yesterday at the online conference the zen teacher norma, whose people were from the island called oahu, on the side where it rains everyday 200 years on the chinese side and 3,000 years on the native side, spoke of each place saying the ocean they call the pacific the country sometimes called america i felt the spaciousness of that naming today the sounds of the birds at waking smashed me to the bed with joy and fear how glorious to be woken by bird song how horrible to live in a world without birds with only bird alarm sounds and bird stories and bird stuffies and bird poems and no birds as though the naming erased the thing being named john a powell said identity becomes more important when it is attacked harder, stacked like scar tissue that can’t flow to respond to new conditions contradictions a boundary is any place where movement happens any movement is across a space if we allow for the space then there is a boundary to negotiate between the land and its name between one ancestral train and the one that flows the other way tugging, contradicting for a time, loving but also between the cells in that ancestral body between the molecules that make the globule edge between past and future also a boundary constantly reconfiguring one side memory-phillic one side memory-phobic the binding, the cross over not unified but glorified the birds call the birds die not all together but one, one, one at a time
Devon Frances Riley 