[-empyre-] short answer post :: all of -empyre-, what non-human relationships are you cultivating?

[Valentine Cadieux]

 I love starting up again responding to Margaratha’s question within love’s
reach, inviting into the realm of being noticed all of the numinous
amazement and enchantment of relationships in my particular noöshed here
and now: the raspberries drying enough to be picked after days of rain; the
sugar maples starting to flame at the tips (that I can now SEE because of
the wondrous carpenters who have repaired my windows and doors after
catastrophic rain); the shared affinity I am discovering as I shepherd a
classful of curious students through a process started by a neighborhood
group to replant a prairie, and to figure out what it means to decolonize a
state landscape; efforts the free vegetable garden group is making to
figure out what we can OFFER each time we seek to harvest.

Especially feeling these relations out for size and fragility in this
week’s frame of radical aesthetics of multispecies worlding and ecological
art, I am also really struck by the insight: We leave shit everywhere.

Usually this isn’t a good thing, from our point of view, and from those
we’ve shat on: we’re losing things, we’re sullying. But as part of our
studies in making a liberation garden, we’ve been reading some texts from
Buddhist interpretations of liberation and ecology that suggest interesting
inversions toward more accountable relations that could be made of our bad
and traumatizing habits. In Shohaku Okamura’s /Living by Vow/, he describes
“Emptiness” as meaning “moving and changing moment by moment,” and notes,
in contrast to our tendencies to try to control and hold our shit together,
that “When we open our hands, we see that everything we need is an offering
from nature. If we have something extra, we offer it to others.”

So thinking about Randall’s affectionate practices, Lissette’s struggle to
translate disparate affect, and Antonio’s slow and concrete building of
shared affinity, solidarity and political alignment, I wonder what
composting of our shit we can engage in that opens us more wholeheartedly
to moment by moment living with open hands, and how radically this could
make us able to share rootspace better.

Valentine


On Sat, Oct 7, 2017 at 12:41 PM, margaretha haughwout <
margaretha.anne.haughwout at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hello all,
>
> I'm driving across the northeast today, watching trees head into
dormancy, and thinking about the conversation that has begun this week.
Lots to reply to. I look forward to catching up fully this evening and
tomorrow --
>
> In the meantime, a question for all of -empyre-::
>
> What relations are you cultivating with on-humans at the moment? I have
just moved, so my relationships are new and fragile:
>
> hawthorn tree at my studio
> crabapples, apples behind my house
> wild apples at colleagues house
> mouse behind my oven
> chamomile and brassicas in my greenhouse
>
> boneset in the trails
> joe pye weed in the marshes
>
> to name a few
>
> --
> beforebefore.net
> guerrillagrafters.org
> coastalreadinggroup.com
> --
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
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