responsibility, and regeneration

Feeling inspired to write here again I see we haven't posted since 2023! This seems ridiculous. I want to say something about how easy it is to go quiet in the context of violence and injustice, something about the struggle to find where responsibility lies, and how easy it is even in the midst of all this, for human beings to regenerate.

Looking back at the blog itself, for a long time it became focused on giving information about the support that we were sending (by we I mean the terrealuma readers and contributors) to friends in Ukraine suffering from the Russian invasion of their country. This is an example of how a context of violence comes to take up all the energy and all the space. Sometimes you just have to respond to what is right in front of you and help.

That's a natural kind of responsibility that comes about when you're close to a situation. This was the case with Vitalii in Ukraine, who I had picked up while hitch-hiking in Poland a few years previously, and the whole campaign started when Maciek just got in the truck to take soup to the refugees coming across the border relatively near to terrealuma.

What about the immediacy of people you haven't met in person who share videos of their lives and deaths and message you on 'social' media - that in the case of Gaza due to international journalists being prevented from access by Israel and the local media being targetted and killed has become the actual media? Does this entail the same kind of responsibility?

It feels this way to me - intensified by the fact that I'm one of the perpetrators, as my tax money buys the bombs. I have a responsibility to use the resources I have, time, energy, money, voice. How to stop those resources from running out though, and what's the responsibility I have to myself? Thinking this way soon gets managerial. It's not really a question of allocation, or of choosing one thing at the expense of another. That might be one lens through which to see it and choices always need to be made, but the essence is different. Does a plant have a responsibility to grow?

It just does. We're nature. All the people who need support, and the ones who can give it - and those roles could flip at any time. Regeneration isn't a thing that you can do on purpose, although you can certainly set up good conditions you can't make the wound heal or the plant grow.

The forces against us see the world and the people in it as a set of units that represent threat to be eliminated or goods to be acquired in pursuit of limitless growth (like cancer). It's anti-nature, anti-life and it's evil. Here's the link to the Go fund me I set up for a friend in Gaza, it's a drop in the ocean but that's no reason not to do it, and not having the power, the right words or the big solutions isn't a reason not to speak, to create, and equally to let yourself rest, connect, play and regenerate, if you can.