Finding home. Part 2.2

Part 2, Version 2: Today, we lost a future. A prose poem.

Today, we lost a future.

One that danced and flitted among the branches of the tall, gnarled pine trees. Ki hid among the house debris, piled deep and high by the humans-before-us – hid like the porcupine whose poop and scent said, “Im here.” Porcupine, you making home in that place helped us imagine we might too.

A future that called to us in the song of the water flowing over and through the soils and played hide and seek in the mound of discarded tires. Low absorption rate. We traced the outlines on parcel maps and described it’s contours and shapes in terms of our hunger and longings: 80 acres, south facing, deep well, discontinued road. Our wounds appeared in the way we approached the place, emerging like the bedrock that pushed through to the surface in places.

Today we lost a future we had only just begun to imagine. Once a road, could become a bike path connecting two radical queer communities nestled in the woods of Maine. Intentional neighboring. Raising houses, children, voices in song. Shared infrastructure, families, gifts. A road, less traveled, no longer available to us.

We imagined providing housing for those struggling to find it, like we were, like we are. We would have prayed to the trees, the streams, the chickadees. We would have apologized for how they had been treated by humans in the past, cleaned up all the trash, and listened for longed-for ways of relating.

We would have called in a community of people to build, grow, laugh, and cry. We would have gestured towards village, inevitably failed, but our efforts would have fed the soils and our tears watered the plants and become one with the streams.

Today we lost a future for our children – a place on a map where they roamed the neighborhood, learned how to live together, to navigate conflict without retreating, where radical politics, not Star Wars, were woven into the narrative of our days.

“Make your highest and best offer.”

That is what they said to us and the others who saw something worth buying. But there was nowhere on the form to list our dreams, our skills for coaxing forth food from Earth, the songs we longed to sing to the place, our experience tending human relational beauty.

There was no way on the form to explain how much our son loves our friend’s dogs, the friend who lives only 1/4 mile away from the land they are selling to the highest bidder. 
There was nowhere to describe mutual aid, providing housing for queer witches, for raising children in unconventional families, or outside of the school machine.

And yet we tried to radicalize ourselves inside their competition. We pushed to decenter our fears and our wants, we called friends, told the story, and were gifted more flexible financing options. We called my friend-down-the road – the instigator, the big thinker, and she told me that once the land was ours, we could set them free. Anything was possible then. She told me to go all in. She said she didn’t want us to regret anything.

We gave it all away when we called the realtor. She paused.

I thinks its too high, she said.

Just like that we slipped so easily back into comfort and stinginess. Just like that, we allowed ourselves to shed the layers of hard work, we forgot all the length and breadth of the years building up to this moment, and we retreated. We forgot to value the we, the us, and the more-than-us in our forgetting of the truth, the present, and what was at stake. We failed the radical possibilities in our inability to fully imagine how we would have to BE to bring them about. Despite our best efforts to pull ourselves beyond fatalist individualism, we find those clothes fit us too well.

“I thank you so much for all your work, and I appreciate you amending your previous offer. Unfortunately, we have decided to accept a different offer. All the best to you.”

We failed to dream large enough and we failed our son, our community, ourselves.

Today, we lost a future we had only just begun to imagine.

Today, we learn from our mistakes, promise to try our best to make only new ones, and keep dancing with the world while we weep.