Emergent Limits

PART 1

The rules of the world are built around
the limits of the capacity
of those who make them.

The process of expanding capacity is de-stabilizing.
Success, stability, and continuation are not guaranteed.

HR boundaries. Laws. Terms of business agreements.
I hold compassion for those who created them now.
They did their best to safeguard a precious balance.

Within bounds, we—it—things—
have a chance at surviving.
We only get to work on thriving
When that step is taken care of.

Tenuous, the sinews that bind.
Stewarding emergent structures
Is a thankless task:
Re-design a too-rigid dominant now
Into a permeable-fluid-yet-stable interdependent next.

PART 2

To way-show, we first way-find
We follow the winding caverns down below institutions
In the soil of authenticity, nature, and truth.

Truth is a multiplicity
We accidentally break others with ours
And we allow that of others to unearth our wounds.

We do not cross from structures of surviving to thriving —
Without metamorphosis.
I guess it’s not odd, that those way-showing to a new kind of life
First must endure death.

We, the creators of the limits, sinews, structures
We must first hold our own human together.
Without being alive,
We cannot make anew.

We become spiders who tend
To the webs we weave.
It is a new kind of hierarchy

When the wind breaks a segment, we don’t fret,
We fix.

Before we weave, we discern:
How much chaos can we—it—things tolerate?
Under which conditions can the structure endure damage
and at what rate?

Emergent structures grow differently.
Emergent stewards choose:
Are we the wildfire?
The fern?
The web?

The rates of our capacities to alchemize
through the valleys of metamorphosis
are sacred things of nature, too.

A snail does not shame its shell for a reason.
It grows it larger over time, bit by bit
But it will never get rid of it.

My limits are beautiful. Honorable.
My desires are, too.
Whether you meet me at my thresholds or not,
They hold the purity of my truth.

Even when in this moment, now, they constrict.
Or in this moment next
they’re a little too far
And a little too loose.

To create emergently, we tend gently to our limits
Yours, mine, ours
We don’t shame them, or obliterate them.

And if we can’t meet each other in them,
That’s nature,
Taking away the glue.

PART 3

To the seed: the dream of building both a life
And a business, with that one and only “you”.
I don’t know what to do with you.

I was given this seed, by some unknown force
I put you in the soil here and there
You burst into a sprout, again and again
With that man then, and this one new.

Inevitably, I’m the one that chooses to prune.

Because what emerges doesn’t fill the desire I desired.
And I’d rather kill it than continue
Growing something I no longer have heart-power to.

So what do I do with you, seed?
I know you exist through my body’s truth
My soul, my bones, my womb, my intellect, they ache.
When others try to redirect me in words, I’m still left with you.

You tell me — don’t stop planting.
Their words and actions are incongruous.
What your body feels is also truth.

In retort, I cry:
But every time I plant you, nourish you,
Cultivate you, have faith in you.
I’m the one who comes out

Black and blue.