Running outside along the streets of Bangkok last week, I thought to myself how grateful I am to be closing a chapter in my 30th year, starting a new one next year. Amongst our circles there are happy things to celebrate: two friends are getting married, and one has been selected for a sustainability award (under 30)!!
I have a deep sense of a part of Spores—this thing the Soil Regeneration Project is building—growing into itself, and the soil research too; and as far as I can see, the action research around soil in Singapore will eventually work to build a community of youth and adults and older folk who understand food sovereignty, peasant livelihoods, not from someone else's backyard or territoria but from Singapore's own. This is not a matter of national security or exclusivity - I wince now at the framing of the piece I helped to co-write on national security and defense, though I know it works for some people in trying to help them understand what food means, within the conceptual boxes they are familiar with (nationalism). No, this is about becoming proud despite cultural loss and amnesia, overcoming national narratives, finding and renewing the bonds of life in people’s lived histories.
In an online workshop last week, "Negotiating Scholar-Activisms and Divergent Positionalities”, with Dr. Ferdiansyah Thajib (KUNCI Study Forum and Collective), Dr. June Rubis (University of Sydney), and Dr. Chester Arcilla (University of the Philippines Manila)", Dr June Rubis mentioned something I won't forget: asked why she does the work she does, who it's for, she said:
"I guess it's for the young people who come after me. It's for the young version of myself who wished to see this but couldn't."
Dr Rubis identifies as Bidayuh, a group of ethnicities from Sarawak, Malaysia. When she brings up her ethnicity, she says, people react viscerally to her - not only people from the Global North, but also Global South folk who are in the Global North, and not necessarily from a background of the Global South - people who have found some way of maintaining the power they have in the context they are in, and for whom her story unsettles the discourse of power they control.
We've all been a young person with some kind of ideal - no matter how large or small. Ideals are scrubbed out from us early. Imagine if that wasn’t the case. The human can be strong, empathetic, relational and idealistic; it can also be individualistic, idealistic, egoistic and greedy. Sadly, these values underwrite our global economy.
There are tools appearing to change this: one is a newly discovered find - $Spores hyperdeflationary currency). Degrowth! I thought the theoretical world was suddenly quiet, but it’s just that the main goal’s sorted, now's the time for world-building.
So, speaking of world-building, these are a few things I’ve been very happy about, and which speak to something bigger and wider than myself:
At the Soil Regeneration Project in Singapore, after a full year and more of work, and very focused effort by one person (Vivian Lee) in particular, we’ve managed to shift gears to co-create a remotely accessible, close-knit, care-based communicative culture of professional and personal lives around a shared set of ideals: regenerative soil practices that support people, not led or bought by money or led by abstract theory, but focused on expanding our relational sphere of caring. I rather like the term Dr June Rubis uses, with her work with kin studies:
"Todd (2019) proposes the notion of a ‘kin study’ in place of the ‘case study’ to engage more thoughtfully and reciprocally with land, non-human beings, and people, especially during environmental crisis." (5)
I’m simultaneously beginning to see the starting bases of a deep collaboration across Southeast Asia and beyond, moving beyond regions, forming a dialogue to think and act with friends - a few in many places, as Abhijan Toto has showed (literally). Around participatory decision-making systems, food, land, sovereignty, activisms of all kinds, danger and threat, and all the usually-labelled-anarchist ideals of robin-hoodism: breaking, entering, and redistributing. And perhaps we might come closer to considering debt cancelling. The current times challenge our ability to truly believe, but I do, and I feel this kind of belief matters for our selves: what each person cares about, on a scale that binds the deeply connected local/e, and the distributed, heart-filled, generosities of transborder friendships and relationships, matters. Networks exist all across the breadth of nature: mycelial brethren, tree communities linked by their roots and mycorrhizae, the biogeochemicals brought by water and soil into the reservoirs and nurseries of fish, insects, frogs, and other marine animals. The birth, life, and death of stars exchanging gases across time so vast we can barely comprehend. These matter.
And caring less - each of us have speedbumps we are self-conscious about. I got over my body image bump last year. But there are bumps too about one’s theoretical leanings. Mine is not only anarchist but also relational, not a politics of necrosis but one of death as acceptance and renewal, and I am learning to accept this fully and let my critical inner parent go, calmly and with love, in order to not cower in front of a more powerful person, in order to speak, even if it seems like an unpopular opinion. When we receive a blessing that sustains us for this: we might go further, be able to withstand more: something like the experience of someone showing love, catching one in one’s self-criticism, with great enthusiasm. (Things can be shit, but it's important to celebrate.)
Understanding the two sides of self-awareness and self-consciousness, and how it slides into self-critique or eogism. Society tends to teach us that we must either bash ourselves publicly and perform humility, at least while we're seeing the relatives or the neighbours - to the "outside" world. Or, for people brought up as boys especially, they are taught that bashing their egos into other people's faces is a sign of strength. Neither allows for a careful, considered witnessing of the self, embracing it, and letting it go so it turns, or grows to reveal a different side of itself. All living beings are diamonds, and the diamond-cutter is ourselves.
All of us live and serve different masters. Some masters are heavier than others. The work of our lives may be to undo our servitude to the master (or pantheon of masters) we serve. This past year may have shown situations that shocked, dismayed, or brought great disappointment, to find doors to worlds where other masters reign strong. I am grateful I know where these doors are now, and I'm grateful I know I have the strength to shut them, and the experience to recognise them in future, so that I can interact with those relationships without suffering in the heat of my friction with them.
I leave you with a song that has run through my head in moments of fear, need, a shot of courage in the dark: this song by Japanese singer-songwriter Angela Aki, 手紙 ~拝啓 十五の君へ (“a letter: to my 15 year old self”). It's lived in me since I was 16 or 17, and I hope it brings comfort, idealism, and the inspiration to dream...dream more (you can see a version with translations here)! For all the world.
And while we’re at it, from The Marginalian; the former Brain Pickings: Margaret Mead in conversation with James Baldwin, on action, stances, and time. How we stand, how we are oriented, may make all the difference,
Now, is it necessary at this moment in history … for someone who is black to take a different stance in relation to the past although we take the same stance in relation to the future? Now it may be. You see, the question I was raising earlier is that maybe in order to act one has to take a different stance.
And Baldwin, separately during the conversation:
“We’ve got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other’s only hope.”
I have begun fieldwork in Thailand, where I’ll be for the next 5 months, with a short break after. I’m planning something but until then, I’m posting small updates @fuiin on Instagram; you can follow fieldwork and learnings there, if you like. It’s my way of just taking the next littlest step, as Carl Jung has said.