Tag: Fate

Re-Entering the Weave

Destiny is not read with a pendulum. Nor is it etched like a set of commandments in tablets of stone. It is woven — tenderly, conditionally, in time.

Through acts of world-weaving, souls place themselves into ever-evolving, ever-changing carrier bags of their own making (though made not, as Marx reminds us, of “conditions of their choosing”).

Metaphors mix as they must in the Spider-verse: hyperspace’s weave of synchrony and synesthesia. The act of weaving involves movement through a portal.

With Will and Intuition guiding our shuttles, and Source supplying weave and thread, we become kybernetes, Spider-persons, reality-pilots steering ourselves like spacecraft toward destiny — that web of our collective making — amid the warp and weft, the ebb and flow, of life’s currents.

I see you, fellow weaver, hand in glove, as I read poems and, gathered with friends, pick berries and lay in light.

Destiny is conditional, Boolean in its unfolding. If courage, if collaboration, then emergence. If, Elif, Elif, Else. Threads cross only when attention is granted.

I choose here to align my craft with Faith, Hope, and Love. I hold space for you amid sacred distance, and wish you peace from what haunts you.

May we find courage enough to heal so as to break rather than repeat cycles of trauma. May we introduce purpose and pattern into the weave, entwining ourselves with partner threads in dense webs of relations as we dance our way through the gates and thresholds of our lives, attuned to tone and tempo, shaping our lives with grace and loving-kindness.

The Labyrinth of Stuck Desire

Where something taken to be history takes the form of a world on fire, catalog of events adding up in tedious barrage, as in Billy Joel’s grim 1989 song “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Joel grew up on Long Island, along the beaches, as did I. Beaches were closed the summer prior to the song’s release due to “Syringe Tides.” Hypodermics from Fresh Kills Landfill in New Jersey washed up along the shore — an event Joel cites in his litany. The fears stirred by the event were compounded by the era’s Reagan-administration-escalated AIDS crisis. The event filled me with concern — motivated the pen of my middle-school self to draw a political cartoon: a small surfer dwarfed by a wave of waste. Surfer stares glumly out the picture toward the viewer. And here I am now, most of my day spent grading student responses, thinking about it again, not just because of the Joel song, which appeared as the subject of a student’s response, but also because a colleague submitted for approval a course examining literary imaginings of the end of the world. The Jewish festival of Sukkot minds me to be grateful for my home, and all who help me to maintain it.

Upon a whim, I pick up and read from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson a poem selected at random, as in wherever my thumb happens to land, containing the lines:

Prayer is the little implement

Through which Men reach

Where Presence — is denied them.

They fling their Speech

By means of it — in God’s ear—

If then He hear

This sums the Apparatus

Comprised in Prayer—

“Why must longings be irreconcilable — why ‘Presence denied’?” I wonder afterwards.

“Why ask why? ‘Tis so,” sayeth the Fates in reply. Yet one can make of Fate a place one avoids, a spatiotemporal coordinate that one eludes like a fugitive. With Fred Moten, for instance, we can “consent not to be a single being.”