Since starting The Mandorla 200—micro-distillations of 200 necessary books on ecology, justice, and place-belonging for our times. 200 words or less—in February 2018, I’ve completed nearly 25% of the 200 book goal.
In 2018, I read and wrote about 25 books. This year, 23.
Here are the five most-memorable reads from the 2019. Every book I select for the Mandorla 200 is highly considered, so it’s always difficult to put this list together. These, however, were the five that stuck with me the most, their micro-distillations republished here…
(37/200) White boy, progressive boy, fragile boy. Wait, me? You must be mistaken. I’ve got nothing but love and light. I’m color-blind. Well-traveled. Have several acquaintances of color. I support Black Lives Matter. Surely I’m not the problem; those bigoted backroadsy white folks spit-spatting hate – now that’s racism. I’m of the educated, liberal sort, therefore absolving me of any contribution to structural supremacy, right? Wrong. So wrong. To confront this highly problematic and binary frame is to see whiteness as drifting like a gas, fluid, adaptive to any environment in order to stay on top, and to also understand that anything challenging such legacies of privilege will erupt in immediate defensiveness, withdrawal, anger, and deflection. Welcome to the “cocoon,” that insulated lack of racial stress permitting me to view racism as someplace, or someone, else. This is a) dishonest and b) disrespectful, and it perpetuates a cycle of white superiority if I cannot truly face my own role in oppression, no matter my politics. What to do? Build racial stamina, break that shallow script of progressive (but conditional) human liberation, own my personal contributions to structural exclusion through increased curiosity, listening and learning and scrutinizing speech and thoughts and actions, and prioritize absorbing another’s embodied experience over kneejerk reactions for self-protection. Now, that’s the real work.
(38/200) Worlds whisper beneath your feet, a place to which your body will return one day. Such mortal suggestion is perhaps why we favor aboveground drama, even as underworlds tug us ever downward to the places we spoon-dig for liberation, where we bury our recent-dead while siphoning the long-dead back to life, fossils-extraction-combustion-boom. Subsurface playfields, covert operations, dank truths, trees passing mycelia love notes, punk rock subversion, urban inversion. By avoiding these places—these dark, breathless chambers—we prime them for shallow burial. Stuff away detritus too wretched to face in containers upon containers, sarcophagus down the esophagus, poisoned lozenges corked and buried so that they never hurt or haunt us again. But repression? Concealment? Waste entombed? Ghosts feed on such nutrients. This much we know: it is the inverse of light that helps us see best, so we call upon you, underworld, to reveal your dark matter truths, honest and full vision for what lives and dies on this rock already engraved in a trillion disowned secrets. I vow to plunge into my underworlds, to squeeze through inky shafts and break bread with whatever resides in that psychic bedrock. Want to see far and long? Look down.
(27/200) The gauntlet of modernity is something we are asked to rise and shine for every day. But what about all its glaring insincerities, its artifice and cages and social posturing? What about these shards of separate selves scattered about in boxes, loping in the dark? See, what I crave is the whole; I want everything. Communion. And yet too often I’m offered only keyhole vistas, bits and pieces and broken mirrors. Nostalgia for what’s been lost swerves me into the side-rail and I course-correct trying to return home, trying to locate a life truer than what I’ve found out here, something baby-bottom soft, green-spring renewal held by mature masculine and feminine forces co-conspiring toward liberated union. Sure, inauthenticity is everywhere, a shared madness that weighs heavy on the psyche. But the way out ought not to be lobotomized forfeiture of feeling. Passing through today’s gauntlet requires we first call out the jar-glass hindering intimacy with the whole, because the arithmetic of happiness is subtraction, erasure not of our selves but of all the bullshit causing swerve and separation to begin with. Identify the delusion, shatter the glass, avoid cutting your feet on its fragmented mess, and step forward into the pyrotechnical lightshow of mortality, anew.
(29/200) Extinction event spins a world of color and animacy into grayscale decay, a place vacated by the gods. Nearly. Nearly everything burned and poisoned and left for rot and those who remain stumble through hell-realm desperation cursing subscriptions to a faith unmet, for living so trivially while the world burned. Man becomes easily enslaved by such dark, cannibalizing or being cannibalized, table-scrapping for breath. Tree stump human stump blue sky bright star long gone. No birdsong no visible horizon. Except. Except the disparate few firefly pilgrims stumbling to locate each other through such “cauterized” psychoscapes. Coral bleaching, warming climates, emptying forests and seas—we must continue to carry the flickering light of possibility, of will. Apprentice with geologic endurance because no matter the odds, no matter the battering defeat or horror or silencing of the more-than-human community, our dreams and memories and love for all that is life-perpetuating keeps us doing the Work that Reconnects. Even after gray doubles down to spiked graphite, even after flesh-hungry oil-thirsty monsters prowl the streets, the rows of Congress and Church and Corporate meetings intent to consume whatever and whoever is left, we still carry the fire because this much we know: bonfires are best when shared.
(43/200) Hate responded to with more hate stacks red upon red with the obvious result: more red. More violence, more racism, more bigotry. Excavate hate and the deepest known fear gushes forth—a fear of death—fear projecting itself onto other races to protect from the unknown, to control what illusions of power and permanence and order we think we have. Disowning fear in this way does little to reconcile what lives in us, expressed through structural exclusion and erasure. To speak, then, of God’s role in all this is to suggest that God exists only to provide a larger and more liberating mirror of love and possibility for all. If God does not offer this then God must be removed, for freedom is not possible until it is possible for all, liberty nourished only by shared intimacy, by coming closer, not thick-skinned, coarse-ground spittle. Seek justice but arc always towards softening. Apprentice more with oatmeal than thorn bush. Stand with melting things to expose my own gooey interior of fear and hate and privilege, legacies of violence. Place them out in the open to dry and walk towards, not away, owning such fear in hopes of transforming it into something of enduring care. Soften.