Remembering Redundancy
“We were taught to pull water from a well that was nearly dry and stagnant—and now it has dried up. This seems like a crisis, but it is in service to the way we might find redundant wells that are fresh and deep, ones that will nourish not only us, but future generations.”
—Hannah Aline Taylor
The well of the romantic dyad is where we went when we were directed away from other sources of love, connection, stability, and material resources.
Our ancestresses were deprived of their freedom, robbed of their agency, killed for their magic, or else had their magic killed, or else their repressed magic killed them.
Our mothers and grandmothers could not own businesses, bank accounts, real estate—without a man. Some of these ancestors are living to this day.
They drank of the well which was offered to them, and fought to be reconnected to other sources.
All did some, some did all.
That is to say that one might have a mother who contented herself drinking from this well, insisted it was enough, taught her to drink of it, insists upon its benefit to this day, and another might have a mother who went on a thirst strike to protest, taught her to be angry, taught her to take power BACK, and insists to this day power cannot be trusted.
Ultimately, in aggregate, they triumphed. They birthed and raised us. We live in a world which allows us unprecedented access to fresh and abundant sources.
But none of that taught us to live and breathe into a new existence, to resource ourselves with these new sources.
That is what is on us to learn, to remember, to honor what our mothers and grandmothers reclaimed for us, what they did not get to experience and which therefore they could have never taught us to interact with.
They taught us the ways of reaping from a stagnant well.
They taught us the ways of going unignorably thirsty.
They cried out to sound an alarm
and it worked
now there is a hush over the world, so much stopped, so much falling away
and it is into this silence, into the void of the unknown
that we may sing.
Now it is for us to learn how to identify an abundant well denied to our ancestors, how to drink from it, who we become, as individuals and as a collective, when the water of connection, ease, and love, is never scarce.
It is for us to return hydrated to the old well, purely for the scenery there, and slowly
over years and decades
the spilled wine from our lovers' picnic
might rehydrate that earth.
