Tenderness

“We need a politics of tenderness more than ever.”

Báyò Akómoláfé

Oh, how I want to believe! How thought can come in the way, build a protective wall around my porous experience of being a-live, together and in continuous transformation. How my mind occupies perspectives born out of pain, rocky reference points in the soup our universe is, mummified thought patterns, solidifying my skin, making me defy touch, vulnerability and, ultimately, grace. Well, this is not even about believing, this is about fully taking in, not-doing anything with or against, the ongoing motions, transmutations, processes that we are (part of). This is the practice. The eruption of ways of understanding that might allow us to see “surprising solidarities with a world that is open-ended in its emergence” (Akómoláfé). As we notice when we zoom in on our personal experiences and processes, politicized terms and frameworks always reduce complexity, place us out of our context and out of our relationships with so much more than what we in a split second atomize to be ‘this or that human’, 'this or that right way to go'. A total embrace of tenderness beyond the humanized (or de-humanized), sensitivity as a force of nature in forms my mind has no truer knowledge of other than its intricate sensorial in-hereness, allows me to perceive, again, that the existential pressure cooker my body is right now, is the hardening of that same sensitivity, my resistance to ongoing change. Can time truly be a reflection of expanding spaciousness?