A walk through Plexus: From LA to Atlanta; Okinawa to Taiwan, to Kazakhstan

Plexus: [Begin New Walk]

☆ You | 36 min ago:

i return to walking a year later, reviewing steps from two years ago. i was so honest here. in expanding old steps, retracing familiar, self-and collectively made trails, I am flipping through the pages of an intimate diary, old pages of becoming.

☆ You [in reply] | 28 min ago:

recently, after transits that reconnected me to land and spirit, i have returned to a similar sense of groundedness and spirituality i had in that time. Rereading, these words feel like they were written a decade ago, a year ago, today.

★ RAYA | 2 YEARS AGO

"talked to a friend this morning about the joy of traveling at home. of looking around the familiar blocks as if they are brand new (in so many ways they still are) and deeply asking 'where am i?'. in this moment this is resulting in me falling in love with the patterns of sunspots in my backyard, tracing where the sun falls as the day progresses, and hearing the rustle of leaves on a big tree in my neighbors yard from a new angle."

☆ You [in reply] | 23 min ago:

Even that, the way i sat in my treehouse room and marveled at my surroundings, at the way the sun falls, at the bees and birds. again i am still enough to watch, to listen.

☆ You [in reply] | 20 min ago:

I wonder how much this perspective comes from again having a place of residence, a lease, a place i live

★ RAYA | 2 YEARS AGO

"wondering about pace of getting to know a city. its tempting to throw yourself and get to know it all. I think this is related to not wanting to be a tourist or a visitor anymore"

☆ You [in reply] | 15 min ago:

And its not just how I look at my home, at this place i live, the subtle textures of the same block, the same route of a run transformed by the seasons, the small fluctuations of a week. having a rooted home here changes how I can listen out there, how i can be truly a visitor when i know where I come from. when i acknowledge (with all of its contradictions and weight) where I am coming from, what i bring.

☆ You [in reply] | 10 min ago:

I have been looking at America. At empire. I have been witness, inside and out, to the American empire, its historic and present horrors. History untold, history retold.

★ You [in reply] | 8 min ago:

Last month, I traveled to Okinawa and Taiwan and started to learn how to look at the Chinese and Japanese empires from the place of those islands rather than from the place of this other empire. In listening to those lands and the history and grief they hold, I learn about foreign empires, histories my body does not know, can not remember. Histories and I am and my ancestors even have been so physically distant from, and yet still, the more I listen, the more familiar it all becomes. The grief, the massacre, the war, the lies, the bombs, the brutality, the color, the weeping. Familiar form in foreign lands in other languages. I start to understand, to be able to look to, yearn towards what solidarity can really mean, when we look and listen and hear that same beast roar.

☆ You [in reply] | 4 min ago:

This morning, I begin a short documentary (really youtube video but at 47 minutes and with the density of history it nearly is that) my Taiwanese friend sends me about Kazakhstan [→] . He thought I might be Kazakh as his father in-law misremembered me sharing I had Azerbaijani and Uzbek ancestry. I know nothing of Kazakhstan more than its approximate location on a map which I know only because of the many times I have zoomed in and in and in on Central Asia and the caucuses on the map in hope that within those cutting lines, weaving rivers and highlighted cities I would decipher something about my fathers lineage, about this other color in my body, the lightness (whiteness?) I can infer from my own lightness against my mother's deeper dark brown.

★ You [in reply] | just now:

I learn of famine, of colonization, of robbery and violence, indigenous land practices villainized and restricted. I learn of diaspora and war, damns and over farming, ecological balance brutalized, rhythms of balances distorted into cycles of climate extremes, desertification and drought, a curiously small population in a raped land neighbors the nations I am told my lineage comes from. I look to the Russian empire. As I listen to these histories (for the most part for the first time), I listen too to my body, wondering how these words may stir within me ancestors I cannot call by name. As I listen to this mourning, am I hearing theirs? Does this echo wake them? Are they here? Do they recognize me? Have they been able to locate my body? I feel ready to invite them, for a visit at least. I am eager to learn their names, for them to share mine. Perhaps we will recognize each other in ways we can't anticipate.

☆ RAYA | 2 YEARS AGO

"A call for mourning that proposes grief as a process for sustaining momentum as organizers, artists, futurists, activists…as beings in a more than human world. Are we there yet? No, but we are starting to solidify shared ideas and understandings of the futures we hope will become and the errors and ills of our present and past we are resisting. A shared language is emerging: There is shared murmuring about ‘the commune’— visions of gathering your handful of people, venturing out to build and maintain an independent climate-resilient community. My friends and I are starting to build gardens, and we won’t shut up about them. We, as individuals, and institutions are grappling with our relationship to the past and present systems of domination. We are acknowledging our shared humanity as well as our humble human being-ness in a more than human world. But if we aren’t careful these moments don’t add up to a movement. My proposal for sustaining these generative moments into a lasting movement towards more just, climate resilient futures: grief. I believe grief is a powerful method for imagining just futures because 1) Grief makes crisis feel real. 2) Grief gets to the root causes of a crisis. 3) Grief, when practiced communally, has the power to unite. 4) Grief’s haunting power can instill the lasting consciousness to maintain a struggle towards and commitment to just futures. In naming what has been lost or what we stand to lose, we can not be tricked into denying the reality, severity, and urgency of our situation. Further in naming what has been lost, we can be pushed to name what has triggered such loss. We must name anti-blackness, capitalism, settler-colonialism, the rise of facism. But this grief is not something we must carry alone. I am optimistic about the potential of reviving the practice of community mourning rituals, of gathering in our loss––organizing around it. From there, we can be visited by and maintain a relationship with the ghosts of our grief as lasting reminders of why we struggle, what we struggle towards, and what we continue to struggle against. More, I am interested in how we can meet each other in our grief. Mourning is a vulnerable space. If we can come here from our separate experiences and acknowledge the shared loss that results from these system with respect, care, and curiosity, we can learn from others and understand how we experience crisis similarly and differently."