I dreamed myself a particle. I was so small a casual breath from my current physical form would sweep me along with a wave of millions of other particles. I was so small I could not be distinguished from the billions of other particles. I was a particle among particles.
Though I had been anxious a moment earlier, in this moment no struggle existed in me. The question of peace did not arise. No questions arose. I was simply floating, part of a wave, a wave of beings being, we did not need an intermediary, we did not need to organize ourselves, there was only the endlessness of being, the endless force of particles in a wave, the endless migration of form within form sifting through larger forms, equally shifting, equally in flux.
There was no time.
I was not sure if this lasted twenty seconds or two minutes. It didn’t matter. When I opened my eyes all my anxiety had melted away.
2.
In the café we are also particles, I thought, taking a sip of my coffee. This was clear to me. The women in the window with their phones out, scrolling. The man next to me in black cashmere, his head, bent over his phone like a polished stone, he too is a particle. The woman in a black hoodie who resembled Madame Gisèle Pelicot she too is a particle.
When I close my eyes, I am immediately back in the surf. When I open them, I am here, my body vibrating so intensely that even two feet away from me I can feel the man with the polished head gently tucking in his coat.
I want to shift this narrative to something useful. Like, how we can collectively turn the tide on fascism, how suddenly across North America, people take to the streets like waves of blooms.
3.
The man with the polished head gets up to great another man and they embrace. I feel a rush of warm air. They are planning an event together. They are two queer men planning an event tougher at the precipice of another wave of anti-queer administrations.
I am dreaming of the golden frog. I am mourning the Paris Accord. Part of myself is in Santa Fe, sitting with Suzuki Roshi and Rebecca Solnit, part of me is with Sam Altman, in Silicon Valley, a place that might as well be on the moon for all I know.
I can’t reach out to you, I think. The divisions are too great. But that’s not true.
I feel the good fortune of my body. I am here in the café in a city on a continent older than your religion. Older than mine. Older than all the religions and all the politics and all of the ways we identify ourselves.
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I don’t want to make light of our situation dear ones. I do not turn away from the dire. The dire particles among us. The negative ions. That there are people who have assembled themselves to bolster themselves, to make themselves into a grand revenge narrative, a counter-feminist-queer-Bipoc mallet…like you, I am only a particle.
Hours and days and seasons are irrelevant, there is only the brushing sensation of particle against particle. Could we rub ourselves out of existence? Could we rub ourselves into dust, into air, into the atmosphere, which is where we are anyway?
I want to believe we can rub ourselves into a new existence. I want to be totally alert to this moment & also alert to the particle.
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