The sun is setting and the sky is growing darker. I am sitting on a low wall overlooking a cemetery, the town of Chefchaouen, the valley and the mountains beyond it.

In my palms I hold a little candle. I have lit it and I protect it from the wind; it is from this morning’s commemoration and as it struggles to burn I think again about the people getting lost at sea, soft bodies, hearts wanting to beat through the water that finally quiets them, salty, strong, dark.

Little bells playing draw my attention from images of dark waters to a small flock of sheep skipping across the cemetery. They are being herded up the hill and towards where I am sitting. A few young dogs follow, then the shepherd. He doesn’t need a leash, neither for the dogs nor the sheep. The dogs trot happily ahead and the sheep follow behind, stopping once in a while to investigate the ground after something edible. They run like little dogs too, ears wagging. The man walks slowly and deliberately. By this time the sky is already overtaken by a dark blue with just a stream of orange remaining behind the mountains. I can only make out their general shapes. It is peaceful.

No matter how many times I thank my stupid luck for the life that I have, it never seems to be enough; my overwhelming feelings of gratitude don’t subside and life doesn’t cease bringing me offerings.

I notice a smile grow on me and my eyes wanting to shed tears. I am smack in the middle of it; between feelings of peace, joy, turbulence and pain, tied together in a knot between my lungs, all resonating with my breathing as I’m sitting on the edge of the cemetery; bodies becoming earth under the setting sun.

My fingers are cold already. My heart has expanded and reaches all the way over the valley.

Two words slip quietly into my mind and attach themselves to this feeling, echoed all over the valley: allah akhbar. God, life, world, universe, heart. However one might chose to call the un-nameable feeling of glory; it is the biggest.

…

No matter how the world turns, it is always in balance. It is only in the human mind, the feeble intellectual glass through which we try to make sense of the world, that opposites and extremes exist. It is our western reasoning and insistence on Reason* as a dominant sense-making strategy that lies to blame for so much evil. Instead of listening to the world with our flesh and bones, we try to explain and optimize and shout our Reason at it.

I know we just want to survive. But there are other ways.

In the world there are no opposites. Only forces, flows and movement. Our dichotomies become tense with paradox and the opposites collapse onto each other, understandably; there are no spectra, only circles. Nothing is opposing anything else outside of the human understanding. Black is not black without white; the one already carries the other within. All is in intra-action.** All is in movement and movement is life. Everything is moving. Even the seemingly steady rock is slowly changing shape underneath me and even before the moment my foot touches the ground I have been part of shaping it. And it me.

And it is mighty to be part in all this change and movement and I understand why we, why humans like to shape and build. I can not speak for other creatures, but I suspect that the birds and the beavers, the mice and the ants, all creatures building their homes feel the same, natural joy. It is mighty to shape, it is mighty to draw out squares and circles and spirals. It is mighty, it is beautiful, it is addictive.

And we are shaped equally by what we are shaping. The wood that we chop and the seeds that we sow are shaping us right back. And it this that makes me think that maybe matter wants to become too. That not only is everything alive with its own vibration, but that everything too has agency. It is, in its own way, asking to grow and become through us.

With a chill in the back of my head I reason that maybe, the oil wanted to be drilled and burned. I imagine its longing for sky from deep within the Earth. Maybe the unruly sediments, after millions of years of laying themselves to rest, longed to be disrupted in their slow dance; to be cut into squares with straight corners and stacked, re-shaped and organized anew in only the blink of some centuries. Maybe the Earth was longing to become plantations and mines, molecules divided neatly into angular shapes according to composition and size; maybe that’s why she gave birth to us. Maybe everything wanted a name that could be pronounced by the human tongue.

I notice my train of thought by how sad it makes me and have to smile at how easily it has slipped into absolutes and extremes as I try out a new idea on my understandings. Un-learning Reason has been my deliberate and maybe impossible intention for quite some time now. But this is not bad; I want to try out thoughts and ideas with which I do not agree, just to see how they fit into me and what they awake. I do believe that matter has its own life and wishes, but not that the Earth has asked to be a plantation and not that the rightful place of humans is as its masters. Something has gone askew along the way.

…

The sky is black now, the town alight below and me and I am hungry. I blow out the little candle and after the wax has cooled enough to allow me to put it in my pocket I get up, draw the jacket tighter around me and slowly head back down into the labyrinths. I remember passing a couple of restaurants just outside the Medina before, serving cheap tajine, and this is where I decide to head now.

—
*La Marr Jurelle Bruce is inspiring me by their notion of Reason with the capital r, defining it as “a proper noun denoting a positivist, secularist, Enlightenment-rooted episteme purported to uphold objective “truth” while mapping and mastering the world.” (How to go Mad without Losing Your Mind, 2021, pg. 16)
**The idea of intra-action as presented by Karen Barad. The concept excites me though I can not say that I fully understand it. Rather I imagine atoms moving and jumping between what we, humans, might consider as solid and stable materia, not promising fidelity to objects as we’d imagine it, and this understanding is good enough for me.

…

(This story told in pictures.)