Eclipse
on awe and its interruptions
There are times when the day moves like a choreography so seeped in the body that we no longer recall when we learnt it. Attention flows like a sequence of similarities, where the mundane and the monotone confuse each other.
And other times, when suddenly you remember that the Earth is a planet moving vertiginously through a universe, and the stardust in our bodies is warmed by the dying star in the sky, and that each form of life is its own shape of devotion.
Or you remember that qawwali exists, and so do tonadas, and there are human beings who carve flutes from trees, and songs that save lives.
Or you think about the wars, waged across and inside, and the vicious inequalities that disfigure lives. You remember that the largest manmade object that has ever been moved is an Equinor oil platform in the North Sea, that the scope of horror may be as wide as the scope of hope.
And so you move, between focus and departure, between awe and its forgetting.
Perhaps, as the Ramchal teaches, the only thing left to learn is that which we already know.
PS. This will likely be the last Substack post of the “Ecology of Us”. Thank you so much to everyone for your attentive reading and support over the years. If this space of words and images is to continue, it will migrate to another platform, less complicit in fascism and erasure, and more conducive to the world so many of us are praying and fighting for.
gracias Daniel ❤️ let me know where I can read you after you move to a different platform