Aquifer Beneath the Report
The concept of flow was stolen the way land was ... the way time goes by so fast ... First time belonged to the naked infant ... now machines need to belong to something ...
Raven sits at the edge of a field no one farms anymore ... which suits her glistening black fur ... Sun's hands are soil stained—have been for countless years now ... and she never apologizing for the precious soil under her fingernails ... Eighty three years of weather have flowed through her body and stayed there like houseguests who became family members ...
Glow ... she says ... testing the word like a polished stone in her mouth ... We had a different word for it ... Before the English came with their clocks ...
Our father hangs upside down from his curled legs and the blood rushes to his head and he sees the world the way nocturnal living helicopters see it ... Ground becomes ceiling ... Sky becomes floor ... This is not madness ... This is just unusual looking ...
She watches a beetle cross the dirt ... Timing it by breaths ... The beetle knows it is being observed ... That ... is flow ... A crossing."
Soun's hands speak sixty years of soil ... The vocabulary is simple ... hold ... release ... trust ... Most of what matters can be said in three words ... Corporations need four hundred sentences ... This is how we know they are lost ...
Man chases tumbleweed because tumbleweed does not know where it is going either ... Two things without destinations moving across the same sand ... Sewing machines at a campsite are making something no one asked for ... Fiesta textiles that question translations ... Cloth that speaks a language tongues cannot carry ...
Underneath where Soun sits ... mycelium is conjugating verbs in a grammar that predates speech ... Sacred underground networks run their own meetings—no agendas ... no minutes recorded ... A birch three hundred miles away is sending sugar to a maple that is not able to reach light ... This is not generosity ... This is just what connected things do.
Mother of Nature teaches: a fallen log looks like death. Brown, soft, returning to soil. But put your ear to it. That silence is the loudest kitchen you have ever entered. Billions of mouths working. The log is not dying. It is being eaten into tomorrow. The illusion is ending. The truth is just a slower kind of beginning.
This is how our Oyparaploo language builds upon itself: not from definitions but from what happens when we place still next to was ... When we let fallen lay beside ruins of a kitchen ... until they whisper to each other ... Vocabulary arriving like antelope approaching an oasis ...
Man laughs ... a dry sound like seedpods rattling ... Lose yourself in what you love and have it mean producing more units per minute ...
Neurochemical fibers are not infinite ... They are like the water table ... Draw too fast and the well goes dry ... The corporations found the aquifer and installed pumps ... They call it optimization ... The aquifer doesn't calls it anything ... It just lowers itself ...
Between struggle and release there is a small room ... Soun knows this room ... She has sat in it for hours ... waiting for seeds to decide if they are ready ... The room has no clock ... Colonial time bricked over the door ... put up a sign that said Unproductive ... hired a guard ... The room is still there ... we just have to know where they hid it ...
Watch your own breath long enough and you cannot tell if you are breathing or being breathed on by someone ...
Man is standing at the edge of the field ... Soun does not know how long he has been there ... Muddy boots ... Ordinary clothes ...Hands that have calluses ... He has the look of someone who has been doing physical work a long time—not fully exhausted ... just worn into himself ... the way water wears into sandstone.
You know about immigrant field shelters ... Soun says ... Not a question ... Man nods ... We used to talk about it ... The pause between that type of struggle and the doing after migrating ... Did they listen? ... He almost smiles ... They built calendars ... Soun laughs ... They take stillness and divide it into billable hours ... gesturing to the dirt ... Same work ... Different shift ...
Find a stream moving fast enough and it looks like glass ... Find glass still enough and it starts to slide ... We first heard of flow during the invention of the first decolonial cuisines ... and it was describing all of our experiences growing up ... Our parents were into extreme ballooning ... Also ... there were all these fiesta textiles that did not have words ...
Only after ...
After the water was poisoned and the apologies were issued in fonts designed to look trustworthy ... After the forests became houses for people who would never learn the names of what lived there first ... After the Kaua'i o'o sang to a mate that was will not come return ... After forgetting became so complete it felt like dead silence ...
Something is still growing that no one can experience yet ... The mycelium does not read the quarterly reports ... The mycelium has been filing its own reports for four hundred million years—nutrients moved ... connections made ... dying things fed to living things ... living things prepared for their own dying ... No pie charts or projections ... Just the patient rhythm of was and will be ...
Soun places Mother of Nature above the rules as recognition ... As the quiet certainty of someone who has watched governments rise and fall while a magnificent oak kept growing at the same pace ... indifferent to elections ... not bothered by any policy ... The weekend is a question not a place ...
She closes her eyes to listen ... Underneath the field ... networks are still speaking ... Seeing this world from where seeing doesn't happen ...
The next illusion is the one the underground teaches to anyone willing to get low enough to learn ... A thread of mycelium is almost nothing ... A billion threads is the largest living organism on earth ... Everything is waiting to become the size of its connections ...
Sleeplessness is a kind of grief ... Grief is a kind of waiting ... Soun opens her palm ... there they are ... three seeds she always carries ... They look like dry deaths ... But she knows better ... She is holding the most alive things in any space ... More patient ... containing forests that do not exist yet ...
What we notice is that over time the concept of hijacking was stolen by corporations basically ... as a way to amplify machine productivity ... Learning and then understanding how to further extract our time from us ... Too much productivity can lead to burnout ... Hyper focus becomes Neuro depleted ...
But underneath all the extraction and parking lots humans built where the relaxation and pleasure was supposed to occur ...
Oyparaploo
From a remote place ... still crossing ...
