A lot of times I feel like I’m living a life that curves like a spiral -- where I end up in the same places with the same people at different times or I end up in familiar places with different people who look like and are doing the same things as the people I used to know or I end up with familiar people but in new places who are older now like me and I can’t help but notice how we just keep getting more and more badass as the years go on. Like going in a circle, except the circle is spiraling towards the sky. Or something like that.

this is the original story about my friend sera where i used the icarus metaphor to talk about her struggles with manic-depression

(this is the intro to a zine i wrote in 1999)

Juan Carlos grandfather had fought in the Mexican Revolution and as our boxcar swayed back and forth, the rumbling sound of the train grinding along track like the ocean or the rain coming down hard, Juan Carlos told me stories his grandfather had told him of Emiliano Zapatas soldiers riding from town to town on the same freight lines, gathering troops, spreading the word and supplies. He spoke of the peasant uprisings fought against the Federales with the battlecry of land and liberty, the reappropriation of land from the wealthy haciendas, by the poor armies, the traditional indigenous ejedo system of communal land ownership which had been around since the beginning of time, and the visionaries like Ricardo Flores Magón* who dreamed of a future free from the tyranny of corrupt leaders and brutal authority.

So while most of my friends are back in the city somewhere cultivating their stress and balancing activism and computer temp jobs or scamming their way along the trainlines and supermarket dumpsters of America, this urban kid has been learning how to grow food and living at a farm near the edge of the forest on a tiny island in British Columbia for the past half a year.

I've been living on a farm in the middle of the forest on a tiny island between the mainland of British Columbia and Vancouver Island for the past month now. My back is strong from shoveling manure and wood chips and pushing wheelbarrows of rocks around all week. I can feel the muscles in my thighs sore from lifting heavy stuff and riding my bicycle on windy roads. I gaze up into the forest which surrounds us on all sides. This place is more like a museum than the real world I know all too well, a model of how the world could be if we hadnt fucked it up so bad with our industrial revolution and greed. There are so few places like this left on the planet. The forest is like a university, infinitely complex in all of its multilayered relations.

Walking through the forest that day, feeling the earth under my feet and all around me, I wondered if the trees all the way down in the jungles of South America could feel it when the trees up here in Headwaters forest get clearcut. If the trees have global solidarity like me and my people, underground roots that stretch across continents.

Sometimes I feel like so many of my childhood memories have been glossed over with this thick layer of sitcoms and action show episodes, like so many of my memories arent even my own, theyre just some script that someone wrote in Hollywood somewhere. Sometimes I have trouble untangling in my mind what was real and what I just watched on TV, the apartment I grew up in from all those cardboard living room sets, the nightly news and the war movies. I wonder sometimes how many people out there have had the same experience. I wonder how many of us have the same implanted culture festering away in our brains somewhere, this bonding link with other people our age because we all grew up with the same dumb shit.