By Sprout
Crisis, by its nature, is disruptive. It changes the landscape of what is possible, whether good, bad, or just different. We live in a time characterized by manyoverlapping crises (all fueled by capitalism) changing the landscape of our realities. Crisis can be the overturning of a rock: casting sunlight into dark spaces, even while it crushes and smothers out another patch of grass where it rolls. In the upheaval, new pockets of soil can sometimes be exposed. Soil is always an invitation to life.
In Covid-19’s rupture of capitalist time in 2020, in my darkest place of burnout and PTSD, I found a space and stillness I never had before. I could not function, so school, work, everything I wanted to do or not, all came to a stop. The school psychiatrist prescribed me antidepressants, and time outside in the sun everyday, directing me to take the sun as seriously as the pills. So I spent time with the moss on my gate.
Zoom in, moss is a tiny forest with a full ecosystem of its own.
Zoom out, I walk by a patch of moss on an old gate almost daily, taking no notice of it at all when it dries in the summer, only appreciative when it swells with life with the rains in the Fall. It has been here longer than I have.
In this time, I came out as nonbinary, and found my way back to myself and community through learning regenerative gardening, one of the only things that I could find energy to do. I was experiencing food insecurity, and was able to buy seeds and plant starts with EBT through the SNAP gardens program, and had the privilege of access to a backyard. Every day felt terrible except when I looked up a plant growing in my yard, or watched bugs crawling in my compost, sat with my tomato plants in the sun, or watched a seed sprout. I feared the weight of the climate crisis, about to crash into us, and processed that grief and the reality of the empire I lived in by crying, smoking weed excessively, and gardening. The excess food I grew went to the new community fridge mutual aid network that had been founded during the pandemic and organizing with them led me to some of my closest friends.
My commitment to academia, the time I spent working to pay for it, then actually doing it, could only go as far as my body could physically take me. When I ignored its reminders, then demands of rest, food, more slowness, it stopped trying to communicate and just immobilized me however it could. It did not care about my timeline, or my ideas of the future, or the work I was excited to do. But in my body stopping me, I was able to build a different relationship with myself, and my work. I was able to turn to community in crisis in ways I never could when I let overwork isolate me all the time. I believe in these moments, with my hands in the dirt, trying to process the history of death the empire I was a participant in was built on, the ongoing state violence, the cusp of the climate crisis, and all we would lose in a post-Covid world, I was in conversation with past and future kin.
That mass disability and death and rise of fascism has continued to play out as I feared. Even so, in that time, in facing and forcibly reprocessing that grief instead of ignoring it, I was able to find not just a productive avenue for resilience and resistance, but joy. Some of the happiest moments of my life came out of the connections I made with other people and myself that started from me first putting my hands into soil.
In the words of Congolese filmmaker and eco-activist Petna Ndaliko Katandolo, soil is an archive of the Earth’s memory. From an indigenous perspective, relation to land is taking part in perpetual memory making with past and future kin. When we die, we return to the land, and while we live, it can return us to ourselves.
I CANNOT JUST ACCEPT THAT THE EARTH WILL BE DESTROYED BY SOMETHING THAT WE KNOW EXACTLY HOW TO STOP. I REFUSE TO DEATH DOULA THE WORLD TO SLEEP AT THE FEET OF CAPITALISM. WE CAN BUILD A NEW WORLD, NOW.
The climate crisis, caused by colonization and capitalism (often one and the same), is arguably just another eddy in their wake. Capitalism’s greatest feat to conjure the climate crisis was convincing many of us of a separation that does not exist, that allows us to poison land as though it is any different than our bodies, that allows us to poison bodies, communities, as though they even could be other than our own. It’s no mistake or coincidence that Black and Indigenous communities disproportionately face the brunt of climate fallout. Beyond the climate crisis forcibly shifting everyone into crip time (although with different degrees of impact) through rupture, the Earth can also be read as our othered, chronically ill, disabled more-than-human kin, on queer crip time of its own. Through the process of creating this piece, I am in conversation with past/present/future kin – including Earth, soil, land – through time and space (including you, reading this right now).
Crisis Queers
And it Cripples
And it undoes time and future
My disabilities each affect my perception and experience of time differently. For instance, the best way I could describe the flashbacks I experience from PTSD, especially at the beginning, was using Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five description of his main character being “unstuck from time.” Vonnegut was a World War II veteran with PTSD, and through writing, he is still able to be in conversation with disabled community across time even after death. Time, which I had already experienced as somewhat non-linear, felt tangled, overlapping, an ocean with a strong current. The past would come, unbidden, and swallow me whole, as real as the present moment, and leave just as suddenly. I could not control my experience of time. It suddenly took on its own agency, and I couldn’t align it with what other people were experiencing, or expecting.
Around the time of my breakdown, the university I was going to happened to offer free group EMDR therapy, a type of trauma therapy that was usually expensive. A bunch of us sat at a long table, with pieces of paper and crayons as the facilitator led us through a process of imagining the most traumatic moments of our lives in as much detail as possible, drawing it, rating our distress, and being led through bilateral re-regulating exercises to calm us down. Bi-lateral stimulation is a key part of EMDR therapy. It’s meant to mimic the back and forth motion of our eyes as they process memories in REM sleep. Trauma is like a corrupted file, a memory that didn’t save right and so keeps coming back up like pop up ads in your mind. If you can reprocess that memory, it reduces the pop ups. Reprocessing that memory means reliving it, which we did over and over and over and over again; drawing the event, then how we feel, then learning how to calm ourselves down again. Sometimes people use flashing lights, or pendulums for bilateral stimulation. Our group session taught us what they called “the butterfly hug,” where you link your thumbs together and spread your fingers out like a butterfly over your chest and “flap” the wings rhythmically one side at a time. It felt silly at first, but it did help.
My mother, who has had extreme anxiety my entire life which I couldn’t understand until I experienced some trauma unhappily similar to some of hers, gave me a gift during this time. She hand-made me a drop spindle from dowels and bits of things in her craft room, taught me how to spin, and sent me home with big bags of fluffy wool roving.
“This will help,” she said. I didn’t believe her.
We had recently begun discussing neurodiversity, learning about each other and ourselves in a new light, and helpful terms that described behaviors we had always participated in but never had the words for. For instance, “stimming” or self-stimulation are repetitive motions or actions that people (especially neurodivergent people) use to self-regulate. This can be when distressed, when trying to focus on something, or when happy. A family member of mine used to get in trouble at work for cackling hyper-realistically like a chicken whenever they became too stressed. We always laughed at this, but this family story describes vocal stimming. I, too, make bird calls and other vocal stims, quite often. Most of my memories of my mother are of her with her hands busy, knitting, beading, crocheting, getting into more and more niche crafts like leatherwork, silver soldering, micro-macrame etc… She cannot concentrate on a movie without a craft in her hands, cannot hear if her hands are quiet.
I remember being a pre-teen watching my mother sit in the kitchen, light coming through the window, past the fat spider she called “friend”, sitting in its web. She sat with brightly colored fluffy wool roving she had dyed with food coloring. They looked like dragons to me, nestled in an old salad box she had recycled- or a sunset being slowly spun into yarn.
Sometimes, stims feel like motions out of time, a desire to be walking down a village road while creating thread on a drop spindle.
Fidget with purpose
You become an agent of synthesis
Combining air and fiber, the imperceptible oil of your skin
Whirrlll whirrlll
It’s now one
And that one becomes one thread
Whirled into a two or maybe 4 ply yarn
Four threads in one stitch
One strand in a sweater
So many rows of weaving
Like people in a crowd
Like ants on a plain
City lights from above
Zoom out and it’s a complete picture
Erasing the one
Nevermind the original three
We lose the whirl of the spindle in the zoom out
But that doesn’t change its affect
Each prick of light in the pointillism of the Earth
Blue dot in our zoom out
Zoom in
Cells in our blood
Blood in our veins
Mitochondria, an assimilation of another into us (Margulis, 1970)
The borders get hazy hazy
When you zoom out
Zoom out
“Just” a person
“Just” Earth
I met Rain at a vigil
For Palestine, Sudan and the Congo
Bushy shoulder length hair, a full beard, bright eyes, wearing all green, always
He mentioned a club he helped run at a local weaving school. I recognized the club name.
By this time I had been helping manage the community fridge’s social media with my friend. We had seen the club’s account pop up many times and had wanted to go, but had never gotten around to it.
Rain mentioned a Pride Picnic – just local queer people meeting up in a park, doing crafts, swapping art, clothing, and resources, and building community. A place to get a free binder! A place to play music and share food! Learn new recipes! Meet people! I had found queer community in mutual aid organizing, but we were what felt like a small pocket of queer trans folks in an assertively normative area. I kept seeing or bumping into queer people around, but there never seemed a place to actually meet.
I went to the explicitly non-capitalist pride picnic with my friends from the community fridge and found that the club was the next day, held at the weaving school:
Every Sunday, always with soup, no matter the season.
The week after the Pride picnic and my first weaving club, Rain had surgery and I made him a big pot of lentil soup for his recovery. Lentil soup has been my favorite since childhood, and was the first soup my mother taught me how to make growing up. Rain & I have been good friends ever since. He often calls me up to talk about navigating limited capacity. It’s been five years since my breakdown, and I’ve become very open about my experience of working myself to losing functionality, and in that openness have found others with similar experiences.
Rain taught me to weave. I found the repetitive left-right, of pulling the shuttle with yarn through, tamping the threads down with a heddle, then right-left of the shuttle comforting, familiar. I soon found that weaving and weeping helped me process big emotions and then realized it was bilateral stimulation, similar to in EMDR therapy. Then, for the first time I taught my mother a craft. My mother taught me to spin for my anxiety, Rain taught me to weave, and then in a way, I was able to hand back the basic tools for processing trauma to my mother, by teaching her to weave for the first time.
In “How to Write as Felt”, Stephanie Springgay explains the difference between “smooth” and “striated” spaces, using the metaphor of striated weavings, or knit fabric vs. the inherent enmeshment of creating felt from wool – an entanglement that cannot be undone, reminding us of how we inherently bleed into each other. “Striated” spaces are institutional and colonial spaces, while these felt “smooth” spaces are open and more radical. In this sense, the spaces that open up from queer community building (the non-capitalist local Pride Picnic, the queer trans neurodivergent space opened up by Sundays at the weaving school, spending time with queer loved ones) are “smooth” spaces of “innovation, experimentation… resistance” and importantly, entanglement. For the purposes of this piece, though I am literally writing about weaving, I am writing as felt, in both senses of the word.
In these specifically queer trans disabled “smooth” spaces “access intimacy” contributes to the entanglement through neurodivergent/disability-specific acts of care: keeping a list of a friend or community member’s allergies or labeling ingredients in foods at a community potluck, keeping in mind and accommodating people’s varying physical limitations and creating/choosing environments accordingly, wearing masks and/or creating well-ventilated spaces, having ongoing conversations about managing capacity, having flexible expectations of each other, urging comrades to not overextend themselves when they already have “low spoons”, creating low-sensory spaces for people to go if they become overstimulated, etc. This entanglement, and the building of alternative infrastructures of care that it represents, is an example of queer ecology.
As more and more of the world’s population become variously disabled from compounding issues of the climate crisis (pandemics, overexposure to wildfire smoke or smog, environmental racism, natural disasters and extreme weather, deregulated pesticides, etc.) these access intimacies and networks of queer disabled care that make up queer ecology become important for us all surviving this together. As our Earth becomes disabled and chronically ill along with us, we can even see integrated ecological practices (beyond “sustainability”, more akin to indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge) as a form of access intimacy with our Earth.
Humans have coevolved with microbial “old friends” who “colonize” us through interaction with the environment and train our immune-regulation. The soil we touch as children shapes our immune system for the rest of our lives. Without soil that is alive to play in and around, without being able to make “old friends”, friends all of our ancestors have had the privilege of making, our children develop chronic illnesses like asthma, allergies and more. Not touching soil is quite literally disabling. Touching soil triggers the release of serotonin in our brains, helping us to regulate. We co-regulate with soil. Our health individually and as a species literally cruxes on us communing with land. Land as kin is not a metaphor.
Soil is the second largest active store of carbon in our world, only behind the ocean. Soil health not only directly relates to our ability to sustain life (and populations) through food crops and immune health, but to the health of our climate. When our soil is not regeneratively maintained, we lose it to erosion or it “dies” (lower microbial diversity and health), and can release carbon into the atmosphere. We are a thing within a thing barely separate if at all from our ecosystem, and there are things within us that blur the line between us and other. Similarly, our mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell!) are other ancestral “friends” that are now permanently parts of us. We are not one, we are many! Soil is kin, soil is community, soil is archive, soil is food sovereignty, memory, immune protection, community health, resistance, an ecosystem in its own right. As are we.
In our climate grief, processing, bargaining,
Resistance
We are in conversation with our past/present/future dead
Our past/present/future queer and/or disabled Kin
We grieve what is not yet [lost]
But marked as expendable
I spent the night of the 2024 presidential election at the weaving school with Rain. There were no screen running play by plays, and we tried to not check our phones. I succeeded, stubbornly, so found out how it was going from different community members wandering in throughout the night, looking increasingly haggard and sometimes exclaiming doom. We chatted, crafted and kept each other company through that night.
There is power in archiving. These experiences are snippets of my life. They’re me hanging out with my friends and family, discovering things, and growing as a person. These radical queer spaces existed, exist. It’s important that in 2026 as transphobia is steadily being codified as the law of the land, autistic people are being put on a registry, and services are being increasingly cut for disabled and trans communities, so disabled trans people care for each other, hang out, have picnics, feed each other, craft together, go on ecology hikes, share skills, organize and take action. There can be joy in the grief, and possibility in rupture.