believing is seeing
having a 9 to 5 is risky.
I heard this on a podcast and it’s been ringing in my ears.
Last month my job fired their warehouse staff and moved the entire operation to Mexico. No one was spared, not even the cofounder’s brother.
The more they outsource jobs, the more they talk about diversity, beaming. They marvel at their prized pie chart, pointing out its proportions.
I wonder instead about the growing wage gap. my coworkers and their overseas salaries. no equity, but private equity.
having a 9 to 5 is risky.
Paúl and I spent Memorial Day weekend in Wisconsin, tucked in amongst the trees and dairy cows.
I had been thinking about rust while we were up there, hoping I’d see a derelict barn from the road and stumble onto a gold mine of old farm gear.
On the second day, we went hiking. In the car on the way there, I had a conversation with the universe. It wasn’t totally conscious nor serious. I asked for sheets of rusted metal. I’d been playing with smaller pieces from the steel pipe, but larger sheets would allow me to cover more surface area.
I asked and let it go, forgetting about the conversation completely.
We parked at the trailhead and made our way in.
Around the halfway point, we came across one of those informational park signs. It pointed out the surviving foundation from a turn-of-the-century homestead, before the mining company took over.
Paúl was the first to spot them.
To me they were perfectly camouflaged, having taken on the same brown hues as their surroundings.
Sheets of rusted metal. A handful of them. just sitting there on the old stones, waiting. I laughed, remembering the request I made an hour prior.
Paúl asked if I would take them. emphatically yes. They seemed like fair game. I scooped the sheets up and pushed them into a second shirt I was carrying.
On our way back to the trail, we made another discovery - morel mushrooms. my first in the wild. The universe was showing off now.
look what I can do, it seemed to say.
We took only the rust.
My mind loves to undermine these moments. Just a coincidence it scoffs.
I call it synchronicity.
The child in me proclaims magic.
In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan talks about the art of mushroom foraging. You have to “get your eyes on” he says, a trick learned from seasoned hunters. Only then do the mushrooms start to appear, “as though they were beckoning.”
In mushroom hunting “believing is seeing”.
I want to believe.
Mostly I want to believe in a world that is very much alive and sentient. ready to play, to collaborate. a co-conspirator. This requires different eyes. Not the ones I was trained to see with; those transfixed by tangible outcomes, bound strictly by logic. I’m talking about the ones that can delight in anything; that notice the morning sky is never the same twice.
I want to get my real eyes on. The ones that can see magic.
found metal sheet
post vinegar bath
The battle against magic has always accompanied the development of capitalism.
Magic is premised on the belief that the world is animated, unpredictable and that there is a force in all things: water, trees, substances, words.
Aiming at controlling nature, the capitalist organization of work must refuse the unpredictability implicit in the practice of magic.
The world had to be “disenchanted” in order to be dominated.
Silvia Federici
Of course there is magic. The universe reminds me again and again. Caterpillars dissolve into cones of soup and emerge transformed, taking flight. Minuscule seeds contain within them the blueprints for giant sequoias.
The task is remembering. This is why the creative practice matters. It brings me back into allegiance with that which is unseen, alchemical. There is nothing to take here. The practice is elusive, impossible to dominate.
Risky is forgetting to take the blinders off. Risky is going through their motions, putting all of my eggs into the baskets of broken systems. Risky is a business made viable only through exploitation.
Risky is forgetting to look up at the moon.
Risky is losing my eye for magic.
Above all, magic seemed a form of refusal of work, of insubordination, and an instrument of grassroots resistance to power.
Silvia Federici
References:
The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan (pg 368-369)
Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici (pg 173-174)