relearn the world, the world
understood anew only in doing, under-
stood only as looked-up-into out of earth
-Denise Levertov, Relearning the Alphabet
Delisted 2023 invites you, just after Earth Day, to co-create with nonhuman beings who were once on earth, maybe still be on earth, or who may no longer be earth-residents.
Read more about the practice below. Or go straight to the invitation.
About this practice.
Time as told us, as felt, is a current through our experience of relation with these more than human others. Time is not about “progress” nor is it something that moves unequivocally and relentlessly forward. It is something we can play as a part of relational grief-work and building kinship and the imaginary future we seek.
It is basically expected that time is a wave
and history the darker diagram of clockwise
arrows.
--Madhur Anand, Parasitic Oscillations
The biological world is enmeshed with the temporal dimension is multiple complex ways, including through cycles of extinction and diversification. This strangeness of biological time is consistent with the complexity of the understanding of time as relative rather than fixed.
We humans are caught by clocks and Gregorian calendars in a linear “forward-moving” time. We also experience cyclical time, in our own biology, and in the tides and seasons, and the moon’s phases. The cyclical nature of time embeds science, and spiritual and religious practices.
Somatic creative imaginary time travel provides one portal or fissure that allows us access to a relationship with an individual san marcos gambusia, or sampson’s pearly mussel, a caribbean monk seal or one maui nukupu’u.
Day 27: feathers emerge from sheaths
--Craig Santos Perez, From Unincorporated Territory [åmot]
Night sky arcs, an upturned bowl
scattered with stars
--Lauren Russell, Descent
Each member of each species, or subspecies, or morph that is a part of Delisted 2023 is a stranger to each of us in part because of their relationship to time.
To be on the endangered species list and then to be delisted (or proposed for delisting in the case of the ivory-billed woodpecker and the ulihi phyllostegia) requires individuals to be on earth with us within the last 80 or so years but then to have so precipitously vanished that they may no longer be on earth, anymore.
What life is is your cells
remembering what other life did before it
And even further.
--Eleni Sikelianos, Your Kingdom
Extinction involves a change in material being on this planet at a certain point of time. But extinction does not eradicate the beingness that once was material and persists as an absence in the ecological and biotic relationships that once shared space, water, energy, air and light with the being now extinct.
Or read a note about Earth Day.
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