“The Greek word Gorgon translates as dreadful, but perhaps that is an astralized, patriarchal hearing of much more awe-ful stories and enactments of generation, destruction, and tenacious, ongoing terran finitude.” Donna Haraway
Medusa is a mortal Gorgon, and Gorgons are chthonic monsters that one might understand as the deified forces of an untamed and untamable Earth.
Unruly, and thus unruleable, their presence is an invocation to re-member our bodies belong to the humus of an Earth that composts shapes, and transforms what was into what might be. A mortal reminder of our finite existence, intergenerational inheritance, and ancestral becoming.
To be monstrous is to be a divine portent (as Susan Stryker so rawly articulates) - a sign that something im-portent is going to happen. And I dare say these times are filled with such signs.
Signs are like tracks left behind by the lives that move and shape the land. They can be read through the soft animal body of our own awareness and sensual attention, and through the knowing that comes with interbeing-ness. They’re signs of something that has been, and they stretch forth (portendere) our wonderment. For what has been informs what will be, and what will be lives like a dream in the movements of every creatures choosing.
Dreams are gestational possibilities kicking about in the belly of an agency that’s distributed and strung out along the warp and weft of existence. Possibilities incanting co-participatory action (not to be confused with “doing”).
How might we read the tracks of possible futures living in our current ways of being, loving, and imagining? Reading them so as to become more intimate with the knowings they might bequeath us?
Knowing not as “finding answers,” but rather knowing as relational inquiry grounded in devotional attention. Knowing as a re-cognizing (re-learning) something again and again so as to be present to the ways life emerges, adapts, and shifts in shape.
For as Medusa reminds us the chthonic rumblings of these apokalyptic hours signal that great change is afoot… and, inescapable. And rather than spinning away from that stone-turning gaze, how might we look with respect and curiosity, again and again, reading the tracks of possible futures living in our every step, slither, wingbeat, tail stroke, and guttural utterance crying out “I’m alive!”