A Declaration of Is-ness
Coexistence, Entanglement, Mutuality, and Reciprocity
We, the ones without all the power and wealth, who refuse to play along, do declare:
The phoebe takes care of us as much as we take care of her.
Whether or not we see it, think it, feel it.
No hierarchy of predators and prey, only a web of interdependence.
None without all the others (or at least not sustaining and thriving).
No ecosystem service, nature-based solution, or loss and damage report
Can quantify the unquantifiable, the inevitable is-ness of our entanglements.
They are also we, but they rupture our commonality.
Hoarding, intentional or not,
In the name of progress, modernity, competition, rugged individualism, productivity.
Racial capitalism embedded within zoning laws, policing, and generational wealth.
Rights given and taken, contested and rejected.
Deservedness ranked and dis-ease bestowed.
For convenience, beauty, order, and control. For money.
Ordinances enact violence; capitalism creates homelessness.
Every seizure, eviction, clearance, police intervention, leaves wounds on bodies and land.
That violence is fascism, producing disability, illness, and death.
Those wounds are not inevitable.
The antidote to fascism is abolition: we co-create our world again and again.
We refuse the logic of scarcity, reject the lie that there is not enough.
We refuse the lie of ownership, reject the idea that care must be earned.
We do not seek rights from the system that creates dispossession.
Survival is resistance.
The sovereignty of seeds, microbes, mycelium–
The holobiont of we.
We commit to abundance, collective care, mutual aid, self-determination.
We commit to protecting what we can, building what we must, refusing to leave kin behind.
Care in the spirals of life, pain, death, metabolism, and regeneration.
A chosen obligation, yes, but more a recognition:
Of the reality of our coexistence, entanglement, mutuality, reciprocity–
The is-ness for which we don’t have language.
We do not ask for what is already in common.
Critters burrow, undermining, much as humans try to stop them.
Likewise human shelter can’t be granted, deserved, negotiated, bought and sold.
Both are natural as breath, as the sky above and the ground below.
The land is itself. The river is Itself.
We are a multi-species commons.
People homes, critter homes; we refuse to disappear.
We remain, entangled—
Human and nonhuman, housed and unhoused, settler and indigenous, past and future.
We hold this ground together, we and the phoebe, the mugwort, the meadow mushrooms…
We sow, repair, shelter, nourish, play, and stay.
With all the rest of us, in our multitudes.
Beautiful!