Undrowned

And my first marine mammal lesson was that if I breathe I can still speak even while crying. I can breathe through salt water. I can live through this mess.

I wonder why sometimes we congregate with those who have been hurt in ways that look similar to how we have been hurt. About how we sometimes (me too) name identities and even whole organizations based on our scars. And how sometimes those of us with similar vulnerabilities are the ones who scar each other. I wonder sometimes about what keeps us close, in a hurting world shaped by intimate violence. In a world that cuts systemically and deep.

I think we have already learned that what the movies say family is, is not a sustainable scale. And in trying to force it, to perform it we suffer so much.

What if all those ways we feel like failures in our families are not failures at all, but a pre-school lesson that could teach us to restructure our care?

And remember that Grace Lee Boggs said if we could work intergenerationally as solutionaries to all the challenges to our wellbeing and existence that would be all the school we would need?

What if school, as we used it on a daily basis, signaled not the name of a process or institution through which we could be indoctrinated, not a structure through which social capital was grasped and policed, but something more organic, like a scale of care. What if school was the scale at which we could care for each other and move together. In my view, at this moment in history, that is really what we need to learn most urgently.

Knowing who they’re with helps them know where they’re at and where they want to be.

Because I know what it feels like to be sick of systemic oppression and its cycles of extraction. The virus impacting these dolphins presses on their lungs, their brains. They struggle to breathe, they swim in strange circles. They end up far off course in a place that can’t sustain them. Do you know something about this?

I love you. And even on your sickest, saddest day you deserve an ocean as blue as your name. You deserve a safety as deep as your need. You deserve food, community, school, and home. And you were not wrong to associate with your kindred. And you were not wrong to breathe loud about what you believed. And the dizziness you feel is justified. We are living in a world off course. And the pressure in your lungs is urgency. We have to learn the language of this air. We are sick of these tired cycles of economic vulnerability, resource grabs, and waste and harm spiraling down. We are ready to breathe differently. And evolve.

She’s sick and tired. Of being sick and tired.