Maj
Reflections on spring planting, May Day, and the Palestinian cause. All photos have been taken in the first few days of May.
Happy belated May Day! May Day is one of my favorite holidays. I first celebrated it in the Czech Republic, when I was studying there as a Rotary Youth Ambassador. The entire city of Ceske Budejovice shut down, it seemed, for everyone to attend the Majales festival. I had spent the last few days skipping class to volunteer with the festival organizers, all of whom were students. From morning until long past midnight, the park along the river Vltava and the surrounding pubs were filled with revelry and music. May is a gorgeous month in the Czech Republic, with blossoming trees and mild, sunny days. Many Czechs know the first few lines of Karel Hynek Macha’s famous poem, “May”, by heart. Here they are, translated by Edith Pargeter:
Late evening, on the first of May —
The twilit May — the time of love.
Meltingly called the turtle-dove,
Where rich and sweet pinewoods lay.
Whispered of love the mosses frail,
The flowering tree as sweetly lied,
The rose’s fragrant sigh replied
To love-songs of the nightingale.
The poem is an epic, a very long and tragic love story, and to be honest I haven’t read the whole thing. But I am partial to the final lines of the second stanza, more than the first:
Tree in the shadows writhes to tree.
In the far mountains’ dark confine
Pine leans to birch and birch to pine.
Wave baunting wave the streamlets move.
For love’s sake — in the time of love —
Anguished goes every living thing.
Anguished goes every living thing.
That one line captures a complicated emotion I have every spring. Now, the poem is about love, and May Day is also about love. It is Bealtaine, an ancient celebration with similar cousins across the world, which Irish Pagan witch and teacher Lora O’Brien has succinctly described as a festival of “flowers, fire, and fucking.” Strictly speaking, I think that is the anguish Hacek is describing in his poem. But I also think it is more than that.
It is the pleasure of the first day I can go outside with bare arms, feel the sun warm my shoulders, the first breath of air that does not sting with the cold. It’s the restless anxiety I feel when I sit at my desk and look out the window at a flawless blue sky. It’s the ache in my chest when I look at a blossoming crabapple tree and I know that that beauty is so fleeting, and so fragile, and there is nothing I can do to preserve it. The blossoms are too delicate to last long in a vase, and no photo can capture the dappled light on the trunk and the ceaseless excitement of songbirds and the gentle perfume of open flowers. That beauty is simply a gift I have to appreciate in the moment, and every year, it feels like I do not have enough time to appreciate it fully. I cannot completely accept the gift, it passes through my fingers like sand, quickly replaced by the muggy heat of high summer. (Though lunasa brings its own gifts, of course.)
For me, the joy of spring always comes with a certain humility. The earth is so generous and abundant, and what have I done to reciprocate her gifts? There is nothing I could do that would compare. I think that is the root of the anguish I feel on certain perfect days, days I wish I could just sit in a single spot and watch the the trees move until sundown.
This spring has come with another layer of complex emotions. I was reflecting on all this this morning, as I transplanted watermelon seedlings from their starter tray into slightly larger containers, where hopefully they will grow sturdier roots and adjust to the outdoor temperatures before I put them in the ground. I also planted some kale seedlings in my mother’s back garden, because the spinach and kale I planted in the Buckeye St Garden in April were quickly dug up, probably by the neighboring squirrels. I replaced them with corn and beans, which I tried to protect with a layer of cayenne and ginger powder. We will see if this is a deterrent to the squirrels, or just seasoning. I planted them in mounds, the way I was taught by Sam Azure at Fort Peck Community College, with intentions to add watermelon starts later for an adapted three sisters planting.
As I sat on an upturned flower pot and started to plant the kale, a very light rain began to fall. It fell on the pond so gently I could hardly hear it. It was cool, and the rain was cold, but I didn’t mind. There is something delicious about a cool rain after the first truly warm days. The sun was still low in the sky, and the birds were undeterred by the rain, continuing their morning racket. I felt as though I were in the middle of an impressionist painting: everything a bit blurred, all the colors softened, all the objects romanticized into the ideal of themselves. I felt profoundly grateful.
And then, without meaning to, I imagined what the garden would look like if the neighborhood was bombed.
The way the pond would break and drain, and the lilies would shrivel. The green grass and bushes would be gray with ash and debris. The spade and planters would be reduced to twisted metal and melted plastic. The birds, silent. If this garden were in Gaza it would have no water, because the water infrastructure was destroyed by occupiers. It would be dry, and full of rubble.
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Still, someone would be trying to plant. That is why the watermelon is a symbol of Palestinian resistance: a great fruit that grows from a single tiny seed.
Today I attended the No New Bonds conference hosted by the Ohio Divest Coalition and other organizations from around the state. I have been looking forward to the conference for weeks, because as famine sets in and Israel’s total blockade of the Gaza strip enters its third month, I have found it increasingly difficult to focus on my graduate work, or anything else. It was cathartic to be in a room full of people who have been feeling the same way.
Last week I listened to the audiobook of Jason Hickel’s Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. In it he argues for an abandonment of GDP as a metric of human wellbeing, and for a shift to an economy that does not require limitless growth to be sustained. As an anthropologist, he spends a lot of time discussing ways we can shift our paradigms, to relate to the world in entirely new ways, and learn from the ways other human societies relate to the world that feel unfathomable to the Westerner. He points to many indigenous societies, both historical and contemporary, who see the natural world as full of relatives. If we see plants and animals and mountains as relatives, then needless environmental destruction becomes not only irresponsible, but absolutely ethically untenable. If we, as a society, truly saw Gazans as equal human beings, our human relatives, the genocide against them we all watch on our phones would be untenable. The fact that nearly sixteen months of deliberate murder of civilians, destruction of civilian infrastructure, of hospitals, of schools, of places of worship, the targeting of journalists, medics, and aid workers, and over a year of international calls for action and sanctions have not moved the American politick is evidence of two things: that our government is no longer accountable to the people, and that too many of the people do not see Palestinians as fully human. This is not only a result of simple racism, it is the result of decades of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab fearmongering and propaganda.
I was thinking about all of this as I drove to the conference. I was waylaid for a few minutes by a family of geese, with twice as many goslings as I typically see. The goose parents had trouble getting their goslings to cross the road because they were pecking at something apparently tasty on the asphalt. I thought about how the geese, too, would be displaced and destroyed by genocide. They could not fly away with their babies, just as mothers and fathers in Gaza cannot fly away, and instead walk from north to south and back again, from one “safe” zone to the next, targets on a testing field for the world’s premier military technology.
99% of the world just wants to live. To grow and cook and share food, to raise families, to sit in a pool of spring sunshine, to feel the rain on their face and summer warmth on their skin. Plants want to lengthen their roots and turn to face the sun. Groundhogs want to burrow into soft soil. Geese want to see their babies safely across the road. Songbirds want to sing to their future partners, and sometimes, they sing for no clear reason at all. If it were up to us, most of us would only take what we needed, and to exploit and needlessly harm would cause us discomfort. I watched a video from Gaza yesterday about how starving families on the coast have resorted to eating turtles. Going out to sea to fish is too dangerous, as the IDF have a habit of shooting civilians who try to gather food from the sea. Turtles are easier to acquire, but one boy said eating them made him sad: “I used to have a pet turtle,” he told the journalist. A woman in the same video said that they only ate the turtles because they absolutely needed to, and they tried to feed as many people as possible with them. “We don’t eat if the tent next to us does not eat.” That is the human instinct.
It is only a sick and damaged 1% that seek war. That profit from the weaponization of fear and confusion, that work to control levers of power at any cost, to pool resources and wealth into their own coffers. I am not speaking of everyday Zionists, many of whom simply believe what they have always been taught. I am speaking of men like Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey, who are dedicating their lives to finding ways to incorporate artificial intelligence into every aspect of modern warfare and the surveillance state. Who stand to gain enormous wealth from the suffering of Palestine, where much of their technology is being tested and refined, and the repression of activists and dissenters around the world.
Their instinct to hoard billions of dollars and to further separate human beings from any accountability for violence against their fellow human beings is antithetical to the promotion and preservation of life. Both human life and life on this planet. Because of course, the climate crisis and the Palestinian fight for freedom are deeply intertwined, just as the climate crisis is intertwined with all indigenous movements for sovereignty and the right to remain on the land. The climate crisis is a problem of extraction and exploitation: of land, of water, of people. It’s solution is not further control, but liberation of all of the above.
The conference was, in many ways, a gathering of the choir. It was about organizing and mobilizing existing community, not widening the tent. So if there is one phrase from the whole day I would want to share with non-attendees, who may be less familiar with the struggle, it would be this: Gaza is the compass. No repression, no sacrifice, no suffering we experience while fighting for Palestinian freedom will compare to what Palestinians endure to free themselves. But also, Gaza is the compass because it tells us where the true limits of our freedoms lie.
When we say no one is free until everyone is free, we don’t mean that metaphorically. We don’t mean that we cannot enjoy our freedoms while others are in chains. What we mean is that if the powerful can massacre and imprison and repress civilians in Gaza without repercussions, they can do the same here. If they do not care about displacement and hunger in Gaza, they will not act on homelessness and hunger here. Right now, your tax dollars that could go to your children’s schools, or subsidized health care, or safer infrastructure go to manufacturing and shipping weapons that are deployed against people who could be your neighbors. Who are your relatives, whether you recognize them as such or not.
And at any point, technology for surveillance and repression honed in the streets of Gaza can and will be used against you. Customs and Border Patrol already use Lattice, Anduril’s AI surveillance system, to track migrants at the border. With the automated AI drone technology Anduril is working to perfect (and hoping to manufacture in Ohio), they could track and shoot those migrants without a human being even turning to look, because an algorithm would determine the target; perhaps, say, if it were taught that certain tattoos and clothing brands were indicative of dangerous gang membership.
But I don’t want to stray too far from the main story here, which is that spring- and the joy that comes with it- is universal. We all feel that pull to the outdoors at this time of year, that drives us to throw open our windows and point to the first opening tulips. Spring is a time when we feel particularly human, influenced by all the signals of the sun and the wind and the soil that we have tried to suppress and forget with our sterile offices and fiscal calendars. It should be a time of deeply felt empathy towards the rest of the world, all our fellow living beings, who are also just trying to live. Whose very existence is resistance against the industry of death.
Another takeaway comes from Yezen Abusharkh, who spoke on the closing plenary about how power removes itself from accountability by separating individual actors from their own humanity. It makes sense that International Worker’s Day coincides with Bealtaine, because ultimately the workers’ movement is about prioritizing our own humanity over accumulation and extraction. We must all prioritize our own humanity if we are going to survive the next decades as a species. Our human needs to grow and eat and love and rest are all worlds more important than whatever spending cuts we’re told will grow GDP. The fight for Palestinian dignity and safety and freedom, which is in turn a fight for our own dignity and safety and freedom, is worlds more important than a promotion or an award or whatever job opportunities people keep telling me I’m losing by advocating for Palestine. We must be humans before we are workers, workers before we are consumers.
Here is my call to action for you: go sit outdoors someplace you find beautiful. Sit for a long time, longer than you feel like you have time to sit. And when you have noticed the different bird calls and the smell of the soil and the places the light changes the color of the grass, imagine what that place would look like if it were a testing ground for every weapon imaginable. If it were under siege and bombardment and abandoned by the world. Not for the guilt trip, although discomfort is good. But because if you can imagine your beautiful home in this way, then you can imagine and understand that the opposite is also true: Palestine is beautiful. Palestine is home. It is ancient olive trees and lush gardens. It is birdsong and ocean tides and turtles. It is museums and cafes and swing sets. It is children and mothers and fathers and siblings and aunties and uncles, it is generations of love and persistence and imagination. My call to action is to let this break your heart. Because then — and only then — you will have done what all the tasks and work and distractions have tried to prevent you from doing. You will have reconnected yourself to your own humanity. You will feel again as you were always meant to feel. The anguish of the spring.
With love,
Meg
