Happy Beltane!
What a momentous time to signal the mid-spring, with new life sprouting all around us, we are asked to consider the strange chrysalis we find ourselves. Our emergence from this time is still coming, overhanging, pending—we’re in the strangest of holding patterns. Some restless and coming out too soon—the world on fire all around us–tensions flaming.
Now is still the time to dream our lives and society anew.
Even now, countless laborers are putting themselves at risk for the sake of others, whether it’s the primary care of health and hospitals, the food and sanitation chain, the constant and necessary functioning of what we have come to rely upon, to say nothing of so many unrecognized others putting care into the system for their family and friends–roots and foods, for strangers. Some of them are also on strike or working in organization and solidarity with those efforts to bring justice, equity, and inclusion in the face of all the ills that our current capitalistic and oligarchic system have done against the lives of these essential labors.
As we change our future from where we are, let us remember that our labors must be balanced with those that need reciprocity and recognition, food of different kinds, nectars of new kinds of health. It is an opportunity, I think many have seen it, to examine what it means to be essential.
The term eclose, the eclosion of a pupae from a chrysalis, to emerge as a full adult, is a helpful metaphor. We’re still changing, mutating, swapping the stored fats and knowledges of yesterday for legs and wings—buckled down in our homes and starting to get antsy. We face fears, distance, and death. We cannot possibly return to the world we left, we are so changing. We are dreaming a new world as we shelter in place and plan for where our wings can take us, how to remake and remediate our world. But what will it take to fly in the next? Will we know where to land?
To facilitate this feeling I have for Beltane and May Day this year, enjoy the fire of new growth, try to honor deaths and stillborn to close, and add some balm for the stretch marks and growing pains—and keep in solidarity that this is happening to us all in some way.
Some music to enjoy and guide that journey.
And an invitation to work on how to dream the future. From the reverberance of the Chrysalis Symposium last year and new work being done to articulate this world with some discussions and workshops online, below.
To celebrate the 1st of May in spite of the lock-out, @medialab_ScPo with @zkmkarlsruhe have made a new platform https://bit.ly/2YlcJmT to follow thru the project “where to land after the pandemic?” A modest way to resist the return to the old ways. –from: BrunoLatour @BrunoLatourAIME · Apr 30
There’s a lot of us working on this. Feel free to reach out and get connected.
Hearthspeaking 