How to Live Nonviolently: Gandhi’s Salt March Misinterpreted as a Handbook

1. Live in community for 10+ years while purifying the self.
2. Build and enrich community and social services while living in community.
3. Reclaim bread labor.
4. Develop an indigenous relationship to the land.
5. Remove the machine from daily life.
6. Create salt from seawater.
7. Resist tax; resist war tax; resist empire tax.
8. Resist empire.
9. Reclaim your roots.
10. Reclaim your power.
11. Reclaim the commons.
12. Reclaim collectivity.
13. Reclaim everything that is your birth rite.
14. Divest in any system that believes in mutable value.
15. Any system that maintains control through force becomes weak when challenged by another system.
16. Reclaim salt.
17. Reclaim the sea.
18. All acts of civil disobedience are devotional.
19. All acts of civil disobedience can be a sacrament.
20. Start organizing with a core group.
21. Allow others to join you.
22. Gain momentum through inclusive process.
23. Dismantle systems, not people.
24. Insist on the truth.
25. Any system that does not respect life immediately forfeits its legitimacy.

Grow on Me, and I’ll Grow on You Too

My birthday was all-over day of rippling peace, love, joy and gratitude; an amount of spiritual and physical satisfaction, that I have never really felt before. It felt delicious. It contrasted heavily against ever prior birthday, adorned with tears. I felt I was finally experiencing the fruits of a long and invisible labor, hanging heavy on the vine, weaving all of my friends around me, who in turn were cross-pollinating each other. And I was the center of it, like a bodhisattva with 1,000 hands and eyes, like a spider weaving her web, like a rotting log supporting a cornucopia of life. Grow on me! And I’ll grow on you too!

My night ended in Trevor, back in town for a court date for two days. My Argos, my love, seeking temporary respite from the war of poverty that suffuses his life. I let him envelop me. I drowned in him. And I noticed that he yielded to me too. It was so different this time. He’s softer now. We made love. And by that I mean there was continuous contact between autonomies, between interiorities, the whole time, and a lot of desire to please the other, to lavish the lover with love. To serve as pleasure. To say “I love you,” renewed, different again, with mouths and tongues on bodies, caressing, percussing. If there’s one dance in which we are becoming rather proficient, it’s that one.

When we curled up to sleep, Trevor assumed the position of need—the Little Spoon—and I did my nimbly best to feebly embrace his broad and thick frame, running my hands and mouth over all of his surfaces as he sank into sleep. I took my usual inventory: new stitches, new nicks and scratches, all story-less; new fade, shaped-up beard and hairline, more muscle, perhaps more fat as well? Kidneys faded (bad) but not solid (worse). Body tired in deep ways. Metaorganism receptively turned inward, receiving pleasure while preparing to leave my world again.

He left early for court, stood me up the next night, and was on a plane the following afternoon, this afternoon, back to a life of extreme precarity in the suburb of a city I barely knew, in a state I’d never visited, for God only knows how long. Standing people up is not atypical of Trevor. A tearful goodbye on the phone this morning really brought it home for me that this person’s position in my life needs to change. It’s time to let go, and let him relax into the position of one of many lovers in a polyamorous landscape, and nothing more. It’s time to stack functions with regard to the rest of it — I need a primary partner, if I am to have one, who is also a sidekick, a collaborator, and a friend. Someone who speaks a similar language to mine, or, perhaps more truthfully, someone who is willing to build a bridge with me, and to me. This is the new vibration, and will be adhered to as a matter of eternal life.

Diverting the Flow of Bodies Through a Space to Inspire Community: An Alphabet

I’ve been thinking about the concept of community a lot. How an important part of communal living is surrendering into change, allowing for randomness, allowing for others to transform us. A healthy house, in my opinion, ought to have a lot of different kinds of people circulating through its commons, much like a healthy downtown. It is this level of randomness and flow that actually allows people to do their own thing. They can come down to the river and drink, and then back to their dens to dream and work.

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“Diverting the Flow of Bodies Through a Space to Inspire Community: An Alphabet”

ALL-TOGETHERNESS / ABORTIONS / ARRANGEMENT
BEAUTY
CREATIVITY / CONSTRAINTS / COLLAPSE / COMMUNES / COMMUNAL LIVING / CCD
DISPERSAL / DISTRACTION / DEFERENCE / DISORGANIZATION
EGRESS / ETHICS
FREEDOM / FLOWS / FORGETTING
GEOGRAPHY
HISTORY / HIVES / HONEY / HONEYBEES
INVOLUNTARINESS
JERUSALEM
KAABAA / KINSHIP / KINDRED / KIN / KINGDOMS
LONELINESS
MECCA / MORALITY
NOTHINGNESS / NEGATION / NOURISHMENT
OPERA / ORGANIZATION
PUMPS / PERMACULTURE / PREGNANCY
QUEENDOM / QUEEN BEES
RIVERS / RIVERBANKS / RIPARIAN ZONES
STREAMS / SPACE / SPIGOTS / SHUNTS / SPACIOUSNESS
TRIBUTARIES
UTOPIAS / UTIS
VENUS / VENUS BARBATAA / VOLUNTARINESS
WATER / WEAVING / WINTER / WOE(BEGONE)
XENOPHOBIA
YELLOW / YARROW
ZEITGEIST / ZEALOTS

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Colony Collapse (CCD) is occurring because bees are living among bombs, toxic bombs, poisons lacing their landscape. The fertilizers are killing them, the pesticides are killing them, the mites are killing them, but, somewhat (but never) like AIDS, what is actually killing them is the co-infection, the coming-together, the acquired immune deficiency of these plagues. Each CCD hive has a different constellation of issues, in different proportions, some so different that they can no longer be officially classified as CCD.

Bees hate sickness, so the sick bees voluntarily leave the hive to die. If more than a certain number of bees leave the hive, the rest of the bees leave and the colony collapses, abandoning the queen, a hoard of food, and some nurse bees, who care for the remaining immature bees and the queen herself.

What can we infer from this about our own communities, our own hives? Too many toxins in a space will repel community, ultimately, and a certain combination of toxins will kill the community altogether. Also, once a certain number of members have abandoned ship, the community will collapse, leaving the most diehard behind, maybe, and more community-driven resources than they can handle. Most importantly, though, to voluntarily self-separate when ill will actually deplete the community more than staying to be cared for.

A Self-Introduction Without Use of the Infinitive

They call me Chloé, my mother named me Chloé, she gave birth to me almost 28 years ago, I have many feelings all of the time, I study permaculture, sometimes stress fills me, sometimes happiness overtakes me, sometimes loneliness haunts me. I want to surround myself with people who often radiate beauty, I want to put my hands in the earth and pull up roses, I want to reconnect life to itself. I want to focus on helping people I call my friends, I want to write with my other hands sometimes, I want to walk backward with those who have passed into another realm, whom have faded into beauty as the Sufis say, and sing to them. I want those who call themselves Other to find me, and meld with me sometimes.