the pleasure of sorrow

today i spent my morning outside, pulling weeds, cutting overgrown grass, and watering the mint, thyme, parsley, and sage I planted a few weeks ago. my dad is a cancer man, and has the largest collection of scrap metal I have ever seen. we still have the rusted frame of our childhood trampoline in a corner of the yard. he refuses to discard anything because he “might use it” or “i need that.” I understand this man grew up during the Cold War era, and grew up poor — one of 7 children to a disabled vet and a larger than life matriarch. he has told me stories about the government bags of food they received. and yes, my father also has a I walked to school for miles in snow story. one day I asked him what we would do if the nuclear power plant 60 miles north of us exploded. he listed exactly what needed to happen. this man doesn’t use google maps. he knows the state of texas so well by county roads, landmarks, and street signs.

i was outside cutting an overgrown bush and out of the corner of my eye, I saw the tail of a black snake with gold lines slip into the green. i immediately called it a day. my mom used some of our yerba buena leaves to make us a tea, and I sat down to read a book gifted to me by a classmate. its called Joyful Militancy. i am not sure how she knew that this book was actually perfect for me. it draws heavily from anarchist and syndicate theory. looking at the names on the back of the book though, reminds me of how intricate the connections are between us. one of the authors who blurbed the book is a figure I knew of from my days in political circles in Austin. we maybe met once or twice, but i saw him often at rallies and protests.

the part of the book i am reading right now is slightly about audre lorde’s concept of the erotic, that our capacity for sorrow makes space for pleasure, for joy.

i think about this as a practice. how each time i endured heart break, i took a year or more to move through those emotions. but how do we move through what we witness each day? more bombings. more shellings. more death. the book says, “Empire works to keep its subjects stuck in individualizing sadness: held in habits and relationships that are depleting, toxic, privatized.”

and so we gather in ways that we can. we build networks of love and care that span geographies and time — we can be present in our refusals. as Jasbir Puar notes in Terrorist Assemblages, the future is closer to us than the past.

portals are all around us, and seeing the snake this morning reminded me of that. transformations are coming. i watched the video of that plantation in Louisiana burning BURNING down. someone on the internet called it an omen. maybe collapse is coming. maybe catastrophe. one world dies while another lives. there are many worlds. the signs are around us. my friends calls it a positive pessimism. perhaps. but despair and nihilism got me nowhere. love has consistently carried me forward.

one thing is certain. summer is here.