A question ...

Photo by Bernd 📷 Dittrich on Unsplash

I’ve been thinking about the tyranny of the line. About the inevitable violence that accompanies our collective insistence on linearity as a way of being.

We see it everywhere and across scale: the corporate climber putting a match to relationships and their own wellbeing in the quest for success; the country setting the world ablaze while committing multiple ecocides and genocides in the name of progress; an entire civilization teetering on the crumbling pillars of individual ownership and infinite expansion.

As if reality were not a fractal field of relations, each shaping the other.

As if the horizon did not recede and come around again like an old friend surprising us with a tap on the shoulder. 

As if time itself were not curved, bent around the black hole of our becoming… the gravity of the now…

Of course there is violence. 

What else can there be when a centuries-long imposition is made on the very nature of things? When reality is herded and corralled to our ends?

Of course the river will break its banks.

Of course the monsters of our collective unconscious will awaken and climb out of the abyss.

Now that they are here. Now that we see their hulking forms against the red sky. Now that there is no doubt that something must change, I ask:

“What of the spiral?”