An Earthworm's Guide to the Dense and Dark
Slow Work in Heavy Times
Light Hive offers essays on mindfulness for complex times. Subscribe for dharma-inspired takes through the lens of a recovering academic and queer, transracial adoptee.
Hi friends!
The June 14th No Kings Day protest was easily one of the largest mass demonstrations in United States history.
(The song for this is worth the ~2 minutes, even if you’ve seen a bunch of these compilations already.) 👇
Downtown Los Angeles’ participation alone was upwards of 200k people, not counting the others in the immediate vicinity: Culver City, Hollywood, Santa Monica, Long Beach, and Pasadena.
I played the teeniest “Where’s Waldo” role in the downtown Los Angeles march. It was a very small effort compared to the time and labor invested by a handful of people.
These finite humans have dedicated a massive amount of time, energy, and personal resources to building safety and dignity beyond just themselves.
I only know their handles, their code names and how they show up in the world: providing resources, morale, sourdough bread, education about different “less lethal” weapons (e.g. rubber vs foam bullets vs pepper pellets, the different kinds of gas based on color), cleaning up their neighborhoods, scouting for their neighbors, making art.
Calling them “tireless” would come dangerously close to suggesting this work can be done by a few superhuman people. This is not the case now, nor has it ever been.
It’s easy to glorify figureheads because…well, they are figureheads. Harriet Tubman. Susan B. Anthony. Bayard Rustin. Dolores Huerta. Fred Korematsu. They take the heat, they get the credit.
But a commitment to dignity beyond themselves and their era's politics unifies the people who marched behind these leaders and those who maintain cadence today.
On Saturday, we marched, we danced at intersections. We came out in droves against today’s strain of blatantly cruel American exceptionalism that disregards due process, destroys public research and lands, and dismantles environmental protections. How terrifyingly regressive. How lucky we are to have such powerful mentors.
The feminist art collective Pussy Riot’s sign in the picture above states, “It’s beginning to look a lot like Russia,” noteworthy because the United States once pretended it was something other than an oligarchical state. We’ve gone from being a (problematic, imperfect) “world leader” to Galactus, comic book villain and devourer of worlds, in a matter of months. How far we’ve come from laughing at Mitt Romney for calling Russia our biggest geopolitical foe.
Currently, Nadya Tolokonnikova, co-founder of Pussy Riot in political exile, has an exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) about Russian confinement and compressed space. Or, rather, had.
When Tolokonnikova was told that her performance piece called “Police State” had been indefinitely closed due to police, National Guard, Sheriff’s Department, and Marine corps presence, she “felt like I had entered a wormhole.”
And yet, or perhaps because of this, even this cultural rebel and political refugee has come to understand the power of truly caring for the wellbeing of others. She exists in a continuum of resistance that insists art, solidarity, comfort, and the fight for dignity is worthwhile work.
Tolokonnikova wrote to The Guardian, “If 15 years ago, I wanted to radically change the world, now I just want to comfort people.”
Each of us matters because we all matter, and that makes caring excruciatingly challenging work. Still, I think caring for each other (and ourselves) is the work worth doing. And it’s okay to start with whatever feels easily achievable to you.
No matter how small, no matter how slow. It’s the consistency that counts.
Tolokonnikova’s wormhole reference made me think of this poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, called “Lumbricus Terrestris,” Latin for “earth worm.”
On a day when the world is weighty,
dark and dense with need,
I want to be the earthworm
that gives itself over to tunneling,
its every movement an act
of bringing spaciousness.
And when minutes feel crushed by urgency,
I want to meet the world wormlike,
which is to say grounded,
consistent, even slow.
No matter how desperate the situation,
the worm does not tunnel faster
nor burrow more.
It knows it can take decades
to build fine soil.
To whatever is compacted,
the worm offers its good worm work,
quietly bringing porosity
to what is trodden, compressed.
So often, in my rush to repair,
I end up exhausted.
Let my gift to the world be
my constancy, a devotion to openness,
my willingness to be with what is.
Let my gift to myself be patience
as I tend what is dense and dark.Amid all the urgency and anger, it’s important to remember it’s okay to take things moment by moment. Agency exists in the space between the dense, dark situations before us and whatever we do next.
But as an offering: many worms make for porous soil.
If you are at all interested in getting involved but don’t know how, I recommend checking out Mobilize.Us. Just click the link. That’s why I put it there.
Additionally, if you’re tired from the weekend or just want to hang, you are invited to practice caring slowly with a small but cozy group tonight. The Creative Coalition will be meeting to play Gene Koo’s The Bonsai Diary, Monday June 16th, at 6 PM PT.
The gathering will begin with a meditation and include cycles of drawing, writing, and sharing practice. This will be part 2 of 3 scheduled sessions. You can start where you/we are.
If you’re interested, please just email, comment, or DM for the link. Your presence would be welcome.
Takeaway Practice
Who came before you? What comes after?
Who has inspired you to live today as you have? What practices, influences, have informed the way you move through the world?
What pathways are you paving for others? What are you modeling for the people around you?
If you liked this, consider checking out:
is doing her own worldbuilding advocacy in her local school district. Check it out below.
Bio
Logan Juliano (they/them) holds a PhD in Performance Studies. Through Light Hive and as co-editor of Notes from the Inflection Point, they write to share reflections and practices amid ecological and sociopolitical uncertainty. They will (perhaps) write a more extensive write-up of their experiences at the event later.