Equilibrium is death

I was briefly a research assistant for this small partnership of architects exploring the philosophical and literal implications of being in a profession/school of thought that sees themselves and the environment in terms of Creation - like the free market, one of constant expansion. What was being left out of the conversation about their responsibility to the communities they were inherently shaping in the process of designing functional, accessible buildings was Destruction. In our time together, I followed them down paths considering how political, war-time and environmental disasters caused destruction, the history of materials and un-building processes, as well as other cultural relationships to sustainable materials and ideas about how to navigate and use space, to consider the question of what can be released, returned, made available by the practice of unbuilding structures with the care and attention that goes into building them - and we put together a panel of current rock stars in architecture theory for a small gathering at Storefront for Art and Architecture. At one point Keller Easterling - a professor of architecture at Yale - was talking about the living organism of a city, and she was using terms very familiar to me, as I was deep in the study of biomechanics and body systems at the time. At one point she used the term Equilibrium, as she was describing how communities sustain themselves, and some guy with an annoying voice and chunky glasses asked her how to obtain Equilibrium, like it was an ideal thing.

'Equilibrium is Death!' burst out of me into the room with breathless frustration, before Keller could respond to him. She looked at me and said "You're right." 

Equilibrium can be similarly defined in various realms, from economics to physics to biomechanics and meditative practices. At its heart, it is part of the conversation about the flow of resources, but describes a place of zero - where all forces are so balanced that there is nothing coming in or out. In the physical body, we call that state death - if nothing is being combusted and released, there are no engines of life to ask all of the sophisticated layers of being to keep going about their business of sustaining itself. Similarly in communities, money and goods, a flow in and out is necessary to not be left behind, to continue being a participant in the organism of a cityscape. As the flow of resources dwindle, opportunities to live and grow elsewhere draw the constituents, the source of that lifeblood to move on or they must be sustained by the city like a body on life support. I can't help but think of pumping money into forgotten about communities being like a blood infusion - each cell/dollar carrying a bit of oxygen needed for the inhabitants to be able to breathe.

While working with this inspiring group + studying the body with a leading figure in the movement world, I was also exploring cybernetics with another small group of theoretical extremists (Phd students), pulling apart our cultural narratives around the machine of the body and its relationship to labor - which shows up in sci-fi/cyberpunk novels as well as in our current technological enmeshment, from pace makers and hearing aids, to the internet as an externalized nervous system. Quite literally the ways our earlier imagining of what was possible shaped our current realities - makes me think about the value of choosing where we are imagining ourselves into the future in this particular moment. In some of my personal and required reading for all of these disciplines, I came across a few stand out ideas that left marks on my particular ways of perceiving my participation in life/society: 

1. A concept (reality?) in biochemistry about how living systems cycle Time through sophisticated loops without metabolizing/combusting it - like electrical currents creating electromagnetic fields from the friction of passing by each other, the potential built exponentially on that cycle. When it is metabolized it is emitted in the form of light, at the subcellular level, kind of like a nuclear reactor - and as we get older, those systems start to break down, time being combusted at faster rates, spurring the aging process and registering as literal light emanating from the body on specialized cameras (Mae-Wan Ho). Jane Jacobs, in her book Death and Life of Great American Cities - describes a healthy/flourishing neighborhood as one where sidewalks bustle with people from all walks of life, in a million little interactions - I suspect we too are generators of electromagnetic energy, and busy sidewalks are just one of many places our personal conductive capacities are amplified.

2. In the development of modern economics from the dawn of human civilization to now, Charles Eisenstein breaks down the concept of work as our time being handed back to us converted into the physical form of money - as I was reading his writing, I was literally watching the men laboring on my crews giving up all of their time and the goodness, the rich stuff of their being for such a small amount of money in return, because the labors of the body are considered less valuable then labor of other kinds, and that was time and energy they could not save to share with the people they loved outside of work. The rate of exchange was deeply unfair and sustaining a system that would never care for them or desire for them the capacity to be active and engaged participants in their own lives.

3. Our immune system is deeply reactive/engaged by our emotional state. Allergies often are tied to perceived threats in the environment, autoimmune disorders are related to hyperactive protective responses in our bodies, hypermobility is linked to the fight/flight/fawn/*play dead* response and often gets passed down genetically, so may be epigenetic evidence of a previous generation's response to trauma - if we apply that lens to the organism of a cityscape or a community and how the constituents are able to receive resources or organize themselves to respond to things are clear across multiple studies from the macro view to the individual I might be engaging with in a classroom. I know this is important somehow, but I don't quite have the scope of it yet - maybe this is the part I'm currently struggling to metabolize the most - how our interactions effect us on a cellular level, but that also gets passed down through generations at the same time - micro and macro are not distinguishable from each other here. Rather, it is a fractal. 

4. A healthy system, both biologically and economically speaking - is truly responsive to the constant shifts in its environment. The calcification of ideas and ways to respond, which often become institutional, structural are always rooted in previous ways of doing something - and while that can inform us, it can also limit us from being able to see potential resources because we are limited to the familiar. This is where Entropy and the Nervous System start to collide, and quantum mechanics starts to have something to say. It is often at the edges where we feel ourselves the most, or learn things we might never have known otherwise (war, famine, recession, environmental disaster recontextualizes what and who matters) - but our systems seek out safety in the form of the familiar. Apples have a profound genetic potency, each apple seed in every single apple holds the genetic make up for wildly different outcomes, so we force apples into consistency with industry wide cloning programs so we can all buy the same few distinguished kinds of apples from the store, the way you might go to McDonalds for the same consistent, engineered experience of chicken nuggets. Our nervous systems memorize sequences of responses that take huge amounts of effort to reroute and redefine, should we decide we want to have other choices for how to be and move through our environments. If we as human beings can develop broader relational/emotional capacities to keep us from being so quickly dysregulated in our environments (part of healthy development from child to adult), how can we also build living, breathing institutions and economic structures that are responsive to broader and bigger fluxuations in the environment before becoming dysregulated? 

What does it mean for something (an idea, a body, an institution, a city) to be truly sustainable? Can we layer these lenses to see the whole picture more clearly? While there may have been benefit to separating them for a time to get clear about the shape of things - maybe they were never meant to be upheld as isolated experiences, and our current fractured reality is the inevitable outcome. What can we sew back together, to be able to understand and allocate our collective and individual resources more clearly?

If the micro and macro are so tied (obviously they are inextricably linked), and energy cannot be created or destroyed - but gets constantly converted, trapped, transubstantiated, revealed, released  - maybe nothing I do is wasted in the end. Maybe all of the things I have done and been and said and failed at were not wasted.

Distortions of Participation

 Where am I? 

A washing machine of memories and circumstances blurred together in soapy residue, a mountain of unfolded thoughts and feelings piling up on the chair next to my bed, the stack of calendars, sketchbooks, partially read books, pens, pencils that I sleep next to, shaped like a lover who hogs the bed and won't hold me when I roll over. I don't do full readings these days, I let the tarot cards that I peel off my legs in the morning reveal to me what's coming. This bedroom is Walden pond, and I am a transparent eyeball, a glass orb perceiving everything at once except no one knows when the fortune teller will arrive to translate all of these shadows of what has been, who's inheritance will pay her bill, where the tornado will drop Dorothy - into a land of technicolor dreamscapes or a metropolis built of garbage, the only evidence we were even here at all.

How did I get here?

A decade ago I sat in the kitchen of a steel shop while someone I love like a brother sat frozen in grief - a hole had been found in the heart of his child, 5 months into the intense work of building itself into a full human, nourished in the protective landscape of his wife's body. This man, broader and stronger then I will ever be, his depth of kindness that changed my life, who gets misread constantly by so many as a threat because of that quiet strength, the lack of bravado, and his black body - they decided not to terminate the pregnancy, but carry it full term so they could know their son for the few days of life on earth that he had to give. So much has changed since we worked in rhythm, alongside, in the multitude of constellations two people can support each other in a toxic work environment, and we protected our matching joy, we grew like two impossible plants in a Martian landscape, nourishing each other. He called me the other day - he has acquired the standards of adulthood, decent pay, bought a house, has two kids and driven, happy wife - but his voice was heavy as he told me about the loneliness of this new place, no friends or coworkers to resonate with - he said he would go back in heartbeat, to the shop, where we had each other's backs, and our bodies were strong enough to withstand whatever came at us. Where the feeling of being seen and known was larger and louder then the post-recession blues, and the monsters were vanquishable because we knew we were not alone, strong on multiple fronts.

A month ago I met up with a new friend from this new environment I work in, her movement slow and winding from the late stages of pregnancy she was swimming in. She described feeling alone during our brunch, of years working at this place, but having made only one other friend. The weight of bringing a child into the world with just her and her husband, an island out in the Bronx. As we went to part ways, I told her how glad I was to know her - and the shock in her face was like the shock of a violin stroke out of silence - and the other night, as I left a school with her teaching through her contractions, the beginning stages of labor, her eyes were like pools, bottomless in the early winter darkness as I told her what I had to fight to learn: It is ok to need things, to reach out and communicate those needs to others - never apologize for needing something, especially in the work of bringing this baby into the world. Call me, in the middle of the night, whatever, and do not be ashamed if you or your husband need another body to offer support in this moment. We were never meant to do this alone.

What I did not say, what maybe feels still too vulnerable to name to someone else yet - is how honored I always feel when people acknowledge they need something to me, and trust that I am available and capable to show up in that way. That I hunger for the depth of that kind of connection, that supercedes culturally learned fear, patterns of shame and disconnection. This is when I feel the texture of the fabric that binds me to something, anything - the shape of home I am building and rebuilding for myself constantly - this undercurrent of feeling, offering, receiving support, when the gift of being interconnected goes both ways at the same time and we are brought closer in the process - THIS is what community means. THIS feeling is what we are here to build, this is the architecture of the house I want to live in, a place where we are able to witness each other through the grief and fear and bittersweetness and celebration and hard growth without averting our gaze from each other. Being able to stay with, to BE with, whatever comes.

In so many yoga classes I've taken, the instructors describe space being made in the joints, between bones - it was a revelation in deeper body studies for this confusion of metaphors to be called out - space in the joints actually causes them to malfunction. The deeper and more connected each subtle ball and socket is, the greater the communication of force through that juncture, and the less vulnerable it is to becoming destabilized. So much injury and pain emanates from muscles working at cross purposes, or having learned to do the work of other muscles, parts that go quietly unnoticed instead of being invited into their purpose in supporting the wholeness of our physical expression - learned habits from our earliest encounters with gravity, so hard to know what we have never experienced, but not at all different from our emotional realities and skill sets as well.

Someone asked me the other day about when artmaking feels liberatory for me. I've been thinking a lot about that word. We live inside of such a narrative of Independence and Separation, of bootstrapping ourselves into being, of freedom from responsibility to others. I think the ideas and language crafted by American culture are inherently at cross purposes with what it means to be an agent/member/constituent/participant in our own lives, as well as any kind of communal space. The skills it requires to support others come from having an experience of being supported, the two are not able to be separated - just like Respect in regards to children, you cannot give something you've never safely received, or even tasted the flavor of. I think we need to be more specific about the language of liberation - the freedom from something does not automatically imply what will replace what held us together before, and even if what held us to the earth was toxic - if the only other/safe option is to not be tethered at all, we will not make it very far. Maybe being liberated from what held us back disrupts the narrative of separation in such a way that we can be more wholly, safely enmeshed in the fabric of each others lives - so that we can see each other, hear, feel, support, celebrate each other more freely. A removal of bondage may first require a redefinition of what CAN bind us to ourselves and each other, and the potential waiting for us in that capacity for connectivity.

Maybe this is good moment to switch the lens.

The element of surprise, by its nature, could never be on a periodic table

 Where does one begin?

How do you choose what part of the tangled ball of needs, associations, expectations, community agreements, unresolvable conflicts, childhood wounds, social injustices and their intimate day-to-day appearances, value systems and their neutered manifestations in our actions and attempts at connection - to start untangling, so any of us can step firmly on some kind of ground, and make even a single step forward? How do we find momentum, with so many threads to wade through? And who would we even be, if those things weren't there (?) - the evidence of our existence, that is probably our work in this lifetime to navigate.

Maybe because I was raised by deeply immature adults, under the poverty line and without any kind of guidance about how to survive in breathtakingly simple ways - I have grown strong and capable to hide my deep confusion about how to process and organize myself and the information I receive from my environment in a stabilizing way. It often feels like I shouldn't be in the rooms that I'm in, or have the language I have, because I was not given the tools or the appropriate lenses as a child to be able to hold my own and see clearly in these sophisticated environments. As wide and deep as I grow in knowledge and self/emotional awareness, no matter how many people I hold in high esteem that I impress with these things, no matter how brave or strong I become - it will not change the destructive narratives my mother has created to protect herself from the judgement of others - by telling anyone who will listen that my distancing myself from her is because something is deeply wrong with me.

I keep thinking I've found my way past this.

While at training the other day, when asked to do a 'grounding' exercise before beginning a session on Social Emotional Learning (SEL, an incredible byproduct of the pandemic that is being incorporated into schools) - I followed the directions, listened to a song I liked, looked over my notes, checked in with myself. When the session leader asked us how that felt, entering the group after taking a moment to be with ourselves, I can only really feel a mixture of confusion and frustration. Traditional "grounding" stuff always makes me feel vulnerable - breathing related exercises always take me back to desperatley trying to control my panic attacks while being emotionally abused by my stepfather. Looking inward before engaging with others leaves me feeling raw and exposed, a byproduct of my selfness and truth being constantly attacked by the adults that were supposed to be invested in protecting and supporting me as a child and preteen, I'm sure. But I also understand that vulnerability is an important piece of being in relationships, that often being able to be vulnerable is proof of feeling strength in oneself, and trust within a relationship - with self or other. So I guess I'm confused about how other people experience a conversation with self as 'grounding', or what it means to feel 'grounded' at all.

In the aftermath of this question arising, I have thought about the ways I do create systems of feeling prepared to meet others - I get places early to settle myself in the environment, to land. I make sure everything I need was prepared in advance and packed the night before, at my own pace (often with extra stuff in case I need to freestyle something). I map out what I think/feel/believe/value about whatever we are going to engage with, so I can worry less day of, and trust myself to be available and responsive. I make sure I have a sense of where I/we are going, to inform the steps I take, or how I log information. So I guess my closest sense of 'grounding' is anticipatory - If I'm prepared for what's coming, I can be available in the moment because I know I'm safe and resourced enough to hold all of us and whatever may come. But I am realizing that so much of my life is devoted to work explicitly because there are rules and boundaries and deadlines and expectations, and things and people to answer to about right and wrong and up and down and next steps - that organize me and my sense of self in a productive way, in a moving forward, momentum way - but is not available to me in my personal life. Perhaps that is why I spend so little time there, why I need so much silence and alone time when I get home every day, why dating is not safe for me, why my closest friends are people I have worked alongside in intense environments - people who also require huge amounts of space and alone time, but have proven they will also be there when it really matters. 

I keep hearing 'self care' come up, a simplistic idea divorced from the reality that if we need to be told to do it, we probably don't have the skills - and its been co-modified by capitalism as something accessible for a few dollars in the form of a candle or a rock with a word carved into it, a shopping spree or a latte you 'deserve' - without any kind of exploration into our self-beliefs, our relationship to self, which was cultivated in our earliest moments by the adults who handled us and communicated to us their values and beliefs about our selfness - through their curiosity or lack of, about our developing selves, their space or availability to meet our needs or not, their ability to keep us safe or not - from our earliest breath these experiences teach us what we are shaped like (the good/bad one, the burden, the protector, the help meet, the surrogate spouse/stand in parent, too much, not enough, family savior/parent's pride and joy etc) and we carry these subconscious beliefs about ourselves into our adult lives and relationships, effecting every choice and relationship we encounter, and saying the word 'self care', or making sure you stay hydrated isn't going to address the lack of or underdeveloped relational skills we are all trying to navigate. The same is true for our students and young people - that we learn by doing, by being engaged with in the ways we need to grow, not through vocabulary words and superficial gestures.

The session leader told me I must send my roots deep, to be a tree that stands tall. I told her that I wrote once 'I'm a ship, not a tree' - so she switched metaphors and said I must find my anchors. I laughed through my tears and pointed at the anchor tattoo'd on my neck. So that is my homework - to figure out what anchors me to the earth, to myself, to this point on the timeline, the map, this moment.

Tarot Reading for Self-as-Client

(3 card draw, for Past/Present/Future)

The Star (Past)

You shone so bright, pulling focus in the room helped sustain you for a time, but you didn't have the reflective surfaces you needed to see yourself clearly.

Justice (Present)

Watch what you put out into the world - that is what will find you. Get really clear on what you want that to be shaped like (karma).

The Sun - crossed by the 5 of Pentacles (Future)

Clarity is coming, but will be coupled with being humbled. Not humbled in an embarrassing sense, but with the pain of not being able to keep holding the unwanted parts of yourself at bay - having to convert everything, even those sad bits that make you feel weak, into something of value/building materials for our future selves - what does it require of you to plumb the depths of your past with a lens looking for resources, rather then the lens you had before, the one figuring out how to protect yourself/survive in spite of the things you are. What if there was more salvageable material then you ever realized? What do you have to let go of, to be able to see yourself more clearly?

xoxo

and we awoke to a crucible

Back in the room with a group of students at a particular school in Queens, we sat down to brainstorm the bones of a new mural. My focus this year (as a teaching practice in general) is about building the kind of Future we all want to live in together. I'm imaging talking about post-apocalyptic scenarios and exploring aspects of things like afro-futurism - which incorporates the past as a powerful resource, rather then the disconnection or other-world colonization of more traditional sci-fi.

While I'm thinking about how to build supportive containers for students to engage in creative play, I'm shocked in all of my classes by the weight of the mundane on these students. The overwhelming response I got from this particular session was about - in the words of a student - the "Illusion of Choice", a road laid out in front of most of them of the middle class ideal: good grades, college, office job. No other options, just one singular route that seems to be painted in shades of brown and grey, colorless and without joy or curiosity about what other rich possibilities exist - within themselves and in the world.

It's wild to realize that what I'm working with is other people's visions for what these student's lives are composed of, so that is the place I must begin.

I took notes as they talked, catching the threads of the tapestry we are starting to weave. Board games like the Game of Life popped up, the idea of wearing a VR headset and living between 2 realities, and eventually we started talking about roller coasters - and so we did sketches where everyone took an amusement park ride and adapted it to fit some aspect of their lives, and it was devastating in how profound their maps were. Clear and articulate in their metaphors, I see the beginning of this piece.

I shared some of what came up with their in-school Art Teacher, and she replied that she was seeing echoes of all of this in all of her student work so far this year. I've been thinking a lot about how the looming recession will show up in the classrooms that I navigate, and I think it is already here. I'm in it. I'm always torn with feeling layers of responsibility for the inherent power I wield in these settings, and more intimately - in the way that all of us look to the people older then us for clues about what is or is not possible. I am lucky in this particular group of students that it is so simple - to hold and protect this space with my focused attention, and to simply listen with a deep curiosity to whatever reveals itself in the room. 

Notes I took during the session:

The body itself is a congealed metaphor,

 Of course dreams are surfacing again. Everything is about to change.

I was in my childhood home, just past the kitchen, standing by the dining room table. Someone I watch for clues about navigating-the-world walked in the door leading through the kitchen, that connects the garage to the laundry room. The door had been unlocked, it remained open as he walked over to me with a backpack on his back. We sat down on the ground next to the table (where I used to lay in front of the large speakers my brother had, while letting the sound vibrate through my body as a teenager listening to the 5 cd's we had growing up) and I showed this person my illustrations, inside of published books, trying to prove something - I'm not sure why I needed him to see that. He did not see what I showed him, so I gave up and listened. With a deep, tired gravitas, he talked about not wanting to leave the country for some temporary visit, being afraid of missing things, events, a religious ceremony while he is gone. Eventually he got up to leave, and for some reason, it was important to me to lead him through the house and out of the front door instead - only the front room looked like the attic of a church, and there were shadows of my siblings moving around beyond the pillars and archways, like parishioners scattered in contemplation, or Quasimodo the bell-ringer going about his day.

Its always been my mother's bedroom in the past - that was the way out, the open window in her room giving me access to the outside world. Now I can't stop thinking about the open garage door - where I would climb on my bike and ride off alone for hours when I was angry but unallowed to express or feel that feeling. That path, alongside the garage would become wrapped in banana spiders every autumn, dozens as large as my hand, that I would talk to - to convince them I meant them no harm. Architecture usually refers to the structures of self, and I am discovering that side doors often relate to the parts of ourselves we keep hidden. An open or unlocked door can signify entering a new stage in ones life, new opportunities and ideas. Why that person might be entering to greet me through this stage/opportunity, but sharing their regrets about growing beyond their own boundaries is hard for me to quite fathom yet.

This person has been mentioning a religious upbringing a lot recently - which I am deeply curious about, but I miss opportunities to explore it because I keep filling the space with my need to be seen. It feels like he wrestles with himself, saying surface things with many hidden layers beneath them, or searches the space between things for something he can't quite see. Once he told me that no one asks the right questions, and there was a deep, internal softness to his voice I have not heard since. I think about that moment often. It seems strange but specific - obvious in some illusive way - that I would lead him through the chambers of my internal space as it shifts to become church-like.

I almost wonder if this dream was more for him then it is for me. Or a premonition, a glimpse of something yet-to-be. 

*** After more dream research

People in our dreams are often aspects of ourselves. Columns are related to our supports/foundation, and while Church makes me think of institutions, I think here it is quite simply a place of reverence, the communal space of having faith - seeing that the garage speaks to the ways we propel ourselves forward in life, and I associate pulling my bike out to ride out my rage as a kid, transitioning from being propelled by anger to something deeper and more supported, loving even, since I encountered my siblings (stand ins for my bredren in so many ways) - I think my lack of faith in myself has been holding me back, allowing hateful people to pull me out of myself.

It's amazing to be exploring new rooms in the house-that-is-me in my dreams, like coming home in New ways, over and over.