Night is Not Darkness

The wood smoke mixes with petrichor and the cold rain after a frozen drought feels like life. The holiday break wasn’t so much a brake as an awakening, waking up to the forces of scarcity that have narrowed my vision since November 5th. Our dominant socioeconomic system wants to extract every last bit of energy and use from me at precisely the time I should be storing up energy for new growth. There’s a constant drumbeat of scarcity in the air. Not enough. Not enough. Not enough time or money or planet. Not enough. It’s an insistent, repetitive story, hard to ignore, and rooted in white supremacy and capitalism - all the while reinforced by western philosophy.

In the symbolic dichotomy of western thought, there are so many insistent binaries. Light and darkness. Good and evil. Summer and winter. Creation and destruction. Pristine and damaged. Valuable and disposable. Abundance and scarcity. Hope and despair. Not that binaries are unique to western societies, but European colonial powers have perfected the art of categorizing variables for the purposes of separation, domination, and maximum extractive value. The distinct polarities serve some profitable end. This over here is valuable. That over there is not. But our ecological laws do not function according to black-and-white, linear thinking. Our planet’s ecology is a branching web of cyclical, reciprocal relationships. Western binary thinking is a toxic value system that has become a parasite on our body politic, designed to benefit only the very few. By paying radical attention to the ecological patterns and relationships around us, we can begin to untangle the hold this story and these symbols have on our mind.

I’m damn spent from living in the white male imagination. Nature dreams only in abundance. Can we remember how to dream with it?

The Abundance within Winter

The maple buds shine ruby in the bleak winter while the roots of the dormant tree gather strength underground. Autumn’s dwindling decays in the leaf litter, seeping nutrients into the soil for next year’s growth. Winter’s weeping fills up summer’s drought. Vultures flock in colonies in the dead trees of my neighborhood and wing in the freezing winds. There is abundance here, resting, recycling, waiting, shoring up, storing up, and ripening with potentiality.

The Abundance at Night

The stars are unveiled at night. They are always there, shining. Auroras blaze in cyclical patterns, bursts of solar energy hitting our planet’s magnetic field. But they are there, glowing beyond our sight. Night is when the saw-whets and warblers migrate. When insects sing out of human hearing. When flowers shine in colors indiscernible to our eyes. When the sun fades, foxfire and glowworms and fireflies emerge. There is abundance at night, raucous and brightening.

The Shadows Sing of Summer’s Decay

On gathering wonder in late summer

Entangled WorldsNichole Amber Moss

The Abundance within Capitalist Ruins

Sacrifice Zones are lands desecrated by capitalist extraction. Contamination and industrial infrastructure are like a whalefall in a sea of wriggling life. Yet the rivers flow. The rivers still flow, and creatures find havens in abandoned sites. Wildflowers grow in hedge forests at the edges. Fungi feast on downed trees. New beastly imaginings emerge from contaminated landfills. Leave an old Sacrifice Zone alone for decades, and luna moths find the moon amid decaying buildings. After a century or more, bluebells emerge from stone ruins inundated the silt of resilient rivers. A Sacrifice Zone is a past and future sacred site. Desecration - while violent - is merely temporary.

Welcome To Your Friendly Neighborhood Sacrifice Zone

On radical attention in a Sacrifice Zone

Entangled WorldsNichole Amber Moss

Abundance within Authoritarianism

Fascism is a time of cruelty that cuts away at people and communities. It is a time of increasing theft from the 99% by the minority ruling classes and increasing violence against marginalized groups. But it is also filled with small rebellions and long organizing. New systems emerge: Mutual aid, community gardens, new organizing, herbal healthcare, and other networks of community care. Within fascism stirs a latent revolution, budding and biding its time. For its time will come. It always does.

Your Heart is Always Breaking and Mending

On community as a practice of radical hope

Entangled WorldsNichole Amber Moss

The next period of life in this country will be frightening and cruel. I don’t want to put that aside. There is such moronic, unnecessary suffering across the world. Our dominant socioeconomic system treats mass death like a necessary line item in the ledger. This will be only a continuation - though now heightened - for people who have experienced any kind marginalization or oppression. The shadows are gathering. The paths branch. Those who we thought were allies are so quickly abandoning us. But what we learn from nature is that amid decay and gloom, hibernation and dormancy, there is growth and transcendent beauty. Nature knows no binaries. It only grows. And grows. And grows. The future is not set, no matter what the ruling classes tell you. We are forging the future now, with every connection we make to each other and to the rest of nature, with every binary we abandon. Our symbols and stories shape our reality. We can weave a new story. We can grow. And grow. And grow.

Last night was the Black Moon. This is the second new moon in a month, which only occurs every 29 months. As the stars shine brighter to our eyes and the light of the moon waxes, let’s intone an intention for the New Year. To remember abundance in the drumbeat of scarcity. To dream with the rest of nature.

The paths ahead are dark. The stars are often veiled, unable to guide us. But night is not darkness. It is the dusk before the dawn, and we have some dreaming to do yet.

You are reading Entangled Worlds, a newsletter from Nichole Amber Moss 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.