THE PLANET IS A PERPETUAL CONTAGION

 

All is in everything.

           To be is to

               breathe

           the same air.

 

Inhale

To inspire the lives of others

                      is to co-exist immersed

                         in the body of the atmosphere.

 

Exhale

Every action is interaction

             and reciprocal influence.

 

We all transform worlds.

 

 

 

NATURE

 

I – Socratea exorrhiza

      A Stroll With the Walking Palm Trees

 

What lives thinks— the living planet is enchanted.

 

The plant world contains intentions and functions

that arise spring up from living thoughts ... beyond the human.

 

I seek to understand, with all my senses

what the meaning of life

of all beings is.

 

If I assume I’ll never be able to understand the thoughts of palm trees,

I would doubt the possibility of ever knowing another being.

 

By trying to feel how the other feels

                           I Love

 

 

 

II – The Metaphysics of the Iguana

 

It looks at me and I care about its point of view.

My eye in its eye its eye in my eye.

I look back at it.

I become someone new, without gender, species, or kingdom.

I feel that it feels we’re interacting as beings.

Not so similar—Not so different.

 

I caress it through the solid transparency of this Window

but if everything (and also the glass) is atoms

... then...

I’m really brushing against the living skin of the iguana

            and in turn penetrating the whole world

                              (which is also inside it)

 

 

 

III – Breathing Romanian Rocks

 

They Breathe, grow and reproduce:

Romania's strange phenomenon of living stones

 

We create life by breathing what circulates from body to body,

 

from place to place,

from time to time.

 

Feeding on the gaseous excretions of vegetables.

 

We hear the rumor of mineral consciousness.

 

Life is what surrounds it.

 

 

 

TERRITORY

 

Act I – CONQUEST – "The Other Cortés"

 

The beauty of the gifts that the Aztec emperor sends to the Spaniards encourages them to further advance.

 

When Moctezuma II—at the height of his anguish—sends a delegation to Cortés to try stop him, he chooses as ambassador a prince named Quintalbor, who resembled captain Cortés in face, features, and body, almost as if he was his double.

 

A mirror that reflects and gives back the enemy his own image.

 

But the conquerors are not moved by magic.

 

 

 

Act II – APOLOGIES – “Equine Opera. Or apologies to the horses”

 

Even if I’m just one.

 

And you are a few.

 

I apologize for abusing your four legs:

 

When mounted, they believed us gods.

 

I apologize for the races, wagons, and carriages.

 

For the plow in agriculture.

 

And the war.

 

I apologize on behalf of the riders, the cowboys, and the so-called gentlemen.

 

 

 

ACT III – MOVEMENT

Body territory territory body

 

Implicated in the delusional idea that the whole world is an open territory to be possessed and exploited.

 

Nature to be acquired and dominated.

Mines: trespassed.

Waters:  appropriated.

Females: oppressed.

XX to XY, in the beginning we are all

women.

 

The places we inhabit violated,

our bodies affected.

 

We walk for the missing:  Women and Forests.

We marched together in the streets.

Walking organisms— keeping up with the lunar phases.

Oscillating.

Building futures with ancestral memories,

medicinal plants. Without separating the cosmic from the political.

Going out on the street and encountering the pleasure of solidarity and resistance.

Earth- bodies — no one’s territory.

Walking.

We See each other.

 

 

 

I DREAMED THAT THE LANDSCAPE LOOKED AT ME

 

Thought is the crystallization of forms.

 

The crystal represents

the making of what is new

into the same.

To (un)fit Who or What we are into a mold.

 

I get rid of one part of me, that part that’s still alive (without me).

Containing data that precedes me.

 

Unrooted but grounded (in me).

Sitting in the middle,

between a double orientation,

towards light and towards darkness.

 

I transform from loss,

              Coming undone…

 

Vegetable thought begins with the explosion of identity.

 

I long for the freedom plants have to assimilate the other into themselves,

the strategy of incorporating and feeding on difference

 

I attempt to be different from who I am.

 

The Imagination stored in curls of hair seeps into the crystalline structure

                       (through the undersoil)

 

Spirals.

 

The undulating, exuberant, and undomesticated infects rigid thought.

 

From the mixture of Curls and Quartz,

emerges a hairy flower that offers

the how to

of consuming.