I DOn’t really feel like participating anymore / This life was never living / There will be a birth.

“Each Monday morning, fellows gather for SEED SOURCING: a shared "storytelling" practice. In the fictional, parallel plane of this story-space, the familiar social and physical laws are suspended. Each fellow is invited to speak from the most direct contact with their inner world - offering story, vision, image, or language that arises from the deeper current beneath surface experience. The practice is oriented toward the sourcing of the seed: that initial pulse of freedom, imagination, desire and possibility from which creation emerges.”

PART 1 //

I don’t really feel like participating anymore.
I don’t know where I want to be or what I want to do.
I’m so ridiculously tired of this life—
not of the earth, not of being alive,
but of what we call life.

I’m tired of corporate systems
and indoctrinated truths.
Maybe I’m burned out—
but what does that even mean?

That’s just another capitalistic term saying:
You’re not managing to contribute
in the ways expected of you.
There must be something wrong with you.
You need to get healthier, happier, more focused.
You need to find a purpose.

Because for a good life—
for you to be worthy—
you have to thrive,
you have to be someone,
you have to do something.

All the time.

Doing.

Terms and diagnoses make me angry.
They all imply individual problems.

Our poor mental and physical wellbeing
is not an individualistic problem.

Words like burnout, depression, autoimmune disease—
none of them come close
to describing the nigredo
we are experiencing as a collective.

The blackening.

Not of souls,
but of systems collapsing under their own weight.
A mourning for what we were told to be.

A quiet refusal

to keep pretending

this was ever living.

The wall says “nothing makes sense anymore”.

PART 2 //

This life was never living.
It was an extensive giving.

Because the machine just takes.
It never gives back.
It only comes back for more.

And I gave all, because I care.
Not about the machine,
but about everyone in the mouth of it.
Gripping onto its iron teeth.
Refusing to be swallowed.
Or unaware they are about to be.

And for the ones in the belly;
I ache for them.
Those already half human, half machine.

In the belly, what we knew rusts
into memory,
into myth,
into story.

In the belly, we have no voice.
We need oil for voice.
In the belly, there is no oil.
So we forget.

In the belly, there are no stories.

So we starve.

In the belly, it’s all screws and gears and bolts.
That’s all there is to chew on.

So slowly, our bodies become tools.
Slowly, our minds become programs.
Slowly, we become robot.

And the machine shits our hearts.

Slowly, the pile of hearts grows cities.
Slowly, they take over our natural habitat.

…Where do we go now?

PART 3 //

There will be a birth.

There has to be a birth.

It will be a C-section.
The belly will be cut open.
There will be a blood bath of oil.
Oil will be spilled.

We will make iron bottles of the machine.
We will fill them with the oil.
There will be food banks.
Like vampires, we will drink—
Drink ourselves back into voice.

We will smear our tongues.
We will open our throats to the world.
No longer rusted, no longer swallowed.
Our voices will summon rivers,
rivers to wash away our time in the belly,
to carry off the rust,
the marks of iron teeth.

The oil will stain our hands,
but it will mark us as alive,
as witnesses,
as voices returned.

We will ask:

What do we build now?