Without Shields (the voice of change is changing)

 

 
 
 
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There are ancestries and ecologies that are speaking. I am honored when their voices run through me. Only when my integrity is clean is the frequency audible. Simplicity is complexity with grace.
 
 
To be their vessel: to hold the nourishment, to wear the breath of any possible future…is to cast aside the costumes and scripts of excuses for the damage. The exploitation that has been justified has bled through now. The language, the status and the authority once wielded to make the vulnerable quiver, now makes cuckolds of anyone who would stand in for the way things have been. Time’s up.
 
 
So I stand naked, in the fire, alone in the dark night. Warrior-ready to simply disavow the matrix of materialism. Eyes rolling in disbelief. Once again the presumption… the nerve is remarkable. Taking, tricking, claiming is the perverse providence of anyone who would adopt the stance of the oppressor. The sociopathic eagerness for wealth, influence, at any cost, is such a small shoe. No voice of life will speak through that craving mess.
 
 
I see now that this work is not daytime. I am walking barefoot through the glass of broken worlds. I have been training for generations for this. Do not try to shelter me, my soft tissues hold the fluid of forever. I can hold this pain with joy, and wash each day with the wholeness of great-great grandchildren who will one day play here. May they have soil under their fingernails.
 
 
(n.bateson 2017)