The polycrisis is the signature of our present; it seems we are in a state of constant turmoil. What is trying to tear us apart?
I usually get overwhelmed when external circumstances become too disorderly for me. “That” then has to be put back in order so I can find myself again. But what if it were the other way around? What if it wasn’t the world that was messing me up, but I was messing up the world? Perhaps polycrisis means that many selves (like me) are at a turning point without knowing who they are. Perhaps the veil before our eyes that we used to separate ourselves from the world is being torn away. I want to recognize who I am. I want to be me. I want to be connected as I. That is the clarity I am looking for. This doesn’t look to the past—it questions my veiled being.
It is difficult to break with what is taken for granted and thus break open part of our self-image. It is difficult to rethink the native language that I so deeply am, simply out of consideration for others, especially when those others are abstract categories. From a distance, I can think and be right. Up close, “right” dissolves to become the truth, and I become all the more true to myself.
Trans artist Kae Tempest told the Guardian in 2022: “Trans people are used in these weird ways to express people’s deep fears about other things…” and: “I don’t understand how my body, our bodies, became a territory for war.”
Today, the human is like a foreign body in their body. Their relationship to the Earth is unfettered. Gravity—that which set us straight on our feet—is lost. Are we fighting for something that will give us back the weight, the meaning of our bodies, and thus order? And if we don’t succeed, do we try to take over other bodies?
Love becomes the gravity that roots us in freedom—in the freedom to be what we were, are, and will be, it will hold us together. It shows us what it is that we were, are, and will be. The moral guiding stars of the future are not laws but prayers that unfold. Like Kae Tempest’s words: “I can feel myself opening up […] Let me be love, let me be loving, let me give love, receive love, and be nothing but love. In love and for love and with love.” (Grace 2022)
In love, for love, with love.
Translation Laura Liska
Sketch Fabian Roschka
