform despair or draft polite appeals to power, but to metabolize what is happening and let our language become a tool of orientation, refusal, and possibility.

Reality is up for grabs and I rebuke
Empire—

i make no false move, but rather
normalize the soil of the new
normalize saying “I don’t comply with lies”
normalize human emotions:
i CAN yell and scream
I CAN have tea with a friend on a Tuesday afternoon
I CAN cultivate gardens
of attention and my body knows
attention is tending is my love

my dreams told me everyone dresses
for their own joy
my rage does not wear a tie
my language does not exile
i am not separate from earth
and something in me is so tired of pretending

reality is up for grabs and I rebuke
Empire

my body is not confused about
the department of war
the department of collective turmoil
the department of dreams
the department of emancipatory imagination

Look: thinks are not ok.
and my body knows
it is time for rest it is time
it is time for enplayment it is time
it is time for shared humanity it is time
it is time for languages of truth it is time
it is time to rebuke empire
and my body knows
love
and my body knows
i am not separate from earth
my body knows
separation is a myth
and my body knows
and my body knows

Something in me is so tired
of pretending