Mow the lawn
goes the tune
of much of the afternoon.
And when not mowing,
I’m grading,
eyes roving
toward evening
whereupon,
once arrived,
I watch a show of discovery:
witches
outing and moving out
half-woke
via cauda pavonis—
prima materia transmuted,
person transformed—
grass a kind of catalyst.
What will come of this summer of black lives mattering? Black reading lists are making the rounds, black-led movements are marching and protesting and rioting in the streets; money has been gathered in impressive amounts for black organizations and black-owned businesses. Consider now what comes after. What have we joined? Where are we headed? What comes next? Reality is a bath, a soup shaped by the tug and pull of bodies and forces, large and small. Worlds arise and transform the same way caterpillars transform into butterflies.
Strong is the power of ideology — but we’re changing, we’re slipping out from under the latter’s grip. Dancing in the streets. The tasks ahead seem massive but thrilling. Time to learn how to make of the lawn a garden. Purchase the tools one needs and get to it. Convert this place into a permaculture Oikos, a multiplayer bower of bliss.
As parents, we become, undergo metamorphosis, transform into the worlds of our children. Through our actions, we model better natures, better worlds. Hopes manifest, consciousness redoubles upon species-being — and upon waking, sees before its very eyes a better state. We change by projecting upon the mind’s eye dreams other than those programmed into us by History.
Set-pieces shift, the life-world around one rearranging in turn-based “moves” day by day, until a pathway materializes, the horizon opening to admit a hopeful future. In the meantime, we practice. That is the Way.
I sit beside Sarah at a town pool, the two of us drying in the air after a swim. A small green insect lands on my leg. We consider each other for a few moments, each one absorbing the other’s fear, processing it internally, transmuting it, releasing it back as love. I’m reminded of Maslow’s claim that each of us contains two sets of forces. “One set,” he writes, “clings to safety and defensiveness out of fear, tending to regress backward, hanging on to the past, afraid to grow away from the primitive communication with the mother’s uterus and breast, afraid to take chances, afraid to jeopardize what [one] already has, afraid of independence, freedom and separateness. The other set of forces impels [us] forward toward wholeness of Self and uniqueness of Self, toward full functioning of all [one’s] capacities, toward confidence in the face of the external world at the same time that [one] can accept [one’s] deepest, real, unconscious Self” (Toward a Psychology of Being, p. 46). Pool days are delightful. Look at us, sun-soaked, unfolding outward, discovering new capacities, refining old ones, becoming. The metamorphosis has begun.
I sometimes sort among aporia: irresolvable questions, internal debates, cosmological Rubik’s Cubes, beanstalks into clouds of abstraction. I feel pulled along sometimes, burdened by daily conditions and daily demands on my labor. Sometimes I think of it as “capitalism” — these conditions, my condition. How do we cheer ourselves? How do we transform the cognitive map into something enjoyable, something we can dance to, some sweaty tie-died daydream? By what games might we reinvent labor as play?
Trance-Scripts 