Do you hear the people sing?

Frayed.

The image that comes to my mind is of a frayed tapestry. A weaving ripped apart thread by thread. The disabled. A thread pulled. The poor. Another fraying. Black or Indigenous or immigrant or trans. A tapestry in tatters. Not to mention all the threads of all the more-than-human creatures around us. The old growth forests about to bulldozed. The endangered creatures now without protection. Whole chunks just torn out of the tapestry. Violently and carelessly ripped.

All the while, these demolishers create a constant noise about it. A firehose. A deluge. A flood of chaos, meant to unseat us. Terrorize us. They inanely babble while society falls through the holes of their making.

So what do we do? Tune in to the noise, and lose our minds? Tune out, and lose our souls?

I was at the U.S. Capitol the morning after the Joint Address to Congress (Yeah, I know, weird timing, right?). I traveled there as part of the Choose Clean Water Coalition lobbying my representatives to fund conservation and restoration programs in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, a watershed where Appalachia holds critical headwaters. I was also there to learn the ropes to one day help my community in their battle against a corporation trying to extract our water for profit.

The Capitol and adjoining office buildings were chaotic. A mess. But I got the sense that it always was? All day, I wound through a labyrinth of tunnels. Suited professionals and citizen groups in bright, branded clothing wound through the labyrinth. Arrows this way and that. Underground cafes. A mural. An exhibit. Storage rooms next to committee rooms. Random escalators. Elevators with floor designations that made no sense. My heart floated from the feeling of democracy-in-action. It sank with the atmosphere of business-as-usual.

The scripts for our meetings were written to ask for new funding for watershed projects in the upcoming appropriations process. Instead, the Appalachian organizations I accompanied had to beg for legally obligated grants from past appropriations to be unfrozen and disbursed. Money for farmers to conserve land. Money for threadbare staff at land trust organizations in a ruby red state. Money for working class communities struggling amidst flood and droughts. And working with these folks all day, climbing uphill in a thunderstorm in a system that never gave them a map, validated something that I had always felt: Appalachian environmentalists and progressives are the most kind, passionate, brilliant, and creative people you will ever meet. They are mending a broken system while they sing amidst the ceaseless noise, and I wanted to learn the tune by heart.

After the first disappointing meeting with my representative, I went to go find the office of New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. I had googled her office number and knew she was in the same office building, so this was my chance to see it like a monument, like touching a shrine. So many times amid the chaos of the last administration and through the most recent struggles, AOC brought sanity and strength to the conversation. She made me want to be better activist, speaker, and writer. Heck, even person. So, I googled her office number and wormed my way through the labyrinth.

I needn’t have memorized the office number.

For as you approach her office, your sight is filled color. The walls on each side of her door are covered in brightly colored sticky notes written by people like me. Saying “hello.” Saying “thank you.” Writing hope and belonging on every slip of paper.

AOC wasn’t just mending. She was weaving a new tapestry made of us.

So, as a storyteller, I knew after that what my job is right now. Find the people singing amid the screaming. Find the people busy mending threads in a ripped tapestry. Find those weaving a new world and singing while they do it. For those people told me the work that needed to be done.

Let's imagine what the world would look like if our leaders were given powers not like kings and generals but more like conductors and weavers. What would the structure of governance look like? Would there be more direct democracy? More active facilitation of communities' ideas? Would the unit of governance change from counties and states to communities of shared identities and values? How would decisions be made?

Dancing at the Edge of the World

This day!
This life!
This joy!
This world!

The sky screams in pink above the snowy void
Our world rattles with the chains of cruelty
So why am I a sun inside?
Why do I burn with such a certainty?

I feel like I am growing feathers
And may take wing
I feel like I may burst
With love for this burning world
I feel that I am boundless
What choice do we have
What can we lose

We are dancing on the edge
To a song called tomorrow
And it is
Sweet
Because you’re there beside me

Falling

You may have already noticed, but I'm continuing to play around with some newsletter organization and design as I settle in to a writing and posting habit for this year. I will definitely be experimenting more between now and June (my one-year blogging anniversary!). I really want to focus on community solutions to climate change along with radical imagination practices, without moving away from my personal experiences in nature and community organizing. Stay tuned! Exciting developments are afoot.

Here's some random updates:

• I fixed the video issues! Sorry if you couldn't view the videos in the last few newsletters that I sent out. They should be working from here on out (and are now working on the website versions of the newsletters).
• I was interviewed for the Dragonfly blog! Mary Woodbury does regular spotlights on eco-fiction, and she fell in love with this blog, much to my delight. Mary leads a Discord community Rewilding Our Stories, so definitely join us there if you're interested in writing or reading environmental themes.
• I wrote an op-ed for about my community's fight to save their drinking water and protect a rare marl wetland. This is my first time publishing an op-ed, and it felt special for it to be focused on a place dear to me.
• Because of these two recently published pieces (one with my pen name and one with my legal name), I was able to do some reflection on my writing career moving forward. I got emotional seeing my name on the op-ed, and it reminded me how emotional I got seeing my legal name on the draft of the first chapters of my novel. I have worked so long and so hard to be a writer. So, moving forward, I'm going to try out using a version of my legal name here on the blog and any other published writing or interviews. I'm still early in my career, so I like that I have the freedom to experiment!

You are reading Entangled Worlds, a newsletter from N.A. Chapman filled with poems and poetic prose that radically imagines the more-than-human worlds beyond the Anthropocene. You can find me on Instagram and Bluesky.