A Conversation 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B95MqnIlin-yLXNIdFNsekRadHM/view?usp=sharing

Words I thought of on the rugby pitch while I watched Wednesday practice:

Team

Cold

Dirt

Mud

Head

Hurt

Running

Kicking

Breezy

Cloudy

Feeling

Lazy

Splash

Rustle

Pet

Tackle

What else?

I forget…

Last week, I sounded retreat.
I was SO DONE with my cozy retreat:
Too closed-in, too tight, too neat.
I sought out another seat.

One with a vista.
.

And movement.

So the pace is slow...

Check out both Teju Cole’s well-known essay, The White Savior Industrial Complex, which challenges the impulse of well-intentioned Americans to do good in the world, particularly in Africa.

At ASLE two years ago, I heard Wes Jackson  (“The Elvis Presley of the Environmental Movement”) speak about The Land Institute, which is restoring the Konza Prairie in Kansas by replacing annuals with perennials (this visual makes pretty clear why this is necessary--these are life-size images of a wheat plant on the left, and a newly developed variety of perennial grain, Kernza, on the right).

I had a lot of thoughts post-class today about being outside in the cloisters for class today. First of all, unrelated to the setting, it was incredible having Eli Clare in class with us. Everything he said was so thought-provoking and beautiful, and I definitely bragged to my sister afterwards that I had had class with Eli Clare and she was insanely jealous. Now in terms of the setting, I have so many thoughts, and following our discussion of wild writing, I'm not going to give this post much structure - I'm just going to let it take a sort of stream-of-concious form, so here we go.

today i feel concentration. i can't seem to unfurrow my brow. when we talk in class we talk resortation we focus on words and i want to expand. we expand restoration. we talk restoration of our own bodies, bodies assumed able, fully functional. our bodies have challenged us. i feel disturbed by our departure from bodies read as less able, less capable. how much can we apply ideas that were not made for us, ideas that can help us reconcile with our bodies though our bodies require less reconciliation. i understand disabled more when talk is black queer woman and i want to connect my black queer women to disability politics. this is ecological, right? everything is connected.

Sitting in a one room hut in Belize, sipping the freshest hot cocoa I’ve ever had, I was somehow able to both relax and enjoy the moment as well as think about just how much wealth I am a part of at home. I knew from the moment we landed in the airport that everything was smaller and possibly poorer in this country, but meeting a local family and seeing the way they were used to living is what has really stuck with me in the years since that trip. To explain, this was technically a science field trip with a group from my high school, but I feel like I learned much more about the culture of Blue Creek Village and the weather of the rainforest than I did about the topics you would find in a general science textbook.