“For this we go out dark nights, searching
For the dimmest stars,
For signs of unseen things.”
— Rebecca Elson,
“Let There Always Be Light (Searching for Dark Matter)”,
A Responsibility to Awe (1997)
The world feels painful right now. The news cycle is relentless, distressing, and overwhelming.
I wrote about the Clarion Call: Standing in Solidarity Against Racism and Ableism in the Neurodivergent Community earlier this week, after our event held in response to Professor Jason Arday’s death and the wave of media coverage questioning the validity of neurodivergent diagnoses and identity:
Professor Arday’s work, and the work of everyone the Clarion Call stood in solidarity for, deserves more than grief. It deserves honouring. Honouring means resisting and calling out the harm. Resisting and calling out ableism, sexism, racism, classism and the neuronormative bias that shaped all the narratives around him and the recent uprising against neurodivergent people. We need to continue to share the good work so many people have given so much of themselves to.
It’s easy, in the middle of all this, to feel like all hope is gone and we are in a never ending dark night, shouting into the void, still unseen. But there is hope.
Together we are a community, a constellation network made up of all our unique ways and differences, and everyone has something to contribute.
Hope can transform a moment, a mood, a day, a whole life.
We live on a planet where mushrooms glow in the dark. Where trees share resources with each other through mycelial networks. Where some of the water in your glass may be older than the sun itself. Where whales sing songs that travel for miles, and dolphins call each other by name. Where sea otters hold each other while they sleep, so the current doesn’t carry them apart. Where axolotls can regrow a limb or even part of their own heart. Where lightning can turn sand to glass, where horses can read our feelings on our faces, and where rain has a smell before it even arrives.
We are a community where Autistic, neurodivergent, disabled, otherwise marginalised groups and our allies are creating networks of care for each other and sustaining each other. We are coming together resisting and shining stronger despite the darkness we may feel.
Every atom in your body heavier than hydrogen or helium was forged inside a star. Made in its fusion, or scattered by its death, long before our Sun ever existed. As Carl Sagan said in Cosmos (1980): “We are made of star stuff“.
Posthumanism asks why we ever decided “human” belonged in a separate category from everything else: animal, plant, technological, planetary (Braidotti, 2013). Donna Haraway (2016) talks about “making kin,” being in relation with the world. I think about my own Autistic ways of sensing, being and relating in the same way: there is no one “correct” way to sense, be, or relate to the world, human or otherwise, and our differences are what make kinship and solidarity possible in the first place.
I’ve been working with Ryan Boren from Stimpunks on our StarStuff.Earth zines all year. It’s been a real passion project and pure joy, diving into everything weird, wonderful and awe-inspiring.
It’s a bit of a side quest that we’ve not really shared yet, folded in between everything else we’re doing at Stimpunks and Autistic Realms. Star Stuff holds some of the ideas closest to my heart: neuroqueering, more-than-human, expansive thoughts that help ground us and reclaim a love that reaches past any category of race, gender, sex, label or diagnosis, all the way down to your star stuff.
“It’s not one person that changes the world, its everyone that is present with them. In the same way, its not one star that lights the night, its all of them shining together.” (Leo Starrs-Cunningham)
We are a community, a constellation made up of all our unique ways of being. It may feel like we are weighed down by darkness, but even fallen light glows. We can strengthen our networks of care & constellations of love. We shine brighter together.
In Solidarity.
Explore Star Stuff zines
Love you down to your star stuff.
In the last year of his life Pablo Neruda wrote a short untitled poem. It opens by saying that if each day falls inside each night, there is a well “where clarity is imprisoned.” Then it tells you what to do about that:We need to sit on the rim
of the well of darkness
and fish for fallen light
with patience.Pablo Neruda, untitled, El mar y las campanas (1973) · translated by William O’Daly, The Sea and the Bells (Copper Canyon Press, 1988), pp. 94–95
Read: Star Stuff – Fallen Light Glows