Last year I read a book written by cosmologist Thomas Hertog, in posthumous collaboration with Stephen Hawking. On the Origin of Time is their final theory together, and it seeks to reorient our way of searching for the origin of the universe. The bottom line (as I understand it) is that we need to start “at the top” and work our way back, or else the search for the beginning makes no sense. Instead of searching the history of the cosmos for some singularity, a definite point of “the beginning”, we need to start with life—rather, humans—as the starting place. By starting where we are situated—over 8 billion humans living on this planet called Earth that circles the sun—we can search the past differently, we can understand the past differently.
The problem with this is the starting point, because it’s hard for me to swallow that their “top-down” theory still begins with “man.” Of course, I’m no Stephen Hawking or Thomas Hertog, but I think that starting with “man” is going to get us exactly the same not-quite-right “answers” that we’ve found all along.
“Man”, as the generic (hu)Man, is not the starting point of the world I want to live in nor the focus of the futures I want to help create. And it’s not “woman” either, because this is about much more than gender.
We are not born all at once, as individuals. Starting from the individual will always get us answers that make no sense, because none of us are individuals when it comes down to it.
We become human beings through relationship, always.
We become human beings through cyclical generations of birth and death.
We become human beings by being attentive to each other, by being in constant response to eachother.
We become human beings through living these embodied ecosystems we call our bodies.
Our origins are our bodies, but not our individualized, named, coded, documented modern bodies. Or rather, our individualized, named, coded, documented modern bodies are where we will find our settler colonialist and capitalist origins. That history is critically important to trace and understand and feel as embodied because only then can we feel our way out of this vicious whirlpool of destruction that threatens all life on this planet.
But there’s another history, one that is obscured by even this new “top-down” theory because it continues to insist on the lie of the individual. Seeking this history, I’m betting, is how we will find our futures, too. Seeking this history, I’m betting, we will find our capacities expanded exponentially. When we begin with the in-between, with the spider’s web of cognition instead of just the spider’s body, with the entire communicating forest instead of just the tree, with the ecosystemic body instead of just the conscious brain, with the motherbaby instead of just the mother + baby, then we will really get a sense of our origins. And we won’t just find the origin of a singular “time” but we will find the origins of all the different kinds of “time” that life has access to, that life creates through life.
As I write this book that is emerging through me, as I seek my origin so that I might know my future, I find versions & variations of time that feel both familiar and unfamiliar to this body grown in the laboratory of capitalist white supremacist delusion.
The time of moving attention/attentive movement emerges through this body when I’m with LOOP, when I’m with the kids, when I’m studying and following my curiosity. This time doesn’t follow capitalist marching orders, and it certainly does not allow space for supremacies of any kind. This mode of time opens up new futures and new pasts, as long as I allow myself to move in its currents.
The time of ripening relationality emerges through home, through alignment with the earth and her cycles and seasons. Procrastination doesn’t exist here, and neither does urgency. When we understand ourselves as in constant processes of co-ripening, then individuals cease to be individuals as we know them. There is no bootstrap myth that will tell an apple to ripen faster, that demands the child orca grow up and learn to self-soothe. When we’re living in the time of ripening relationality, this body stops feeling so individual and overwhelmed and lonely, and I begin to attune instead to rituals of offering and receiving, to the ways we hold ourselves and eachother together and apart, in shifting orbits of care.
We hold the archives, like our mother’s mothers’ mothers did, always. We hold it in our bodies as land, we absorb the memories of depths not understood with the conscious brain. We hold time through the memories here in these bodies, the memories that are our capacity, expanded across times and spaces. Moving along currents of times that refuse to center the individual, we may begin to access these capacities that emerge beyond our surveilled borders of body.
As 2024 begins, I feel the ways this body is waiting for answers & fixes, the ways this body is in a holding pattern of individual expectations of what this year will bring to me. I feel the despair and paralysis that comes from fear of the future, from looking only for the ways that “individual-I” can change myself & the world.
As 2024 begins, I’m re-committing to resolutions, but not the resolutions of capitalist time that begin and end with the individual. The etymology of resolution is “from Latin resolvere "to loosen, loose, unyoke, undo; explain; relax; set free; make void, dispel." As I interpret this, the most radical resolutions, then, are those that set us free, that loosen the yoke of the individual so we can feel into the ways we are other, we are with each other, we are eachother.
As 2024 begins, I relax my hold on my individual self and open instead to the potential of home, of community, of the collective. By changing the starting point, by staying responsive to all of my selves & connections, I show my trust in community to move us along currents in common toward liberatory futures-to-come.
LIFT
Not a blank slate, our future
—rather, it has
always
been a slate
smeared with blood
and shit and sweat,
a slate that takes a penny to make
sold for a month’s salary,
a slate that was held,
sacred,
in someone else’s hands,
under their pillow,
protected and
respected and
then stolen, broken,
shattered for
sport and ignorance.
Our lives have shifted, yes
they look different in some ways,
in some ways
always the same
—but a rift
is happening—
the before
and the after
yet to be determined.
We could,
as a species and a set
of communal beliefs
and archetypes,
change.
It could,
maybe,
happen.
The chasm
is there
to be leapt into, a future-less
void of the same upon the same, or a
future-full something that has already
been imagined and spoken
by those under
our feet.
Strip it all away
as you fall and
you might keep falling
or
you might be lifted,
too.
Fantastic poem. This opens my door to different ways of thinking.
That’s so right Sam, the past is present & the present is prologue for the future. It doesn’t have to be the way it’s been done, you can change t. We can make the future different individually rather than collectively marching every day toward the ‘norm” Great piece, I loved it.
“an event or action that leads to another event “or situation”. Thank you , Patty