Marikees - ________

Upside-down fig tree in Bacoli, Italy.

"No one is quite sure how the tree ended up there or how it survived, but year after year it continues to grow downwards and bear figs."

Credit: ArchaeoHistories

“‘How does one hate a country, or love one? […] I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness. (via booksnippets)

Hi,

I'm saraphil, a transgender queer refugee. I'm part of a group of LGBTIQ refugees facing extreme hardships. Life in the camp is incredibly tough—access to food, water, medication, and shelter is nearly nonexistent. Every day is a fight for survival, and despite our resilience, the lack of basic necessities is overwhelming.

Asking for help is never easy, but we are at a point where we have no other choice. Donations have been scarce, and we're reaching a critical stage. Without support, we face starvation and worsening conditions. Your contribution, no matter the amount, can make a difference between life and death for us. It helps provide the essentials we desperately need: food, clean water, medical care, and shelter.

Please consider donating to our GoFundMe fundraiser:

https://gofund.me/4d80b32c.

We are deeply grateful for any help you can offer. Thank you for reading and for your compassion.

With gratitude,

Saraphil

Donations! Donations!

The economies of the US, Canada, and the European Union depend on immigrant labor. As Harsha Walia documents, the purpose of the border regime is not to stop immigration but to control and terrorize it. When Germany decided in 2015 to take in over a million refugees from the Syrian civil war, it was only because the largest association of German employers had just declared that the national economy faced a shortfall of millions of skilled laborers. But at no point did the German government allow direct flights from Turkey or Lebanon, where so many of the refugees were warehoused. Instead, they obligated refugees to make the expensive and perilous journey over the Aegean Sea, through the Balkans, under and over razor wire fences, through police truncheons and tear gas, past violent, xenophobic crowds, so that finally they would arrive with almost nothing, willing to accept any labor conditions and bureaucratic controls. It was a journey that cost on average several thousand euros, on top of the steep psychological price, effectively ensuring that primarily only members of the university-educated middle class would be able to make it.

Peter Gelderloos, The Solutions are Already Here

The concept of assemblage—an open-ended entanglement of ways of being—is more useful. In an assemblage, varied trajectories gain a hold on each other, but indeterminacy matters. To learn about an assemblage, one unravels its knots.

The Mushroom at the End of the World - Anna Tsing

Lorde, A. (2003). The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Feminist postcolonial theory: A reader, 25, 27.

We expect humans to live on Mars in the near future, yet we haven’t even dared to inhabit Antarctica

“Each of us, I suspect, cherishes a particular landscape that outwardly reflects some all-too-invisible condition within. Its very topography gives colour, contour, dimension to otherwise inaccessible areas of inner reality. Endows them with palpable configuration.”

— Gustaf Sobin, from Luminous Debris: Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc (University of California Press, 1999)

Pen y Fan, Wales - March 2020 Rolleicord Vb on Kodak Portra 400