Liberation, Feral Cats, and Biting The Hands That Feeds Me
Our wildness is how we dance with the unknown
The universe has pointed out that I am like a feral cat.
Life - full of love for me - offers me a plate of food and I - full of terror - run and hide. Life offers to remove the fleas from my fur and I hiss and claw and bite. Life offer me a cozy bed indoors and I would rather die outside than risk a possible trap.
The feral cats and I look ragged. Life on the streets - in constant fight or flight - takes its toll. Our fur is dull and matted. Our eyes are bloodshot and restless. Our teeth are rotting and falling out. Help is right beside us, but it appears threatening so we hide. We will die young in these streets.
We do not know there is any other option.
The feral cats tell me with their antsy gaze that it is not worth the risk to try and live a life of liberation. What if liberation is just the latest marketing scam The Brutality is selling? What if a cozy, indoor bed really is a trap? What if everything really is as scary as it seems? It is not worth the risk to find out we are wrong. Because if we are right, then we are dead. And that is too big a risk to take.
The audacity to be wrong
Liberation work requires a certain sort of boldness: the boldness to be wrong. Oppression - with its insistence on perfection and its brutal consequences - has taught me it is better to die a familiar death then hope for something beautiful and be wrong. Oppression has taught me to live fast and die young in complete and utter certainty that there is no other way.
The safety of knowing
Colonized people love the illusory safety of knowing. The unknown represents feminine energy, and sexism has taught us that feminine energy is weak, illogical, and worst of all dangerous. I do not trust the unknown, and I do not trust not-knowing. But the creative process, teaches us how to engage with the feminine energy of life - the unknown, the void space, the possibility of possibility - with more camaraderie and cooperation. It is wise to befriend the unknown rather than trying to dominate, control, or suppress it. No matter what I learn, most of this universe will remain beyond my comprehension. There will always be more that is unknown to me, than known.
Your Duet with life
Life is a creative process. I am improvising, moment by moment in a duet with life itself. Maybe I’m writing, DIY’ing, parenting, conversing, driving… All of life is a creation. And yet, creation is a terrifying and intimidating process, and I will surely insist that I have "ruined” my blossoming creation more than once along the way. This is the dance with the unknown. The inhale and exhale as what I am creating dips back into the unknown, and then solidifies into the physical world, and then dips back into the unknown, and solidifies in the physical world. Creativity is inhaling and exhaling the inspiration until it’s done. And the work tells me when it’s done. I don’t get to tell it. I don’t get out of the car until I reach my destination.
Learn to breathe with life
Life is in a constant state of inhale and exhale, expansion and contraction. This is how life moves. Feral cats and colonized people refuse to dance with the unknown. Because life appears threatening to feral cats and colonized people, we experience fear even when Life is trying to be kind to us. Each time we experience the bowl of free food as a weapon, we reinforce the perspective that life is only terror.
But it’s time to notice when the help isn’t a threat.
It’s time to notice when the love is actually love, not a trick.
It’s time to stop being feral cats and colonized people, and come home to ourselves.
We were always meant to be wild, but never feral. Our wildness is how we dance with the unknown.
Our wildness is how we reach our pain up into the void and transmute it into something beautiful (music, art, words, love) that has never existed in co-creation with us before, and after this moment it will never exist the same way again.
Our wildness is how we engage with life, not how we hide from life.
Our wildness is how we remain in communication and collaboration with our ecosystem, which is also wild.
Our wildness is how we escape institutionalized oppression and run home to the insitutionalized liberation of planet Earth.
Get wild!
Do something wild today.
Get messy, sloppy, inconvenient but fun!
Get fierce, unhinged, ratchet and loving it!
Get free! Get free! Get free!
