The Apocalypse doesn't come on time

Standing still in the uneven, uncertain futures

“libidinal flows in the world… urge me towards unprecedented ways of organizing and acting and thinking-with-the-world. My place is in the ‘elsewheres’ that have no name yet.” 

~Bayo Akomolafe

My place is in the elsewheres that have no name yet. I feel this in my bones.

This quote stopped me in my tracks when I read it the other day. The elsewheres. The places that have no name yet. The kind of elsewheres that call my soul. The cartographies I navigate, have navigated, will navigate… how they are the same, same and different of those navigated by my ancestors, by peoples of the past, by ancestors of the futures.

I wish to dedicate this exercise in navigational thinking to Christopher Staab. He may never know the influence he has had on my life. As a young person in his high school english class, seeing the masks from Western Africa, reading Chinua Achebeʻs work and learning of Yoruba and Igbo traditions through the lens of literature, a world so foreign to my home and culture, I was transported and welcomed to other worlds. Worlds where I felt an unnamable ancestral calling that was disorienting for my white bodied being.

That cryptic nostalgia has left a misty residue of longing that follows along my life story. Bringing me back again and again to spaces where the spirits of unfamiliar lands seek to teach me and open me further to ideas that seem to me suspended in time. Ready, open and willing to be breathed by the earthy smoke of ancestral fires, burning the world back to life.

A white person of mixed European race, my familial lines are littered with interpersonal traumas and secrets. All of my forebears came to the U.S. three generations ago, fleeing their homes for various reasons, none ideal. Some names were changed on entry through Ellis Island. None felt compelled to hold the stories of their ancestors close. And so, with little desire to carry those stories, much has been lost along the years.

My parents chose in their late 20ʻs to move to the islands of Hawaiʻi. Seeking paradise, they unknowingly gifted me new, enlivened mycelial roots that would allow me to reach into Gaia in a way that my blood ancestry has never offered. As I have aged, deepening my connection to the indigenous Kanaka Maoli culture of this ʻaina, I have been able to clumsily navigate the type of insecure footings that are realistic for an ally. I wear these shaky shoes with deep gratitude and reverence.

The technologies of capitalism and colonialism succeeded in their mission of severance for all of my ancestral lineages. There is no innate grounding to place or culture in my family lines. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny were slotted into the places where rooted ritual once stood. Shadowy relics of tradition, now cased in the sickly plastic of modernityʻs cultural erasure. I mistook these for my lineage. I donʻt hold blame. Only curiosity. And the desire to do and be better for my future ancestors.

We live in a time of cartographic certainties. A time when google maps enables me to look anywhere on the planet and see what is there in pixelated real time. With creepy, uncanny certainty. I am pinned. I am mapped. So are you. And so it is, from the macro to the micro. Our  capacities and imaginaries for mapping have extended into the realms of our genetic material, mapping the DNA as if it were a source code to be re-written and hacked in service of a flawed fantasy of progress. As if in the mapping, we weave a tight net of security around our tender hearts. As if there is safety in knowing the contours of every imaginable surface. As if that kind of knowing is even ever possible.

But what is a map worth when its territory is toxic? What is the purpose in complex cartographies of oppression and suffering when they only serve to increase divides and magnify the experience of suffering? Social media allows us unparalleded access to the lives of the ‘rich and famous.’ Into the frozen happiness of peak moments and perfect bodies captured in kodachrome color. That access only increases our sense that somehow, despite the magic that is our life, we are always, in all ways, missing the boat.

I seek the territories that rebel by remaining unnamed and unknown. While we have mapped, labeled, captured, sold and come to own all aspects of the physical reality matrix, what does it mean to move into the illegible cartographies of the more than physical realms, the other than human realms? The emotional, astral realms. The realms of time space and quantum entanglements. It is in these illegible cartographies that I find shelter for my aching heart. In these blurry, bright ley lines, I find hope still remains. It remains because it can never be fully captured and rewritten to match the narratives of control.

The mastery of mystery is surrender.

Having spent years mistaking submission for surrender, I have come to see that the maps of my life were marked with guilt and fear, tools of submission, tendrils of control.

Bayo speaks of the slave ship as an ever-present reality, not a past tense but a present-future. The slave ship is the holographic algorithm of modernity. The slave ships of our past, those sickly passages of suffering, the ones we wish to disappear with our longing for a new story, those ships, upon their arrival in the Americas, never disappeared… but were instead “digested by the shore,” becoming the putrid compost upon which seeds of terror capitalism and brutal separation societies were sown.

The slave ship as metaphor for what we call progress, what we believe to be modernity. Progress designed as an oversized SUV, shiny t-shirts and cocktails on the beach. As if these pretenses of joy could ever approach the feeling of opening the heart’s coherence. As if this saccharine vision of success were something we aspire to continue.

In the realities of the slave ship, terror, submission, confusion and darkness reign. There are only a select few allowed top side to see where the ship is headed. They must oppress the others or mutiny will result. Because they know, more than any others that these lives are only worth the price to be gained from their labor. That they are the living dead. That they must not be allowed the taste of freedom ever again, or they will become impossible to contain.

Those in the slave chambers, must suffer in darkness and filth. Finding solace in apparitions of community, where some semblances of connection can be salvaged as sickness and desperation take deeper and deeper hold. Having been stolen, ripped from genealogy and identity, shoved into cramped and desolate spaces of mere survival, the slave ship will never allow the world a futures of thriving.

And so it is that we stumble along, tinkering with the gears in the engine room, thinking that if we just change course, then perhaps the slave ship will take us to new lands. Feeling that if we are invited to the top side, then we’ve been spared the terrible fate of those below. And yet in our hearts we know that this is not true. What we are coming to fully realize now, is that even when we arrive on those new lands, we no longer own our bodies. Our bodies are fully and finally captured. Our bodies are too easily subject to control.

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.”              
~ Ezra Pound

Ancient Hawaiian navigators traveled by wa’a, sailing canoe, in their navigations to new lands, their elsewheres that had no name yet. These elsewheres had been glimpsed in dreams, thought of in prayers. These elsewheres persisted in the darkness of gnosis until the desire and need to experience them became so visceral that there was no fear great enough to quelch the beauty of the heart’s curiosity.

The wa’a relied upon a collective commitment to thriving, a trust in deeply held knowledge that was not coherent to the brain, but clearly coherent to the heart and the na’au.

On the wa’a there was no below, no holding space, no darkness. Access to the knowledge of the stars was equivalent to collective survival. The gravitational pull of elsewheres’ promise became the guiding pulse that propelled whole cultures to a different kind of expansion. One that rode the ocean waves, courted the winds and read the twinkling scripts of the galaxies above.

What would a futures on the wa’a look like, feel like, smell like, taste like? What would we do differently if we no longer stood on others backs for our fear-fueled survival?

Imagine futures where our shared thriving depended upon understanding a vision of distant elsewheres that we can only glimpse and never capture. A capacity to speak to the celestial wisdoms and a desire to ground ourselves in the ever uncertain ocean, wind and waves.

Grounded and centered in uncertainty. Think about that for a moment. These paradoxes are the only real thing. To remain stable, calm, centered when everything in all ways is moving. What would that do to our education systems? Our food? Our water? Our beings?

My challenge to you is this: Become the attractor field for the beloved futures you know in your heart are possible…

Begin by speaking to the stars, listening to the wind, surrendering to the ocean. Begin by paying attention to your dreams.

‘ike moe ‘uhane is the insight gained from dreams. Speak with it.

Begin by noticing the slave ship, the apparition of its shapes in the crowds… you will see it, and once seen, it cannot be unseen. We have booked passage and paid our tickets in full. We are all complicit in filing the holes in the hull.

We can choose differently.

“The Universe is a communion and a community.

We ourselves are that communion become conscious of itself.”

~ Wendell Berry