In Vietnamese proverbs, there is a saying “No mud, no lotus”, which means the challenges in life (the mud) give us the condition to rise above, shine, and be pure-hearted and beautiful, like a lotus. These days, with the literal forest fire and all, I don’t feel very “rise above” at all. It’s mostly just “barely surviving”. It’s more like flowers in a forest fire. They may be resilient. They may be surviving. But they don’t fucking like it.
I won’t talk about the election, and the general anxiety that the country that I have chosen to move to and become a citizen of, has started on a path of slow decline into extreme-right-wing-Christo-fascist. I won’t talk about my work, which generally feels “safe”, and “comfortable”, but it’s slowly getting back to this “Alberta large corporations that move conservatively and as slow as possible with my processes as possible”, and yeah, with all the work and accomplishments I put in last year, my year-end assessment was “meh” from senior leadership. I won’t talk about my personal life, which is generally safe and comfortable, but I don’t have friends, and any efforts of making new friends naturally ended up in rescheduling, people have better plans, and/or people have more fun friends. I won’t talk about all the (white) fabulous people on social media celebrating Pride month and touting how much they care about the community who will ignore racial minorities and continue voting for anti-trans and racist politicians, because, you know, tax cuts. I won’t talk about the state of the world, which is literally on fire at the moment, and it seems like anything meaningful is reserved for the rich and the powerful.
And so I just ended up not talking. Well, maybe to my therapist. But a brown gay man pays a black woman to complain to her about his burdens.
Well, let’s not talk about that.
So I don’t know what else meaningful we can talk about. Because there’s no meaning in anything anymore it seems.
Just a bunch of flowers, resilient, stoic, quietly burning in the fire of life.
Pace Fine Arts 