I see three kinds of movement.
The first is the migration of people across national borders, across continents and oceans, and this march of people increases every year. At the end of 2000 the number of people who arrived and lived in a country not of their birth was at 281 million, according to the United Nations.
The next movement is the internal kind, moving within nations in late 2023 and on into 2024 increasing as larger and larger numbers of people join Free Palestine rallies and marches. The demonstrations take place everywhere in the world and continue to, from Sri Lanka to Malaysia to Hawaii to Finland to Alaska to Gambia to Fiji.
As the world leadership of strongmen and Neo-liberal capitalism guarantees a growing underclass, the Palestinians have become symbols for all victims of colonial violence. Time and time again, the daily plight of bombed civilian families is identified with by local movements in faraway cultures.
Both kinds of movements, the migrating and the marching, involve the push against police control, permits are ignored, the leadership seems to be everyone… The efforts to ‘restore order’ against these movements often come in the form of threats, but the exodus of migrants and the loud marching of protesters are just too passionate and too large in number. The local entrenched power act as stand-ins from the US and Israel, and the colonial empires of old, and we are moving away.
All the countries of the world have migrants leaving and arriving and all the countries of the world have marchers waving their signs. People are in motion constantly, as if the time has come to move and keep moving. State-sanctioned economies are seeing large numbers of participants walking away, with a rise of barter and gift economies, the way of nomadic survival.
We are entering an era where the percentage of the population that is in motion is so high that the conservative governments and their residents will be highly defensed at all times, conducting their parasitic business practices with a shrinking market of consumers. The pattern of demonizing the people in motion, pioneered by the finger-pointing hate of Donald Trump, will become a permanent culture of fear, while the on-the-move “citizens of everywhere” will create a new kind of fluid nation state.
All of this motion by humans, as small streams grow into torrents of bodies, is taking place on a landscape that is itself in motion, the ultimate Movement. Entire eco-systems are now moving and speeding up. Species of animals and plants, all of life from mycelia and fungi to the eagles soaring above, are moving every year, shifting up the valleys across the plains as temperatures, rainfall and companion species fly, crawl, run....
The Earth is evolving rapidly in its dance with humans. A massive transformation is underway. Life forms are disappearing. Jet streams and the deepest ocean currents are slowing down, moving in new directions. The surface of the planet is running with fire, flash floods, freak storms. Humans will be walking through all this change. We are walking through it now.
And as we walk, we are with each step defeating the logic that has controlled much of the human race for centuries. The Newtonian cause and effect is behind us. We are mixing a brew of intuition, quantum surrealism, and common sense. People will open up zones of reverse-knowing with every mile.
We don’t mind that we don’t exactly know what will happen next. We might as well put all the sci fi novels ever written into a blender. This 6th Extinction expresses the incomprehensible desire by the Earth to continue life. No-one knows why this happens every one hundred million years but it is happening now and we are a part of it. We are moving with it or against it.
How do the migrating and marching and the movement of all living things…. how do all these moving beings interact? Can we measure this art form of so many moving parts? No we can’t. Each movement influences and is influenced by the others. Walking into the unknown is something we are doing together.
We haven’t talked or thought or acted this way. It is new. We teach each other how to un-know. How to make language without controlling others with our words; without controlling or owning the object of our story. Teaching one another to live in the question, not the answer… will be completely new to us, to walk without invading, to move without profit.
Soon everyone will be moving and the Earth everywhere is moving. With this movement we are inspired by our protest partner, the Earth. We are moving to join the Earth.
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