Others have asked for my help and I’ve given it, just as on occasion I’ve asked for and received theirs. We do what we can, and we honor each other’s rights to limit, qualify, and refuse. Sometimes an ask is for more than one can give. We apologize and move on, trusting that where the one cannot, the many can. Step outside: it’s a lovely world! Pretty birds trill atop hills here at Dada’s House. With the mushroom, so too with all other things that prompt trips: “One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter.” So sayeth the Caterpillar to Alice amid the latter’s adventure in Wonderland.
Tag: Giving
Tuesday February 4, 2020
What do we mean by rebellion? Government by election is illegitimate, the numbers and the games played with them suspect. Time for ontological rebellion, refusal of consent to another’s determination of reality. Time to write and perform alternate scripts. Take value-determination away from the money-form. Reject the count en masse. By that I mean the Census. That which can’t count can’t rule. Collectively, in groups, drop out of the count. Drop out of buying and drop into giving. Create an alternative narrative reality. Turn every house into a freehouse, a treehouse, an Undercommons, a tribal encampment. Those who have land, give land. Start communes. Queer language. Historicize it, romanticize it, poeticize it, improvise with it, cast spells with it. Disobey those who police it. Craft new states of being. Provide for the needs of others. Teach. Parent. Use love and generosity to coordinate local gift-exchange. And support those who take to the pipelines and the streets. Water defenders, metro fare protestors. Rise up, act out. Decolonize this place.
Wednesday January 29, 2020
I wish to become a better giver of gifts. Remembering to do so and doing so. Where does one find them? Doesn’t one have to acquire in order to give? Or can one give things received in language? Special words, like those spoken in Julius Lester’s folk tale, “People Who Could Fly.”
Monday January 27, 2020
Witness from micro and macro perspectives, spiral galaxies of charitable giving. Countless acts of gift and receipt. For these are what make the world go ’round. Gifts appear at all scales of being, to be had and to be given. Food, flowers, books, recommendations, playlists. Words, too, as gifts exchanged among worlds, nations, persons, human and nonhuman relatives and kin. Which, however, are the ones that need saying?
Sunday January 5, 2020
A beautiful afternoon — a time to celebrate after several days of rain. Though even those have been wonderful: F. sleeping in my lap, or with her head resting on my shoulder. Sarah writing thank yous as friends and family visit us, bestow gifts on us, and feed us, local friends and colleagues having established for us a meal train. A circle of giving. Freedom is ours when we join and grow these circles of reciprocity. Extend the giving outward through the polis and the cosmos. Support the Sanders bid for the presidency. Make the vote count. Correct the outcome of 1972. Participate, too, in the antiwar movement. Make its number swell.
Trance-Scripts 