They said he had tuberculosis, but it was a mysterious death—one of the first I heard of—that fluttered the nerve endings of our collective subconscious. Someone was walking on our graves.

If you take a vacation with a close friend and it’s not the best goddamn time either of you has ever had in years, it was a flop, and marks the end of the good times between the two of you forever.

“You can feel it on that one, like a tingle. You ever feel something like that? Like you can just feel the ghosts of the raped around a certain kind of man?” “I know what you mean,” Trace says. She does. She has felt this, often.

I don’t want to divide the world up into categories anymore, I want to understand.

My writing utopia supports both introversion and community. It’s urban, but also oceanic. We heal our shameful histories with honesty and reparations. Everyone has a guaranteed minimum income. In my writing utopia, we center creativity and joy. We don’t bend to the needs of capitalism.  We know that imperialistic story structures will never destroy the empire.

I get that sometimes, the strange sense of waking up and being shocked to realize that I am me and not some other person.

Language is pitiable when weighed against experience.

As I approached the doorway to Earth, I was hesitant to enter. I kept looking over my shoulder. I heard the crisp voice of the releaser of souls urge me forward. “Don’t look back!” And I remembered how Earth is a heavy teacher yet is so much loved by the creator of planetary beings.

I cried happy tears five times this week, four times over Artemis 2 and its crew, my emotional support astronauts, just like anyone else who was paying the slightest attention. Moon joy indeed. But the fifth! On Wednesday Mary, my riding teacher, took my arm to correct my hand position slightly, and exclaimed: “Your wrist! It’s like a brick!” We spent the rest of that lesson and the next focused on making my wrists as soft as possible. It was a fault in my riding that was hard to see but easy to feel: easy for Mary to diagnose, and easy for Lenny to complain about.

He’s such a funny, stubborn, sensitive horse. As soon as I concentrated on soft wrists, soft wrists, to the exclusion of everything else, he stopped tossing his head, reached into the bridle and gave a contented sigh. And stayed there, soft and round and happy, until halfway through the next lesson, when I had to halt in the middle of the ring to have a very big emotion.

It felt like I was riding a made horse, a horse Pam or Carrie had trained, not my own opinionated little mustang that I have been riding for seven years. It isn’t just my wrists, of course. It was a thousand thousand pieces we have been working on forever, and this was a tiny addition, but it was a load-bearing tiny addition, a phase change. Before and after.

Outside of the tiny circle of people who ride Lenny, and people who teach me and Lenny, and obviously Lenny and myself, all this effortful and painstaking work doesn’t matter and will disappear when we are both dead. But we did this, together, my stout little chestnut gelding and me.

The Kingdom of God is a call to revolution

I don’t think there’s virtue in labor for the sake of labor, in endlessly harvesting beyond one’s needs.

The land we stand on feels solid, but the continents float on molten magma like dumplings on a simmering stew.

Abraxa loves them both, wishes them only good. They’ll leave me, she tells herself, and then the thought rearranges itself like a warm wax lamp: they’ll let me go.

Native trees like native people do not understand or care for the profit motive.

One of the immensely valuable things I’ve learned from reading Indigenous writers and history (shout-out to Anita Heiss, Evelyn Araluen, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Terese Marie Mailhot, Joy Harjo, Natalie Diaz, Bruce Pascoe, David Treuer, Stephen Graham Jones, N. Scott Momaday and many more) is that looking at the United States and the Commonwealth of Australia and seeing colonial regimes that are fundamentally illegitimate is a real and viable option available to you at any time. Instead of doomscrolling, just think: Turtle Island. My shoulders immediately relax and I can breathe more easily. This land has seen empires rise and fall. This, too, shall pass.

This world is a network, not a hierarchy. You can tell by the immense amount of work and energy that pours into maintaining hierarchies. The empire really really wants to monopolize your attention because the second you notice it’s a party trick, it loses its power. Bullies hate knowing they peaked in high school. Billionaires are shit-scared of death, which is even a little bit poignant. The empire is a house which like all houses is only a temporary shelter against the rain. Water will find its way in.

Two obvious objections present themselves. First, isn’t this nihilism? I think it’s actually a bit closer to existentialism. And I’m not advocating for giving up on life and lying in bed being depressed, because I’ve tried that and it’s boring. Anyway the whole premise of this objection is, if not maintaining the empire then what? Which is more totalizing empire thinking, because it turns out there’s lots of things that are not the empire and a lot of them are really great.

For example: Charlie and I got to visit the Pueblo Indian Cultural Center. It’s amazing, a museum in a circular building that emphasizes the cyclical nature of indigenous time by, among other things, grouping artefacts by meaning and not chronology. This curatorial choice underscores the tenacity and continuity of a culture that succeeded in beating back the Spanish invasion and that endures to this day. Plus they have fry bread tacos in the cafeteria.

If not empire then how about ceremony? The rituals of maintenance, attending to the cycle of the years, tending to the land. Gardening, emptying the dishwasher, going to church. Or how about art? Making things or singing or moving your body around outside the relentless coercion marketplace. Forming relationships with particular wild or domestic animals. Being, just for the pleasure of it.

The second objection is that if you don’t consider imperial law legitimate, the empire’s goons can come and snatch you off the streets or shoot you in the face, which: yes. They do that. (Or the flip side of this argument, which is that as an immensely privileged white lady, I can afford to say that the empire is bullshit. Also true.) But while I was in Albuquerque I finally got around to reading Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. Holocaust memoirs by their nature are drenched in survivor guilt, and the glib reading of this is that the good ones died and that a person had to do bad things to live. But Frankl digs deeper. To him even death in the camps could be a victory to the people who held onto their sense of self. When he talked about this sense of self I recognized it in myself as the person who thinks that we as Westerners should honour treaties with indigenous people or shut the fuck up. The person who can immediately disregard any argument that comes from a terf. The person who likes books and horses and Jeremy, and who is me.

A self is an amazing thing to have. A serious thing to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world, and so on. As I get older I spend more and more time enjoying consciousness for its own sake. All the middle aged cliches: learning the names of my backyard birds, closing my eyes the better to hear the music, drawing not to show other people what I’ve drawn but to find out what I am looking at, and whether my hand can cooperate with my eyes. When I was young and skinny it took me a long time to learn to float, but now that I’m old and buoyant I can simply lean back into the water and let the earth hold me in her cupped hands. That’s how it feels to me to have my self.

Trans people have taught me what suffering taught Viktor Frankl: that there’s a whole universe inside me that the empire can’t take away unless I yield it. The things I know to be true about myself: my treasure. My secret heart is both the only thing I have and, in the end, the only thing worth having. Find out what matters to you in this life and marvel at it. The stars over Wilbur Hot Springs, so thick and bright they were like rain. A lush-furred coyote outside Bandelier that turned to look at me with its dark golden eyes. The thirty years I’ve spent in cahoots with Jeremy: our witty and clever large adult children. What are the chances? All of it is astonishing. Worth it, despite despite despite.

I keep trying to make everything fit in my head, and the best I can figure is: We’re all we’ve got. You know? We have to take care of each other.

Relationship building. > Empire building.

Cancel all uncreative, uninspiring time-sucks.

I was convinced that I’d never have any friends, so I had this idea of being one to myself. I could be honest and loyal and supportive. I could listen to myself and make myself laugh.

I know what it is like to be from an extraction zone. What it is like to grow up in the place where the taking begins.