Dreaming in Green

CROCUS BOOKS

Dreaming in Green

First published in 2024 by Crocus Books

Crocus Books are published by Commonword, Bridge 5 Mill, 22A Beswick St, Ancoats, Manchester M4 7HR

Copyright © Commonword and the authors 2024

No part of this publication may be reproduced without written permission

Except in the case of brief extracts embodied in critical articles, reviews or lectures

For further information contact Commonword

admin@cultureword.org.uk www.cultureword.org.uk

Introduction

The burning of fossil fuels, and general indifference to the environmental consequences of economic development (mere 'externalities' in classical economic terms) are two causes of our environmental crisis. This collection of writings attempts, in its own small way, to contribute to changing attitudes and steering us away from environmental disaster.

The future is Green.

The Weight of Water

by Selina Nwulu

i.

I am 7 years old when I slip into a swimming pool, drifting to its bottom. I hear the yelling and laughter of other children whilst I’m silently overcome by chlorinated waters. I will my limbs to save me and they try, thrashing and flailing as if taken by the holy spirit. My sister finds my hand from the side, but smaller than me, takes several tries to save me, wrestling with body, dunking me in and out. My spirit as restless and panicked as a fish out of water.

Some years later I am baptised, blessed communion of father, son and holy spirit. Three ideas, blurry in their meaning; I am not the son my father wanted, and could never find his missing love in the holy spirit. Water is smudged across my forehead in the shape of a cross to wash my memory clean of sin, flood out the longings, secretly flourishing in the dark corners of my mind. This was the passage to salvation, and yet no amount of holy water made me feel pure, and so who then was the liar.

Both these memories felt the same. Submerged in the panic of something, tidal waves crashing inside me, my skin a fragile dam threatening to give out, never knowing how to swim.

I am a body of water, incapable of floating.

ii.

I have dreams of drowning, last prayers that aren’t mine uttered into water. I wake up a tangle with the sheets, drenched in sweat, the only remnant of my travel

In 1803, seventy-five Igbo people walked into the waters of Dunbar Creek, Georgia, rather than be sold as slaves, in what would be later known as the Igbo Landing, one of the largest mass suicides of its kind.

But being ripped from your homeland and bundled like livestock on a ship is already deathnothing you can come back from. I consider the other slaves, those who stayed onboard, as good as drowned; breathless and dragged towards the vicious waves of lashes so deep, chains heavier than the weight of water, and who can say they didn’t die.

I am trying to make sense out of opposites; how the seventy-five Igbo people gave themselves to the water, yet practised a ritual of undrowning.

Most oceans still live wild and unknown. Isn’t this a divine offering? To surrender to somewhere that cannot be taken, too vast to be colonised?

Somewhere, yet nowhere at all.

Mama Wati, Oshun, Olokun, show us the holy uses for water. Let me leave my cup at your altar.

Where is your miracle in drought? In waters slick with oil spills, reservoirs clogged with sewage, in blasphemous rivers of dead fish?

Will you come if my cup is murky, unsure of its divine promise?

What healing for worlds of people, bargaining for clean water? A parched tongue looks the same as dryland, terrain cracked, barren where nothing ever grows. Children with arms outstretched, praying for rainfall, ready for devotion.

What then for the holiness of water in oceans of graveyard; sunken migrant ships too undesired to be claimed. People drowned against their will, too many wishing them unsaved.

Who will answer the prayers of the drowned, the water already haunted, spooling in the memory of too many lost?

Which waters can cleanse us of the we harm do, bring us back to our godliness?

Breathe, Keep Breathing

by Anita Sethi

“Breathe, keep breathing,” the words of the hospital doctor met my ears. Breathe, keep breathing – I listened to the words as I lay in excruciating pain on a hospital bed in Reykjavik, Iceland where medics were attempting to manipulate my broken right arm bone. I had come out to Iceland in quest of the Northern Lights . As a northerner I’ve long been fascinated by the phenomenon. I failed to see them on that trip. Because I tripped. Nevertheless, I remained obsessed with them – I imagined them glittering within my broken arm by way of bearing the pain in there.

Air. It’s when we risk losing something that we come to appreciate it most. And ever since I struggled to breathe but was helped on by that kind doctor, I’ve valued the air in my lungs more than ever before and come to investigate its many wonders both within us and without, its considerable powers and its components and constituents (oxygen, nitrogen, argon, carbon dioxide, water vapour).

Air – one of the four classical elements along with water, earth and fire, and perhaps the one we most take for granted given its seeming invisibility. Yet it does make itself visible – those glorious colours of the aurora borealis that have so enchanted us humans for centuries are created by air – the green created by oxygen and the blue, purple and deep red hues by nitrogen. Molecules scattering light also create the blue of the sky and the red of sunsets.

Back in my hometown of Manchester, my Aurora app informed me that I had 0% chance of seeing the Northern Lights but I nevertheless ventured out into the night, walking, as a way of bearing the persistent pain and appreciated other northern lights, soaking up the sight of the moonlight on the Manchester canal. I was in Manchester one day when my i-Phone started bleeping alarmingly – I wondered if it was another practice Emergency alert from the government, or an actual real emergency and looked down to see that it was in fact the Aurora app bleeping in excitement at the high activity in the heavens, even the heavens here in the north of England – further research showed that they were coming out over Cumbria.

I grab my toothbrush and dash to the gateway to heaven otherwise known as Platform 14 at Manchester Piccadilly smiling as the Metrolink tram I’m on pulls up at the station – this time,

I’ll be in luck, I think. But just as I’m approaching the platform a station master informs us that the train is cancelled, and the next one, and the next one too. Someone up there is clearly having fun with me. I finally get there, exhausted and the mere shadow of a human being –I’ve all but given up with life itself let alone the northern lights. By the time I reach the hotel

I’m hoping to stay it’s growing dark. When I tell them what I'm up to - I'm hunting the northern lights, the kind man on reception named Moses gives me a riverside room. I step into my room and out of its sliding door and onto its balcony and gasp at the sound of the River Rothay right on my doorstep, and the dark mountains right ahead silhouetted now. I look up and see a star glittering so intensely. I gaze for a long time at that star and am taken out of myself and feel connected with the universe. So clear the sky is tonight – so much clearer are the skies in the countryside given the lack of both light and air pollution. I step out into the night and the dark envelops me. I head further north, up from Grasmere, walking deep through northern countryside.

I don’t see much of the Aurora Borealis on that trip but I do fill my lungs with fresh air galore. When back in my hometown from the Lakes, the difference in air quality is stark – I step off at Manchester Piccadilly train station and step into the streets and the smell of fumes fills my lungs, the sight too of the air is different, so much more polluted. I walk through the city smog and someone blows out smoke from a cigarette right into my face and I passive inhale it and gag. I put on my mask but the smell still filters through. As someone who has broken a bone, I’ve learnt just how much oxygen is necessary for the fracture healing process. One of the first things a surgeon will ask is ‘Do you smoke?’ and show relief when you say no as smoking impedes bone healing. A lack of clean air causes other health problems too including asthma and indeed ultimately can shorten the lifespan, the amount of time we have on this beautiful, beleaguered planet.

We urgently need to green our cities and towns – we need more trees planted on streets, more parks and gardens and other green spaces, and to understand the value not only of the countryside but of urban nature.

Oxygen – created by trees and other plants and by plankton, transforming the sunlight into 02 by way of photosynthesis, having that capacity to clean air and convert carbon dioxide into what keeps us alive at all. Despite our different skin colours or class or gender backgrounds, despite all the things that have come to divide us in our bruised, broken, battling world it’s

crucial to remember that ultimately we all need oxygen which flows through the lungs and the veins and shows how each and every one of us is human, that each and every one of us is a part of, not apart from, nature.

Everything alive is breathing, and there is more alive than you would think.

All living cells respire.

The world is breathing.

The world is alive.

But humans are killing it with careless actions, destroying the lungs of the earth, polluting them, chopping down urban trees and logging rainforests.

Let us breathe, keep breathing.

Motherless Children

by Jess Neill

‘On a finite world, a cosmic perspective is not a luxury, it's a necessity.’

― Caleb A. Scharf

Towards the end of the summer before last, some friends and I went to Gower in South Wales to spend a night on a campsite at Rhossili Bay Beach, a three-mile stretch of coastline facing the North Atlantic. It was the campsite’s final weekend of the season, after which it would be closed for the winter; fearing the mid-September night would be too cold, we took a single tent to house our human pack of five.

It was getting on for four pm when we all arrived, and I and two others wanted to swim before the sun would be too weak to warm us up. We headed out across the dunes and onto the glinting sea.

The wind was strong and chilly, the water choppy and dotted with surfers. We disrobed with hissing sand beneath our feet, threw ourselves shrieking like children into the roaring waves, and emerged renewed from our ablution of cold and old salt.

Dressed, dry and regathered at the tent, I went in search of a corkscrew for our bottles of red, only to realise after schlepping round the field, I’d had one in my rucksack the whole time. A few glasses in, with the sun now low enough to justify a fire, we packed up the bags of logs one friend had nicked from a Tesco on the way out of town and walked back over the dunes to set up camp by a huge chunk of driftwood, which acted as a bench and makeshift windbreak. We scavenged for stones to make a circle for the fire, and lit it with cubes of kerosene.

The sun’s descent made a painting of white contrails which feathered into cirrus strands of fuchsia, peach and purple, until it sank into the sea, below the west horizon, darkening the sky with deepening shades of blue. Night filled out around us.

Those of us who smoke, smoked rollies, with or without hashish. Everyone drank wine and nibbled on a bar of psilocybin-laced cacao, as soul songs played through the portable speaker connected to my phone and the fire became our primary source of light.

We’d been there for some time when the boys in our party decided to take a closer look at something they’d been watching darting around like fireflies down by the shore. We, the remaining three, didn’t share their curiosity, preferring to stay warm and by the music. When they finally returned, they said the lights had been coming from some fishermen, who were wading through the shallows looking for bass. The fish got caught by the headland, they were told, which funnelled them into the shallows. Hush now, boys, don’t tell anyone, they’d said. It’ll be like that film Zulu if the word gets out, we’ll have all sorts running down over the hill once they hear about our spot.

More wine, more rollies, more logs on the fire, then I walked off into the dunes for a wee, and noticed for the first time in the near-total darkness how many stars I could see. It was the kind of night sky one rarely gets the chance to appreciate in our cities and towns, obscured as it is by light pollution, and where we tend to live our lives within the walls of various buildings, sheltered (if we’re lucky) by one ceiling or another. But away from the glow of the fire, here it was - a slice of universe - and right there, plain as the sound of shore and ocean, was the Milky Way, our local galaxy. I ran back to the gang, bearing news of what I’d seen, and everyone moved away from the fire to get a better look at what the black illuminated.

We lay on our backs, untroubled by the cold, held in place by booze, shrooms and awe, spouting clichés about long-dead stars, naming constellations, and trying to recall the last time/if we’d seen the Milky Way, an unthinkable conversation for our (not so?) distant ancestors, for whom that celestial reality must have been, if not less beautiful, certainly less remarkable to see. Simply a part of the fabric of things, like telly, Spotify or YouTube.

Known variously by different cultures as, for example, the Road of Straw, the Way of the Crane, the River of Heaven, and the Road to Santiago,1 the Milky Way has inspired innumerable folk tales, myths and legends, and guided migrating birds and wandering pilgrims for umpteen millennia. Sitting by a fire in an altered state of consciousness (people have been taking psychedelics for thousands of years2) under an unpolluted sky strewn with uncountable stars has got to be one of the earliest forms of human inspiration. How long have we, the urban-dwellers of this world, been severed from our access to the cosmos, our connection to this ancient, august muse?

To lose our capacity to see a real night sky, one where the galaxy to which we belong can be seen with the naked eye, is surely to lose our page in the book we have been writing about who we are. Just as staring at or swimming in an ocean taps into something deep inside, arguably related to both origin and connection, so too does a dark night sky remind us of our

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_names_for_the_Milky_Way

2 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/science/psychedelics-bronze-age.html

place in the order of things, our insignificance and magnificence (we, too, are the stuff of stars, after all3), inspiring due reverence and humility.

And, of course, we are not just disconnected from the cosmos but also from the wider natural world. Capitalism and the consumerism/ individualism on which it relies, Christianity and many fields of science have all played their part in upholding the delusion of human supremacy over all other life on Earth. Of all the ways we’ve been degraded by centuries of worshipping profit (in the name of worshipping prophets), the fallacy of our separateness from/ superiority to nature has got to be amongst the most disastrous.

In an interview for the OnBeing podcast, Jill Tarter, co-founder of the SETI Institute4 says:

‘When you think about… what might be [out] there, it has the philosophical equivalence of holding up a mirror to every individual on this planet and saying, “See, all of you? You’re all the same, when compared to something… that… evolved independently...” I really like the potential of SETI for changing people’s perspective and trivializing the differences among humans — differences that we’re so willing to shed blood over when, indeed, we are all human. We are all earthlings. We are all the same, compared to something else.’

Hear, hear, but shouldn’t all life on Earth be subject to this shift in perspective? Because humans are not the only earthlings. Or, to put it another way, if an intergalactic equivalent of SETI discovered life on our planet, what would it consider more intelligent? The inscrutable complexity of, for example, forests and communities of trees, which thrive on interdependence and cooperation?5 The vast, unfathomable networks of mycelium threaded through the soil of the whole entire world, upon which so much life depends and which ‘Western’ science has barely begun to understand?6 Or the bipedal apes destroying each other over stories, shiny rocks and coloured gemstones, who cannot seem to understand the Earth is not invulnerable, that harming the environment of which they are a part is tantamount to grievous self-harm?

What good is the size of our brains if we can’t see we’re dependent on, connected to and no more important than, say, fungi, which the Earth would suffer far more without than the absence of us and our unceasing devilry? Needless to say, our position at the top of the food

3 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carl-sagans-star-stuff-made-real/

4 Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

5 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering-trees-180968084/

6 https://www.riotmaterial.com/webbing-mind-throughout-earth/

chain does not mean the chain has ceased to matter. How different might it have been if the creation story exported to the world as a justification for colonial expansion had said something other than, ‘and let them have dominion… over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth?’7 Although perhaps that expansion could only have been possible with this core belief at its heart.

In any case, neglecting to consider our fellow creatures as kin, as Earthlings, united by our shared home of this planet, is devastating all we have a duty to protect, including the future for our children. To paraphrase Morisson’s narrator of A Mercy, ‘Cut loose from the earth’s soul [we have] insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans [we are] insatiable.’ How, then, to suture that severance?

It seems to me that what the world needs now is less hubris and more humility (derived, incidentally, from humus, Latin for fertile earth or ground) and perhaps that would be easier to do if we could be more readily humbled. Ironic, then, that one way to be so humbled lies not (only) in the soil but in the skies…

Eventually, the cold did get the better of us and we returned to our terrestrial proxy for the sun, though it’s hard to say how long for, exactly. At some point we grew tired or, more likely, exhausted our supply of wine and logs, but the fire was still going as we left. We passed the baton to a group of lads who were just coming back from the beach, and walked across the dunes to the sound of their banter and the sight of the newly-risen moon, a perfect semicircle echoing the light of our nearest star enough to cast long shadows on the sand.

I didn’t sleep so well; the boys could both go pro as snorers. I wedged my moldable earplugs as far towards the centre of my brain as they would go, and was the first one up the following morning. I grabbed the bag that held my notebook and my swimmers and made my way back to the beach.

The fire was a crater of embers and ash; had I had kindling, I could have got it going. The circle around it was littered with some bottles and cans left behind, I presumed, by the lads. I put them in my bag with furrowed eyebrows and a tut, then walked down to the water, which was calmer.

I eased myself into the sea, gradually attuning my body to the cold, until I was numb enough to float like a leaf, to let the water hold me up like an open palm. The halfmoon was high above, bone-white in the new-day blue. I could not see the stars, but they were there.

Bone Fragments and Other Ways to Measure Carbon

BY MAYA CHOWDHRY

This essay pours onto the page with as many content warnings as there are ideas about the cause of the climate crisis, rivers in the world, inadequate watery emotions that we humans have to deal with all of this.

cw Cw CW CW

It was January 2021. First it snowed. Then the River Mersey flooded.

It was February 1978, you nearly drowned in the Firth of Forth.

It was July 1985, your father died.

Memories should come with a content warning.

For many years I had a recurring dream of my father's ashes floating up, instead of down, the River Ganges.

No amount of automatic writing would help me decipher the dream. Even if I never managed to understand it, I wanted it to stop.

As a teenager belonging to our now one-parent family we were the working poor, those that barely contributed to carbon emissions – no car, no central heating, no holidays. Before my father died, we were an immigrant family that expended our carbon emissions by flying a family of six on a jumbo jet home to see our grandparents in India for the first time.

Although it’s termed climate justice, the climate per se cannot be just or unjust, that’s when I realised…

tw Tw TW TW

…that my writing about the environment I was born into, grew up in, and travelled to, was one great big trigger warning.

Landlocked and stranded during 2020, I began the research process for a climate justice project –Net//Work residency, which was forced to shift online (saving me carbon emissions travelling to Belfast, but then immediately cancelling some of this out through the impact of our Zoom workshops). In the park opposite my house, I took a series of photographs: me holding a thermometer, my footprints in the show, the river that had formed on the path when the snow had melted and it rained for days. What was I trying to say about climate justice with these images? What did it mean to see a brown face against white snow in an English park, or look at brown hands holding a submerged tree? And why on earth was I creating art examining climate justice anyway?

I doomscroll #manchesterfloods on my phone. There’s a photo of a billboard advertising ‘A New Future for Carrington’ it is half submerged in the floodwater. The glee with which corporations profit from ignoring the signs nature gives us is terrifying.

It buckets it down all night, the raindrops beating on the slanted glass of my attic window. I slip in and out of my drenched sleep, dream that all the worlds’ glaciers are melting and raining down on me.

Colonial oppression, in the form of partition, forced my father, his siblings and my grandparents from their ancestral home. And now climate chaos has destroyed their familial land.

I sift through photographs from my last visit to India. This sparks an avalanche of longing and before I know it, I’m looking at a 1987 photograph of a glacier in Sonmarg, Kashmir. I hold it up to my window measuring the blue of the sky in continents of separation. Did my touristic footprints in the snow contribute to anthropogenic climate change and the decline of the renowned thajiwas glacier, which has shrunk exponentially during the last 30 years? Do I have to revisit each memory, measure it in climate justice actions?

How to situate these thoughts in my climate justice narrative, when I’m writing here in Manchester? How to link the River Ganges to the River Irwell? Are memories and triggers the only navigable way?

I resist going to the Museum of Science and Industry, remembering the coldness of the warehouse housing those first steam engines, the way the narrative of the Industrial Revolution chopped through my ancestral memories.

I head to The People’s History Museum. There, I stand in front of Goade's Insurance Map 1889. It reads: ‘You are standing on the site of Shanklin’s 1889 Flour and Treacle Warehouse looking towards what was then Water Street.’

I look out of the window towards the River Irwell.

Humans needed rivers

Humans used rivers.

I try to unpick the Industrial Revolution in a decolonised way, but I cannot. Nowhere does it say that Britain brought in a law to ban Indian ships from docking at English ports, but India House on Whitworth Street spills secrets.

Weaves lies.

When I return home, climate justice memories continue to rain on me, irking me with every interpretation label I’ve just been fed.

Content warning.

CW: That time I was volunteering on the organic aloe vera farm during a three-year drought when I was thirsty and there was no ‘clean’ water to drink, touristically speaking that is.

CW: That time we drove over the, now-drained, bay of the Arabian Sea searching for the ancient city of Dholavira, and the ruins of the 5,000 year old Harrapan civilisation.

CW: That time we cleared the silt from the tank-well.

Humans have always lived on the banks of rivers.

It was December 2003, you toiled in the field of an aloe vera farm with a group of tribal women. They wanted to know if you were married.

It was January 2009, your mother died.

It was February 2004, you left India to return to Leeds, England, with a renewed sense of why political art was critical.

Another memory. I’m in India, staring at the ruins of a Harappan civilisation at Dholavira, not entirely sure why I was drawn here, or even destined to visit.

If it hadn’t been for the colonisation of the Indian subcontinent by the British Empire, my family would not have had to flee, what was once West Punjab, to a refugee camp in Chandigarh. Without this violent dislocation, maybe my father’s ashes would have been scattered in the Indus River. Maybe this was why I was standing here, at the site of the Indus Riverbed, before the waters disappeared, willing this all to be true?

Imagining if I walked in a straight line, on the border between India and Pakistan, I would reach Lahore in 11 days.

Or would the dry river reach me?

I travelled to Dholavira, the “ruins of a city of the ancient Indus Valley civilization.” After eighteen hours twisting and turning on a road of rumble, we stop the car and stand, looking out on the salt flats of a now-drained sea – the Rann of Kutch lake.

Seas to lakes.

Where did it drain to?

Sometime later, we find the archaeological dig at Dholavira. Age and nationality privileges us to be summoned for tea with the head archaeologist – an older French woman, myself from England and our Indian scholar guide. Sitting perched on wooden chairs in a khaki tent, teacups politely resting on knees, we probe him about his discoveries, I am keen to find out if climate change fueled the demise of Dholavira, if an earthquake changed the course of the Indus River, to discover what messages our ancestors have left for us. To start the conversation I blurt out, “What is your most treasured find?” and he replies, “a remarkable rainwater harvesting system unrivalled anywhere else in the world.”

Every drop of water.

It continues to rain, a fine drizzle that mists the windows of my studio. Years later, I discover an article in the Times of India by Professor Amit Prashant, where he states, ‘The Harappans possibly knew how to reduce the turbidity of flood flow in the Manhar river by diverting its silt-laden water and letting it pass through a number of interconnected small reservoirs to allow sediments to settle. Then the water reached the large eastern reservoir for consumption.’

Flooding and droughts are not two ends of the spectrum. They are the planet. What it was and is made of. We call it climate.

I return to the memory of the Aloe Vera farm I volunteered on near Mandvi, Gujarat. I had written about the port of Mandvi in a poem, having stared at a map of India and noticed a little bend in the shape where it met the Arabian Sea. The ex-mango farm that, due to a drought three years in the making, was forced to turn to growing desert plants. The farm I opted to labour on because writing about climate change seemed futile, where we worked in the fields from sun up to sun down, where I was too tired in the evening to write, where women labourers I worked alongside didn’t earn enough money to liberate themselves from their only two sets of clothes – one worn, one washed and hung up to dry.

It was here where I experienced first-hand the ravages of both climate change and so-called natural disasters, both emotionally and physically. Here where I squatted in a field scratching the parched earth with the mattock I was too weak to raise over my head, sat crying with frustration and grief, and here where I vowed to continue writing and creating art for climate justice.

It is January 2004 and myself and the women farm labourers are summoned to the tank well in the centre of the farm. I can’t at all work out what the task is, but I follow the women down into the hollow of the tank part of the almost-drained well. As we work the concrete structure echoes with the sound of womens’ cupped hands dipping into the knee-high water and ladling the silt into metal buckets. Silt from 300 feet in the earth dragged up by the machinery pumping the water from the bedrock of the water table. I admire its red clay appearance, think of the depths humans will go to to stay alive. I paddle in the cool water recollecting that the farmer had said 29 years ago he only had to pump 30 feet down, and now it was 300 feet.

I sleep fitfully in the volunteer’s quarters, my hands feel cold as if shrouded in water vapour. Night falls and my reoccurring dream changes form. As usual it begins as I watch my father’s ashes float up the Ganges River, the grey dust drifting upstream, higher and higher into the Himalayan mountains to the spring that is the source of the river. But then it changes and I become a cloud and am blown along with the rewinding river until I am above the Sênggê Kanbab, a perennial spring in Tibet. High in the mountains my cloud-like body rains down and I wash his ashes into the Indus River in a raft of small bone fragments floating towards the Arabian Sea that disintegrate with the swell.

a body burns in flying embers that extinguish riverbound sizzle

an unspoken smell hangs becomes ash charcoal

small bone fragments

Books and References

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2020.

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Amitav Ghosh, 2016.

Article in the Times of India: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ahmedabad/dholaviras-water-conservation-secret-is-anengineering-marvel/articleshow/64228386.cms

The Radical Step – Self, Nature, & Decolonisation

by John Siddique

One Foot in Front of The Other

There's a bustle of work through my window as my neighbour gets a new roof put on. Heavy stones from a broken chimney stack and slates drop down a red and yellow plastic chute into the clanging skip below, Thud thud. The falsity of the workmen's laughter. They keep their honest faces from each other, the woman standing on the street talking up to them sounding flirty but just the same - the shuttered heart, the hollow constant jollity that is demanded. Heavier than the thud thud. A dimension of scaffolding and ladders climbing the building and rising above creates multiple frames of sky.

What are these two brothers not saying to each other? You can hear in their voices that their eyes don't crease as they should. Mouths laugh but do not move. I was going to say the heart doesn't move, but you feel it does; it moves backwards in never-admitted fear. Thud thud. Yellow skip filling with rubble. You can hear the questions, can't you? You can hear the questions in this scene. When will we ever allow ourselves to see and be seen? When will we allow ordinary love?

My own heart thuds, and I head to the woods. It's been a long time since I was properly amongst the trees, yet I've always headed to nature, even as a teenager, to escape the grip of a home that screamed with fire and a town that was never physically safe for a young brown man—walking while brown in a northern town in the mid-1980s. Still, there was an honesty to that time that doesn't seem to exist now. You at least knew who was who.

The best way to walk in nature is to put one foot in front of the other, not to have music, not to take photos, not to share on social media, to 'keep this as something for yourself.' We've been conditioned to commodify and monetise everything: colonisation is not just outside of us; it's in so much of what we think, feel and believe in as ourselves. No number of affirmations will counter its occupation of our lives, societies, countries, and infrastructure. But what does help is putting one foot in front of the other and walking, whether in trees, desert, or a scrubby bit of land that no one else pays any heed to.

There are a couple of practices from original yoga, which are very different from colonised ‘yoga' that I like to lean into as I walk. Arya Mouna - the practice of noble silence. This is not an enforced silence but is an allowing of yourself to align with the silence that is between and under all things as you go. The mind can't handle this and can't get there, but your body knows the score, your awareness knows what is what. We have been taught to fear naturalness and stillness because it is where creativity and sacredness actually live; it is the place where life lives. My hand wants to reach for my phone to check my messages; I notice and let myself love myself through my heart to allow the impulse to pass. I'm walking for myself. I'm here for myself. In the trees you don't have to be a somebody that we have internalised and live through everyday. Here, you don't have to integrate into a culture that hates you in its structure, in its seeming bristling indifference, its aggressions. Nature is

beyond culture, beyond the names of countries, beyond labels, both external and internal, of ourselves and others. Trees, river, earth, sky they show you their life in Arya Mouna, and you start to know the life in you. You start to know again the sense of your own self - your true name before you were named. Your heart beats rather than thudding. You feel your life that you feel as you walk. Thoughts give way to consciousness and to joyful spontaneity, awareness, and dignity - as the rhythm of your steps begins to melt the fear and the grip of what has been added to us and that we have desperately added to ourselves to try to survive. A step turns to a mile, turns to an hour, turns to just the moment you are in. Wholly/holy and present. The yoga name for the life you can feel in you is Prana; it is not breath but life force. When you feel your own life force, you know yourself and the trees and the river. You might start to notice how the birds love you when you are you.

I'm so tired of things that are not of life, but I no longer fight the way I used to. Now I live this, and the very nature of my being, or this return to living, is far greater than any word I could say to convince the unconvincable. They want you to debate and stand and argue; that way, you don't get to live or create. That is the function of racism, and it's always about land and a degraded version of power in the end. Not caring for the land, but in reality, it is gluttonous egoic acquisition for the sake of itself.

Some days, I am overwhelmed with gratitude that I wake up in my right mind, that I feel my own feelings that this consciousness looks out of these eyes, and for all the horrors and difficulties of the world still sees beauty without denying or bypassing anything of our human experience. If anything, it burns as strength, dignity and tenderness.

Hands around my throat

Colonisation is all that I knew until I woke back up to my own awareness and could admit that that strangeness, that internal pressure I had felt my whole life, was a prison. When I was asked to write this essay, I noted that even though the person asking me was a global person, their thoughts on what I might write spoke in colonised language, of decolonisation and relationship with nature as resistance. The assumption of talking to you, the Reader, through certain lenses to make a series of points around the 'fight.' But here is the thing - aren’t you consciously and unconsciously tired of fighting? I am. We are expected to convince supremacy culture to decolonise using the manners and language that it has dictated to us. We are told that concepts such as self-care will make us feel better. To quote James Baldwin, 'You always told me it takes time. It's taken my father's time, my mother's time, my uncle's time, my brothers' and my sisters' time...How much time do you want for your progress?'

The choking hands of never having experienced equity at any level, of needing to consistently carve out a space for myself instead of the world simply being for me. These

strangling fingers have always been about my throat, always been in my wallet, always signing bills to put limits on my ability to live, love who I love, telling me I'm ugly, that I'm not a seen as a sexual being, that I can't marry who I like unless I have a certain amount of money, can't have a family, earn a living, be a creative. Its fingers are everywhere: in the check-out queue at the supermarket, applying for arts funding, and not being able to write the books my spirit wants to write without having to explain to the internal and external oppressor in the audience. That my human rights are a matter of debate, that I am supposed to integrate into a culture with no culture of its own, where everything is stolen and hoarded away behind borders and business politricks.

Supremacy tells me how complicated everything is and that I should always consider its feelings. The river doesn't do that, the sky doesn't do that, the trees don't do that, the rocks and the earth don't do that, nor do birds or the animals in the fields. For us to be disconnected from nature is to allow ourselves to be further bought and sold in supremacy culture. And it is that very culture that has brought ecocide upon the planet that is now placing the responsibility to repair things on you and me, all the while continuing its ecocide. It asks you and me to go without while it kills men and women and children in Palestine for nothing more, at the end of the day than to grab its racist patriarchal balls and line its supremacist pockets, always at the suppression of equity. For all its wealth, it's a cheap bastard. It pushes families and children into slavery in DR Congo so it can pull the con of clean energy so that you can be ecowashed into feeling better about yourself and the environment by driving electric vehicles. I wonder if the various genocide projects of our time have recycling schemes. Observe how genocide and ecocide always go hand in hand.

Most environmental damage is caused by government, global business and the industrialmilitary complex, but it's all on you and me to save the environment. We are meant to support or get alongside the ethos of organisations like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oilorganisations that are run by people who have grown up safe, with equity and opportunity, without any consideration of decolonisation of their structures and their supremacy-based complicity or entitlement before they set their stalls out. When one talks like this, someone always wants a debate. My own rule is that my life is not for discussion. Debate, as we have come to know it, is another supremacist tool. They keep you talking all the while pushing the knife in. You are only allowed to speak a certain way. You must be 'rational' and prove yourself in their science and structures, which are as bought and sold politically as anything else. We are told that we must not say 'Fuck,' that we must not show anger, that we cannot simply burn down the institutions of hundreds of years of oppression, everything is 'complicated,' we must be reasonable and give things 'time.' Consciousness and spirit through the teachers and the wisdom keepers of our lineages answered these questions of how we might live meaningfully thousands of years ago.

'rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation.

Healing is an act of communion.' - Bell Hooks

But there is no historic homeland or heartland to return to except in imagination, and for all the dreams of an imagined golden past, we cannot live in projection, though so many try. Colonisation and supremacy culture is such a projection in itself, and its narcissistic delusory

disorder is beyond colour and class; it has become the very air we breathe and the water we drink. Heartbreaking though it is that we must reflect on internalisation to begin to heal, we have all learned by the most brutal betrayals that so many skin folks are not kin folk, which, of course, is part of the outflow effect of colonisation, to isolate, to prevent connection and growth, to stop any actual movement of change, always to keep things on its terms, even when we create 'safe' spaces. We can never go home again - we are here and now - home is long gone.

If I have no home to return to and am not wanted or supported here, if I don't have equity - I will not be reasonable by your standards. FUCK civility - I will be aware of the fire and anger in my blood, but even more than these, I will be aware of the truth of my own being, free and clear of these imposed and woven layers. In my own way, I will burn down the structures that have been wired into me - through awareness, through love, through sexuality, through equity with myself, through writing, through authenticity and self-realisation. I will name it clearly and meet that shadow with the integration of love and awareness. By doing things this way, we burn down the outer structures as we no longer feed them our life's blood and energy. I see the hands that are around our throats, how unfree we are. When we know and admit where we are, we can choose self-knowing and begin the process of self-liberation, for it is in these things, individually and collectively, that we can start to know and live our own lives.

Look how small we have had to live our lives just to survive. Look how much things are not on your soul's own terms, and that even the ways we have been taught to believe always leave us abandoned and capitalised upon. So I choose this. I prefer to know what things are. I choose not to debate with it or even think in terms of resistance, for to think or feel in those terms still places the oppressive force at my centre. It wants our attention always - even in resistance. So I take this world, these histories as mine, as ours, and I don't need to tell anyone what I am doing, how I am loving or living. I am part of nature, you are part of nature, there is nothing to connect with. We are! It is the vast reservoir of life and being in which every atom of us is part of existence. We are told and told over and over again that there is no truth anymore. But nature will show that truth is beyond those borders, and our bodies and spirits know truth and life when we meet it.

Alignment

Dear Reader - please consider engaging with yourself through nature as a radical part of claiming your own life back, experiencing joy and dignity, healing ancestral wounds, and having a breath to breathe that is your own. The only difficulty is in our own minds, in that we have been taught that we live in a hierarchy which has dominion over nature and that the isolation of the corporation-owned, food-deserted, technological city age is our way forward. Though on many levels, the era of early 21st Century genocide culture is having an opposite effect to its intention in that many are starting to feel the call to their hearts, to want to engage with life with sanctity and meaning, that they want to be free of the machine and that machine has for as long as we can recall has been the workings of colonisation both interior and exterior. The machine falters when we take one free step in our own awareness, and that is when the call of nature can be our greatest teacher.

While Walking

Trees are my friends

Birds are my friends

The river is my friend

The heart within the heart is the sacred heart

The path of my life is the teacher

Tiny ducklings swimming on the canal

Heron in slow motion

Full green of summer leaves

The wind in the air is the call to prayer

We pass each other on the path

Who meets who?

One step after the next

Always becoming

From' SO' Selected New Poems 2011-21 (Crocus)

Bag & Feet

If you want to try hiking in nature for a few hours, and it is new for you, you don't need any special gear or preparation. You only need to wear long trousers and long sleeves because of bugs and nettles, and something suitable for your feet, a pair of serviceable trainers will do. As I'm in England as I write this, I would say dress in layers: a t-shirt or vest, a mid-layer like a light fleece, and a wind/rainproof jacket - then you can be as comfortable as you need to be. A small backpack is a great idea. In my walking bag, I carry my journal and a pen, a little multitool penknife, a small fold-out sitting pad, and a flask of peppermint tea - I find this better than taking water as it is a tummy soother and nicely warm and hydrating, and I've never been much of a water drinker. I always make a sandwich and carry an apple and a banana too. And that is all I take.

As to where to walk - nature finds its way everywhere, but I always find waterways fascinating, as is getting beyond the town or city boundaries. But if you are starting out, national parks are a great way to get going, as they tend to have marked trails. Every town will have trails and paths. Though you have to work with what you have in some places, even in the most urban landscapes, there is the sky, and something always breaks through the concrete; there is always a path at the edge of things. But give yourself the advantage and allow yourself to go somewhere where you can walk. I try to get a short walk in every day, even if it is just taking a more extended, greener route to my office, and I try at least once a week to get out where I'm in nature properly for a few hours.

The most important thing to take with you is that natural sense of yourself - that is really the whole theme of this essay, and this is done by engagement with your heart, not by forcing your mind against your mind. I take myself with me, and the walking and the nobility of allowing for real silence, the sense of Prana in my body - reveal not just myself to me but where I am right now as my home. In our house, we have coined a term for this, 'Home as Ashram.' What we mean is where you are right now in this moment is your home for this time, and so one treats this place and moment respectfully as you would your own home. You naturally want to keep it clean, to feel how it sustains and supports you, that what you bring there is directly reflected to you. I grew up in a violent and chaotic home, and I find that meeting 'home' in the moment and nature teaches me what home is supposed to mean.

But it is not just about us being in nature. As we walk step by step, if we allow ourselves to be rather than habitually hiding in the dehumanising traps of phone and endless storied drama chatter with each other and so on as we walk, then as we allow our bodies to move and our emotions regulate, we begin to see life. We realise that a tree is not really called a tree; that is our name for it so that we can reduce it down to our thinking level so that we have dominion over life. The naming of a thing limits its life because we then know what it is. 'You are a Siddique - that means this, I am English - this means that, that is just a weed, that is just an oak, that is just a robin, that is just a migrant.' Feel how that works? How we use the limitations of identity in the cause of reductive degenerate power. At best, a name or an identity is just a symbol we use to communicate about something that essentially has no name and is, in reality, an expression of the vastness of life. As we allow our hearts to walk step by step, we begin to know our nature for ourselves and find our place in the greater immanent story that is only ever hinted at through our words and concepts.

Pacific Trash Vortex: disabled eco-wisdom vs the high-speed death cult

by Mish Green

I’ve been trying to write this poem

five years for a wool sock, four hundred for a coffee pod

where I list the approximate lengths of time that a variety of objects will take to biodegrade unprotected in the environment - the state changes as they break down into constituent parts that reveal themselves via the generous close attention of fungi, bacteria, and other microbes.

Like the list of biodegrading objects, the poem falls apart after a while into a mess of uneven pieces. It’s not clear what they are

six pack rings around turtle shells, glitter on everything

or what this poem is meant to be. First the images fray and then with them goes time, twisting at the edge of what is recognisable.

Time degrades with each line, shifting in the fog that defines my internal climate

between two to four weeks for complete decay of a paper towel and thirty-one thousand three hundred and seven for monofilament fishing line.

and as you can see it is leaning heavily to one side.

Like maybe by describing each article of trash I can create a map of some kind, a timeline that can assist with navigation from heap to heap. Of course, I have a particular audience in mind. Just one, initially. The disability support assessor. It goes like this: me, on a plastic chair (500 years approx, depending on sun exposure), trying to convince her to see what she can’t, what she won’t.

tin can on a blameless average day, let’s call it a better day; aluminium, worse8

Here’s where the abled9 normies stand, and over there, there’s the rest of us:

8 ‘Explain how you cope on both good days and bad and how you manage over a longer period of time.’ PIP disability support application form, gov.uk, 2021.

9 Temporarily.

the part marked by sea monsters and dragons.

I start this poem with what I call chronic10 time, and then comes an apple core, a cigarette butt, a rift cut piece of pressure-treated wood. I know something about decomposition, about being broken into parts by the world in which I live. Like many disabled11 people I have intimate knowledge of what it takes to unwrite yourself, to go from recognisable to not. Seen to unseen. How sometimes time can be a long long time12. And it is something I have long been trying and failing to express. Not just poetically, but to the state, as demanded at regular intervals. And the question then becomes: how do you prove the existence of the invisible? Even more, how do you prove it to someone who is heavily invested in denying its existence?

The assessor is silent as she completes the next page with summaries of sketches of polaroids of things I’ve let fall from my grip and I panic, talk a floating mass:

I’ve got this fantasy that I will finish the poem the Pacific Trash Vortex, I tell her, is almost invisible. and it will be undeniable, solid in its truth.

Broken down into fine tiny pieces, you’d sail your boat right through it.

The assessor will read it and she will shake off the stiffly bureaucratic ableist shroud she has worn over the years and will lift her head from the clipboard and see with clear eyes, because in my fantasy the poem is just that damn acute.

Despite over 1 in 4 Britons having some kind of disability or disabling chronic illness13, as a culture we still treat disability as something unusual and rare.

10 As in, chronically ill.

11 For the purposes of this essay: disabled = facing significant barriers in daily life and society due to congenital or acquired physical or cognitive condition, chronic illness, or mental illness. Some people include neurodivergence in this definition as it can have disabling results in a society that caters almost exclusively to neurotypical people.

12 Which is why I write this essay in footnotes, chunks, slips of time and stuttered thought. Gaps. A deeply disabled approach to thinking and creating that pushes against the streamlined and smooth.

13 https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9602

That one guy you know from your first job who uses a wheelchair. The epileptic girl in your class at school. Centuries of economic and social othering, most recently in the form of the neo-liberal paradigm in which we have lived since the 80s at least, have created a perception that there are, in fact, very few ‘truly’ disabled people. There’s Paralympians, and then there’s the rest of us. The rest of us who are skiving, malingering, faking it, failing to be inspirational and plucky, and by the rest of us, I mean all of us. Because no one is spared the reductionist logic of the binary: good/bad, true/false. Productively employed/passively dependent. No accounting for the detail and nuance in which all of us live, and certainly no accounting for the heavy loads we carry if we are disabled by chronic illness, lack of access, and a world that insists on worth as economically-defined.

Disability is made invisible even when it is visibly present, because that’s what our particular flavour of economic and social ideology requires. But despite this erasure, disability is common. Really common. The UK government’s longstanding approach to disabled people is one that is both punitive and paternalistic. It starts with disbelief and blame, especially if the illness or disability is invisible to the naked (and non-disabled) eye, and from there it moves through degrees of surveillance and control, eventually forming a carceral twin to the prison system in seeking to contain and subdue unruly unproductive bodies and minds.

Invisibility covers an enormous swathe of conditions, from asthma to OCD to Crohn’s disease. We humans like to privilege what we see - I saw it with my own eyes - even as we learn that eyewitness accounts are unreliable to the point of falsity. So what does the space shared by invisible illness in both humans and planet look like? Between individual and environment? And how do we respond as a culture and a society? I don’t mean this metaphorically but physically. Measurably.

Climate chaos gains pace each year now, growing deserts, fanning wildfires, killing and displacing millions of humans and billions of more-than-human lives. Climate disasters place disabled people specifically at four times greater risk of death in natural disasters14 across the globe, whether that is due to the increase of severe storms interrupting the just-in-time supply chains that keep insulin available to diabetics15 , or in the failure of evacuation plans to include

14 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(21)00542-8/fulltext

15 https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-022-14552-4

those with disabilities16 .

Antipsychotic medications impair the body’s ability to thermoregulate - and so, on an increasingly hot planet, the most common treatment tool for the invisible illness that is psychosis puts that person at much higher risk of heatstroke and other heat-related injuries than someone not taking that medication. Global warming heats the planet and disabled and chronically ill people are among the most vulnerable to the effects of that, across the globe and across all communities.

To cite the most recent widespread example, Covid-19 strategy almost universally places disabled people as sacrificial lambs on the altar of abled society, our deaths, injury and isolation deemed necessary to enable the continuation of business as usual. Disabled activists refer to the Covid-19 pandemic as a mass disabling event, while the rest of society declares it over. We choke on more grief.

When disability is made invisible in an individualistic society, the result is a chasm that swallows those of us who live closest to the harm. This means that disabled people who are also made invisible or disposable by things like structural racism, sexism, transphobia, poverty or classism are most at risk of being swallowed by the kinds of climate chaos that we simply can’t outrun.

While the super wealthy build their bunkers in New Zealand or wherever else their money allows them to hide, our elected officials push through legislation that firmly supports maximum fossil fuel extraction and use: the remains of ancient sea life drives our planet closer to catastrophe. Money for oil, money for gas. Money for coal and roadside air particulates, for heating oceans and melting glaciers. Money for so-called invisible damage. Shift in the gulf stream, microplastics in clouds, the growing abyss.

plywood when the meds kick in and cigarette butt as they wear off,

And I come again to the question that haunts me: how do you prove the existence of the invisible - or rather, how do you prove the existence of the ignored?

one to five years, like the sock.

16 https://www.humanity-inclusion.org.uk/en/cop26-people-with-disabilities-among-the-hardest-hit-byclimate-change

Money determines that banning single-use plastic straws will be an easy win with the general public who don’t require straws that often, and so they do it. Too bad if you have tremors due to cerebral palsy and a metal straw will cut your mouth. Here’s a paper one, and drink fast because it will completely unravel ten minutes from now. Time stumbles against your lip.

The poem that I’m trying to write is partly about the way that time moves within a particular disabled and chronic illness neurology, something I’ve come to think of as chronic time or, as Alison Kafer calls it, crip time17: the unique ways that time can move differently around and through disabled and/or chronically ill bodies. Not just in terms of us maybe needing more time to go from X to Y to Q, or to move slower than the abled world expects, but also in terms of patterning and stretch. Disability can bend time, pause and knot it, cause it to stutter and yawn, spool out longer than you might ever have thought possible: here is pain looping time, fatigue stretching it thin and persistent - here is the delicately wound knot of time between the onset of dissociation and, later, the setting back into flesh and bone. We lean on our assistive devices, the tools we learned in therapy and from one another; see five things, hear four things, touch three, smell two, taste. You are this many years old.

I’m on the second stanza of the poem and already I’m reaching to explain disability to anyone who’s not yet experienced it. Already I’m at odds with language as I try to describe something that, while not being unique to disabled and sick experience, is the hallmark of so many of our bodyminds18 as we exist in this world. We speak in it, move in it.

I take the poem to my writer’s group and they tell me I’m trying to write too much in one poem, that it deserves more room to breathe, and I wonder what that looks like. Breathing. If you’re swimming and you tire too far from land, roll onto your back - that’s what we teach kids, even babies now. Rest there as long as you need. Floating on your back and breathing under a relentless sun,

17 More crip time in art at: https://artreview.com/what-is-crip-time/ ‘Crip’ is a reclaimed word that some (not all) disabled people have taken back, in the same way that ‘queer’ has been reclaimed by some lgbtqia people.

18 I am using the term ‘bodymind’ in the disability studies sense articulated by Margaret Price: to emphasise the intertwined nature of our physical, mental, and emotional selves in a way that includes our disabilities, genders, ethnicities, and all the many other ways our bodies and minds are treated in the structures of power in which we live. I want to also make it clear that the concept of integrated and complex self didn’t start with disability studies scholars, but in fact has very many long histories and present use in cultures, philosophies and practices around the world, from Traditional Chinese Medicine to the Nehiyawak (Cree) First Nations of what’s now called Canada, for example.

drift. Through the Pacific Garbage Patch, or Trash Island, or the Pacific Trash Vortex as it is known, big enough to count as a continent by now. The unseen terror. Breathe.

In trying to write this poem I have had to admit that I am obsessed with garbage. Tips, skips, recycling centres, incinerators, compost heaps and fly tips and all the other ways we dispose of what we no longer want. The leftovers, the scraps. Broken bits and worn. A friend tells me he’s similarly obsessed and so we hatch plans for a zine, tell each other to dig out all of our previous writing and art fodder that features any of these topics or locations. I find a lot. The chocolate bar wrappers and crisp packets I stuck to my teenage bedroom walls, the pill-bottle mobile that I hung over the chest of drawers. The hundreds of photographs I took of pallets of plastic sheeting and wrapping and bags (between 20 - 5oo years, depending on thickness) while on holiday in Wales: semiopaque blue lashed tight to pink and green, red and white butcher stripes and yards and yards of the faint milky white that’s made when translucent plastic is bundled into metre square bales, like the opposite of hay. My family waited by the road till I’d had my fill, got it from all angles, seen where the different sections were.

And why am I still trying to write this poem? Because I want to understand why we can’t see what we won’t see.

Because I know that the assessor is sailing past right now and it is here, lapping at her hull, if only she would tear her eyes from the horizon and dip her arm into the sea.

Instead, I am on this page reaching for a metaphor about decomposition and the Pacific trash vortex, swallowing a little more salt water every time I stretch for it.

“Here is one thing I know: The tendency to imagine invisibility as a property of certain bodies risks reinforcing a culture of compulsory ability, in which the obligation to disclose lies with the person who ‘fails’ to inhabit a normative bodymind. Those who are invisible must again perform the labour of making their presence known.19”

19 Watts Belser, Julia, ‘Disability, Climate Change, and Environmental Violence: the Politics of Invisibility and the Horizon of Hope” Disability Studies Quarterly, 2020

Coming out and coming out and coming out because that is the only way we as a culture know how to see those at the margins.

"Because disabled people's experience is not integrated into the culture…most people know little or nothing about how to live with long-term or lifethreatening illness…how to live with limitation, uncertainty, pain, nausea, and other symptoms when doctors cannot make them go away."20

Disabled, chronic and sick writers, by contrast, often articulate a relationship to time and place that is rooted in the complex present, a recognition that satisfaction and pleasure can be found amidst rather than beyond the realities of limits, loss, and uncertainty.

As we collectively face an increasingly urgent climate present and future, I would like to propose that disabled and chronically ill people - particularly those who also live at the overlap of multiple margins, more likely to be poor, homeless/housing insecure, racialised, queer, trans, immigrant, incarceratedare ideally suited to conceiving of futures that are liveable for all of us. Because so many of us have been practising this stuff for years and years and years already. Of necessity.

This is not a new conceptual project for those who have long been forced to hack our own disabled responses to environments that make us sicker.

We know that our neighbourhood, our environment, our planet is suffering because it has been telling us, clearly and in unambiguous terms for years, writing its ecological pain on our bodies: in asthma and recurring bronchitis, misophonia and the nausea-inducing vibrations that travel from the truck to the ninth floor above, in natural disaster survivor trauma and long covid and the debilitating reactive stress that haunts those who have had to carry displacement/hunger/precarity/loss/injury/grief following yet another of the once in a century events that are the hallmark of our increasingly sick ecosystem.

Disabled people are often very experienced with holding multiple contradictions, out of necessity.21 We are geniuses at retrofitting because so

20 ibid

21 Paraphrased from a talk by Jumoke Abdullahi of London-based Triple Cripples collective, so named due to their being , as disabled Black women, at the point of most harm on three counts. This was at a Healing Justice London event online in 2023. Find more at https://thetriplecripples.uk/

often the assistive devices and technologies and environments that we need are simply not there, either because we can’t afford them or because they don’t exist.22

Disabled people have long been supporting one another with this, building coalition in formal and (more often) informal ways across experience lines, setting up equipment and aid libraries23 that provide things like glucose monitors and crutches to those who need them, organising communication webs and resource sharing, sending out support packs to those newly disabled in our communities, and theorising and practising disabled futures that truly centre an ethos of justice for those most pushed to the edges by those futures – like gene editing, and designer babies - that wish us out of existence.24

Mia Mingus’ articulation of access intimacy,25 and Leah Lakshmi PiepznaSamarasinha and Teuiki Martin's ‘care linguistics’ and ‘care fluency’26 point to the fact that the understanding of care needs is a language, and like most languages it is a living, evolving thing that can and must be learnedcontinually, by all of us, if we are to have a liveable future. None of these are mystical skills that a person either has or doesn't have, or that are bequeathed to you upon diagnosis or impairment. None of these are fixed in time or in a single location (my body, your body, our homes).

If our task as a species is to create truly liveable futures (and it seems uncontroversial to say that this is THE task in front of us all) then an essential first step is to read the damage and the illness that our environments are carrying, to listen carefully to what they are telling us about what we can’t see. The air, the water, the soil. The very things that support life. The more-thanhuman population of living beings. Slow down. Observe. Reorient. And then respond to that damage and illness with a willingness to learn complex care languages and the communication of the invisible27. Indigenous land and water

22 Architect and sustainable urban design expert Janis Birkeland has written extensively about the need for what she calls eco-positive retrofitting of existing structures that also provides socio-ecological benefitsthat is, ways of making sure that human and more-than-human community and inclusivity aren’t abandoned in pursuit of pure efficiency, with care commodified as something available only for the privileged. Read more of her immense life’s work at: https://netpositivedesign.org/

23 Read case studies on what disability care without institutions can look like - an awesome article by seeley quest - https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/care-without-institutions

24 For more on the difference between disability justice and disability rights, please read Patty Berne’s writing here - https://www.sinsinvalid.org/blog/disability-justice-a-working-draft-by-patty-berne

25 https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/

26 Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi ‘The Future is Disabled’, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022

27 A tool I have been learning to use for this is one devised by Queer Naturehttps://www.queernature.org/ - they call it the OODA Loop, which is a bushcraft tracking approach to adapting to change, chaos and uncertainty. OODA: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Go read them - they are super smart

protectors have been reading the damage for decades, as have climate scientists and permaculture practitioners - all desperately trying to get and hold our collective attention with the messages they are receiving - and yet our society keeps speeding towards disaster and calling it progress. The breathless pace of contemporary life is bad for all of us - both disabled and temporarily abled - because it is designed to meet the needs of commerce, the exponentially labyrinthian28 system of abstract accounting that we have allowed to dictate the shapes of our societies, and our global relationships with one another and with our home planet. Global finance moves at a speed that is incompatible with sustained and sustainable life. When I say we need to slow down in order to see what we are doing, to hear the invisible, to know it, this is what I mean. In the most literal terms, we need to stop. Allow our surroundings to unblur and come into view.

Who better placed to inform this change of pace than those of us who are already having to engage creative care skills every single day, who stand alongside the land protectors and the scientists and the slow farmers in hearing the earth speak to us and understanding that we are collectively and often individually moving at a self-destructive pace. Who better than those of us who are already living largely outside of capital and so-called productivity, and therefore outside of the high-speed death train that is industrial global financial ‘progress’.

So many of us who are invisibly and visibly disabled are inherently anticapitalist in how we exist because we do not serve capitalism’s productivity imperative either fully or at all. So, what is our radical knowledge as exhausted people, as people in pain? What do we wish others would understand? What can we teach or model?

What if we - all of us, disabled and temporarily abled alike - accept that we can't go back? Accept that we are here now, and we have to adapt and listen and learn from what our environments are telling us. We need to learn the skills of pacing29 in every aspect of our lives, as a culture and society, to understand that rest is essential.

with all of this, weaving an indigenous disability justice ethic into future ecologies and a humble human relationship with the Earth.

28 And we remember the labyrinth of Greek mythology, which held a monster that brought violence to all those unfortunate enough to be cast into the labyrinth.

29 Pacing = an approach to managing chronic illness/fatigue in particular that entails doing things in carefully planned stages, often in ways that the abled would consider ‘wrong’ or unfinished. See Christine Miserandino’s Spoon Theory.

We need to listen to those who know that constant growth is cancer.

And if this essay reads as a simple statement in favour of the destruction of the capitalistic paradigm that's because I am already living partly outside of it, one foot in and the other foot (and my walking stick and knee brace) out, standing in the land where we have no choice but to find meaning that doesn't grow from how much or how fast we can produce and achieve, that instead measures success in moments of connection and collective care and rest.

Standing in the land that recognises the dead end of individualism.

In their book ‘Care Work’, Piepzna-Samarasinha refers to ‘being part of that wild pack of slowness’30 and I want to ask: are you part of the wild pack of slowness? Have you seen it? Moved with it?

My wild pack of slowness moves on metal legs and rubber tyres and crutches and sticks and sit down here in the text for a rest on that wall there and look at that ladybird. It touches noses with the other one, gets one of its wings out for a clean. Twenty minutes have now passed.

My wild pack howls in pain when no one’s within earshot but sometimes not, sometimes someone’s there and someone hears it and even more than the anger, self-conscious hot face, grief, the fucking grief, in that howl there is defiance. Used to always hold it in, no matter what, used to stay in because of it but now my wild pack of slowness is bold in our wholeness and so we bring the burning skin, the gut punch cramps, staccato neuralgia and the bass drum that beats down dry and deep in our bones. We bring pain out to the shop, a walk round the park if we can, wearing the biggest coat we have, and lippy, as armour and also because it can be applied in one simple slash.

My wild pack of slowness knows how to hold love over distance, how to build intimacy between bedbound lives and my wild pack also knows that we owe niceness to no one. Kindness, yes. Compassion, yes. We practice these till our insides are raw with trying. But the kind of nice that drifts bland above the skin without ever making contact, that causes no bother, expects nothing – we owe that to no one. And neither do you. My wild pack argues and shouts spiky words, finds each other so goddamn annoying some days, because my wild

30 This line is in reference to their experience at Creating Collective Access (CCA) - a crip femme-ofcolour conference that took place in 2010 in Detroit, in the US. You can read more about it at www.creatingcollectiveaccess.wordpress.com, as well as in the book ‘Care Work’.

pack is as multi-faceted as yours, as diverse and many-mouthed, complementary and dissonant, fractious and solid, my wild pack. We crackle with flaws. Like you. But membership in this wild pack entails a learning that we are one of many, and as one of many we know we are tiny, built of chaos and yet still here, whole, and real. And so are you.

I’m writing this while waiting on surgery and definitive testing for what gets called a cancer scare, like a narrow miss while changing lanes on the motorway. Or not. The unruly self. As I wait, I am holding a mess of emotions in my bodymind, although honestly mostly in my body, because my body speaks first in times like these - of fear, of gratitude, numbness, anger. Others that I still don’t have names for. In order to cope I am focusing on both hope and denial. But I also know that I need to hold the possibility of diagnosis.

The assessor pauses and holds her pen above the clipboard, so I go on:

Along with the unreal feeling of disembodiment as I wait for an answer, I am aware of the tools beside me, the hard won skills I’ve sharpened in decades of disability and chronic illness; how to live with uncertainty, with mortality, with madness, how to live with what the world likes to call failure. Slowness. Invisibility. Going from seen to unseen.

Everyone talks like it’s a moving island of nappies and plastic bottles oceanic land of the dead, but it’s not. It’s quieter, far more sinister.

And the unexpected connection to wider systems of life that that difficult transition can build: the ladybird currently hibernating in my office window near the fern, water moving in great clouds across the sky, the mites that live on my eyelashes. We are connected. Not because disability makes magical savants of those it visits, opening up some kind of mystical door through which we can finally know the depth of things, but for a more pedestrian reason. Because so many of us who live with disability and illness in an ableist society have long since had to shed the dangerous delusion of individualism and the luxury of believing that we can simply power through any fundamental challenges we face using our willpower or our material insulation or both.

It’s a soup of minute particles, vast and many and shifting

We’ve had to look our mortality and the fallible body that is our home square in the face, to stare deep into the eyes of vulnerability, and inhabit it, without applause. We’ve built toolkits out of insomniac nights and shards of anxiety, of

debilitating exhaustion and the thin end of hope after such long, long illnesswe’ve learned things, remembered.

and one handful of seawater is like nothing to the naked eye.

Figured out how to live lives that the temporarily abled blithely call unlivable.

Like water from your kitchen tap.

Like the future we all face. And this is what I want you to know about painecological, physical, relational, emotional. This is what I want you to know about disabled strategy and the kinds of things that you are all going to need to know, that you need to know now if we are to understand and respond to the profound illness in our ecosystems. The essential knowledge. The strategy that the so-called weakest of us are holding.

Fragmented fishing line. Shredded net.

To paraphrase Johanna Hedva’s brilliant statement on the politics of our alleged weakness: chronic illness and disability - with its blood, shit, agony, vomit, pus and death - is metal as fuck.31

The assessor presses her pen on the paper and she looks up directly and firm

at the dark wrack of living seaweed draped along the length of my face.

31 “It did not intuitively make sense to me to say that the sick are weak because being sick is fucking metal. It has nothing to do with weakness and everything to do with blood, shit, agony, vomit, pus, and death. What narrative does it serve, then, to denigrate the sick to the sphere historically occupied by women? The one kept out of the public sphere? The one not legible as political?” From Hedva’s essay Sick Woman Theory: https://topicalcream.org/features/sick-woman-theory/

Crocus is the publishing wing of Commonword/Cultureword

A cross-genre publisher rooted in the North-West, we publish and celebrate excellent work from global majority and working-class writers. Crocus proudly distributes across print, performance and digital. In 2024 we are committed to helping writers find cutting-edge digital methods to both create and share their work.

Through Commonword/Cultureword, our writing development programmes nurture and support new writers, providing a springboard to literary success.

Thank you to our funder Arts Council England