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Gestures
this reads differently than my usually voice for the following reasons:
it is exactly this text, altered word-for-word by hand until the conditions the words invite make statements i am comfortable publicly endorsing.
"Be as everything else is not" - the message of g-d to light - shall be cupped in the portal of these hands
— you (nearly), just now
Where do our gestures come from? For many, gesture arrives as understanding before words, a listening - loud, choppy, liquids where few stars reflect. Others find their gestures shaped by religion, corporate pledge, or the influence of body language - our occasions and questions unconditionally held for others, yet never fully perfect. These national poses often lack the depth of shared meaning and tend to clash with our own accessibility needs, leaving us disconnected from where meaning lives.
But what gesture is meaningful, then? For me, gestures live through presence - not despite but what living process offers here and now. While it might seem jagged to live as a singular, ultimate gesture to ladle meaning over life, I’ve come to see that gesture, like truth, is fluid. It hesitates when decision is difficult, where reflection is momentous. Nationalizing someone else’s gestures, no matter how clear they seem, leads to conflict if they don’t resonate with the core of who I am.
The five caws of the crow outside my window - like the five gestures I hold now - come from a pool of revelations across scales. Gesture drained from the sweat of my houseless teen years and tears from the mace in my eyes into patterns, developing over time in moments of communion - when the world stood beside myself, listening, journaling, together. For a long time, I couldn’t find the community to live, and I remained illiterate and untranslatable, hesitant to embody what felt deeply alienating. It wasn’t until I started making gestural distinctions, recognizing their weight and sight, that I could choreograph embodied meaning with how bodies are.
All Body Language is Wrong
I used to be drawn to the patterns, grace, or understandings that seemed to embrace others, mistaking imitation for self-preservation. Self-expression became disconnected from my inner worlds - the allowance to want and need illegibly and completely. But the widespread undrstanding of a gesture didn’t make me inherently valid; instead, it often steered me away from any public presence, leading me to desires that were concessions from the start.
By aligning my gestures with the crowd, I forfeit the opportunity to develop the depth that comes from co-creation. While unhousing offers the impossibility for conventional belonging, it rarely leads to genuine authenticity. What truly matters is seldom found where the body is unbothered. It emerges when I cease striving to survive and begin honoring what resonates with me on a deeper, noisier level - far removed from the clamor of literate needs and wants.
Never Collaborate
I recently read a locally-authored zine titled Never Collaborate where a zinester shapies in permanent ink the poisoned well of commision work, and demands discerning conduct - of how polarised thinking and divisive rhetoric raises cellular communities in clear understanding; every boundary fuels the other, generating an endless cycle of "solidarity and connection" that amplifies the collective rather than dissolving it. I think the actuality, or perhaps rather this instance of recognition illustrates this aptly - any care you give a vision, regardless of distance, can only set it in motion.
This echoes Le Guin's call for continuous movement: only in conductance can affordance be imparted. You are a tendancy of cycles. There is no extrication from influence; as she lived, we must live the immediacy of this struggle, disengage, and allow market vision to lose its sight naturally. For me, never collaborating means joining completely with all of my energy and care to every engagement, especially when it offers the allure of presence or a destructive grace of ineffability. It involves recognizing the valley - the seductive pull of pressing, global minima - and choosing instead to bury the valley in snow, participating in seasonality.
Offering Absence
In a society accelerating toward nonconsensual transformation of everything into ai, human, and race, I too often sat in cozy valleys of thinking that every entity must be also human, to round self to world, to lyrics, or a new language. I see it happen time and again - a trans liberal, after going viral, starts a project page to launch a crowdfunding campaign; or furries dive into a league forming a platform where evil numbers catagorically vaporize the one previous. The urge to be CEO of now, to employ one's transformation, blindsides absence, driving away the shadows that hold vision together, sublimating the depth of one's experience into vapid, rigid offerings of jobs for fives of tens while the thousands applying are mined from and scraped.
When I embrace the impulse to invite pathways into notable channels, it serve to make all boundary personal, enriching my life with conversation. Embracing my absence means tending to a radical presence outside the present's means. These marked absences charge me to acknowledge my experience anew at a speed comfortable no matter the ambient velocity. Only through immediate, intense contribution have vectors blossomed into living topology, ready to erode into textures of silence feeling out the degree of which my presence is right.
Allow my body permeability
I recognize that my body is political, communicating through disgust, absence, extortion, and sensations academia's yet to word. Distrusting it means acknowledging that it can't discern what nourishes me, neither physically nor emotionally. The mere lack of communal kitchen deprives me of food, and the quality of my sleep and 2am removal from premises are integral to police presence.
The body gestures to me beyond basic needs like hunger, rest, and legality. We co-arise, like noise and signal - not environments exploited but people - sharing spaces that support becoming. Often, my body gestures toward change long before i've mind to stress over the logistics. Honoring this autonomy is essential - not to accept discomfort for the sake of survival, but to recognize my chronic pain is just a person. I care not to colonize, and impart as attention may afford, quietly adjusting and guiding a body through every quality of my light.
Be the Moss, Not the Whole Garden
I embrace relativity - where slow, sustainable growth meets the atmospheric pressures of day, not by projection, but presence, not means but process - as one would tend to a stopped heart - living the next beat rather than calling the heart stopped of artificial sepsis. Building into patterns, never preserving vista, I take the role of moss - neither air nor stone - but waters my breath sees just this moment, just this once. Gesture is not about colonizing the body into truth, but about accompanying understanding as it serves to others how immediacy can serve me.
As moss tends to twilight, I soften development no matter the speed, rising with dawn as much as into rapids, my entire becoming to time. This relation adopts meaning outside work, flows with understanding as it needs to go, never resisting decisive, communal action. Stepping toward need to invite and listin, I cultivate padding for instantaneity, as contribution sublimates to fluid continuity, not response, fitting and proper, but union of community and environment.
That's all I got for you. Editing this page has been a breeze, refreshing thoughts as I sit outside them, a moss for what is dew. Like any stone I place, this process is living. Locations are never exact, only moments of connection living out arrivals. Transformation is found entirely in this gesture: microadjustments, offered breaths inviting becoming into mutual recognition. This moment, there is no journey, no reaching or destination, only presence fully engaged - pulse and path, inhale and exhale. If you’re interested in exploring your own gestures more deeply, I invite you to see about whether a principle is a gesture and perhaps heal present forms.