Ignition

For years I’ve struggled with self-expression and creativity. As a kid I would write stories about faraway lands and magic gems, taking pleasure in toying with ideas and finding joy in creating logics, cosmologies, and universes for mostly heroic figures to act within. Molding personalities and alchemizing texture in fiction was a way to communicate the love and appreciation I had–and still have–for craft, story, and character.

I hardly see that same brightness and creative dexterity in myself today. Casually I may describe myself as “mentally flexible" but creative? It seems–it feels–suspect. I could source this hesitation's origins in the skepticism against certainty I was indoctrinated into as a young scientist; I could source it in some of my own anxieties around my outputs and contributions in the world, too, but the why of a thought pattern or behavior, I am learning, is not so consequential to one's personal journey as the what–the identified barrier or impediment.

In the days where I proudly embraced my identity as a scientist, rigid, rational, and dispassionate thinking characterized the profession and flights of fancy had little place unless they could be exploited by industry as "innovation". Imagination, as I experienced it, was defanged, resisted, and undermined–overtly and covertly. The embrace of imagination always entails changes in thinking and behavior and so professional resistance to it says more about the inherent conservatism of an environment and the individual actors within it than those given to its spirit.

Change is happening–and can happen–all the time and at every scale. This decidedly Butlerian truism is one that gives itself to movement and momentum, while also imbuing inertia–a resistance to these shifts in disposition–with dignity. There is beauty in movement and love in resistance and the duality of their pairing recalls the gentle push-and-pull of a waltz as much as it does the surf and the shore.

As I’ve grown older, wiser I've found that creativity and ingenuity are what keep the world spinning, that keep us—and it—in motion. And while momentum is a useful benchmark of progress, ethically-grounded rationality largely determines whether such movement is beneficial for the collective good of humanity or whether it directs us towards and reinforces cycles of harm and dispossession. I engaged this truth most viscerally observing the institutional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, responses which normalized public abandonment and rendered the lives and livelihoods of millions little more than collateral damage for the benefit of private business.

This blog has been a long-gestating thing. I've mulled over the idea of writing for a public audience for years, but my previous attempts were painful and unsustainable. Some of this pain was self-inflicted, the result of setting my targets among the clouds while abstracting my why. Some of it was due to un(der)acknowledged fear and un-tended-to anxiety. Compounding the problem was, as with most writers, a lack of focus and follow-through. As I have accepted that these may always present challenges for me, I realize that they are no longer sufficient to prevent me from coming to voice. In these increasingly contentious times where fascism is actively establishing itself throughout the body politic, there is a responsibility to speak–out and up–or be complicit in annihilation. I choose speech.

I write here, first and foremost, to provide space for and caress my complexities. I write to re-connect with the motes, morsels, and threads of previous digital incarnations, as a way of re-membering myself and honoring my prior embodiments. This project is the first I’ve begun where I aim to write from my fullness rather than parse myself into easily-digestible shards. To write from the heart and from the mind. To write for the spirit. Of science and technology, politics and revolution, and arts and culture. Here I share are my visions, my strivings, and my lessons, as I explore to what lands heart-led commitment leads.

Here I hope to leave an imprint, a digital record of my living, loving, thinking, and feeling. I hope it brings you, Dear Reader, the comfort, clarity, and strength you need as you navigate and advance your own struggles and explore your recesses.

In light and shade,

The Eucologist