+ Spread Your Wings, Little Dragon +
(or, we don't need hoards)
Being so poor that not only my life, but that of my chosen family too, are in danger.... Well it's eye opening.
I have a habit of looking deep inside me and so I come to understand some things on a gut level, not merely an intellectual level (we need both, combined).
So anyway... That saying about being careful if you own things or they own you. That's important.
And it's not about how much money or stuff one owns, but how one relates to it.
Sure, if you relate to things in an organic way, you won't be that metaphorical old-school dragon who hoards millions, you'd share. But one can be poor and be owned by money, or capitalist zeitgeist ideas, or free from them. And one can have high income or inherit riches and be either bound or free.
I need stuff to survive and due to capitalism, money is the only way for me to access it (housing and food being threatened for me and fam very urgently https://gogetfunding.com/help-two-disabled-queer-abuse-survivors-finally-achieve-housing-security/), so money stands between me and my freedom to survive currently.
But I don't let the capitalist worldview chain my brain. I know that feeling too, that cold sweat panic of "I need to CLING to my hoard or else I won't be SAFE" like if an old-school dragon was driven by anxiety rather than outright greed.
We don't need hoards. We don't need to gatekeep others from resources to be safe ourselves. No, we only become free if we outright refuse to reduce our own bodies and minds, as well as other's, down to "resources" that are defined by a single number: its numerical value, the price tag on our souls and on the soul of the land and all it brings forth.
(This number will go down to zero or negative as soon as the machine has ground you up and spit you out - we're being disabled at a staggering rate!)
If we stay connected to our own raw, undomesticated aliveness, and grant others theirs, then instead of hoarding dead things, we build up our resilience. We break our chains, spread our wings and lick our wounds. Because we've all been hurt and we all deserve grace, time to mourn and rage and heal.
We don't become safe by buying into the idea that we'd lose our value - and with it our human rights - if we lost our status in capitalism, be it as worker or as capital owner.
One of the most radical things you can do is to directly and defiantly relate as Alive. I don't know how else to describe it, even though I am explicitly talking about things and clouds and rocks as well as critters and growing things and people.
But if you try it, you'll feel the difference between seeing something as a ware to be bought and sold and speculated with, versus keeping in mind whatever you know of its life, its circumstances, its past, present and potential relations to other things and places, to people or cultures or land. Or its lack of relations. Its displacement and dispossession from the land and people and cultures that gave it form.
This means that the book will soon be available at a more affordable price and I’m glad it will reach more readers. In the new blogpost, I respond to some of the critical reflections from reviewers. Read Part 1 here 
Aurin needs
