The future is NOW!
Go play your little heart out,
Just this one moment
“Love is alive, and someone borne along by it
is more alive than lions roaring
or men in their fierce courage.
Bandits ambush others on the road.
They get wealth, but they stay in one place.
Lovers keep moving, never the same, not for a second.
What makes others grieve, they enjoy.
When they look angry, do not believe their faces.
It is spring lightning, a joke before the rain.
They chew thorns thoughtfully along with pasture grass.
Gazelle and lioness, having dinner.”
(Rumi, continued at the end)
A life is not made, it grows. It is more than flesh and bones, atoms and “wet-wear.” A life—with (or without) a mind—does not ask: “What are we?” But first: “Who do we want to become?” (Braidotti, 77). What we are looking for is more than a change of scenery, although that too is encouraged. You have long discovered the key and have yet to find a fitting lock. Too many times have the wings of ambition grown weary and ice-bitten. An ember burns in your heart yearning for a steady breeze, a slow breath. Where is the warmth of that sun within you? Dose of caution: this kind of traveling is not done with your body; there are no words to tell you we are really in this together.
How to become-alive? A life’s active mission (we can for now leave its question of origin to the Minds) is to shed, overcome, and differ with identities that tend toward dominant categories of identity and subjectivity, and instead, very simply, to cultivate “the kind of relations that compose and empower positive passions and avoid the negative ones” (Braidotti, 95). I know, very subtle, much intricacy. Practice becomes a grounding exercise, a witch’s flight, “an ethical drive to enter into modes of relation that enhance and sustain one’s ability to renew and expand what consciousness can become” (Braidotti, 95). In other more direct words, we cannot stop at training and evolving the mind and body; the spirit, too, grows and shrinks with practice. Base materialism? There is always more. As living beings, we can, ultimately and beyond all doubt, surpass the moral panic and melancholy of a soulless life.
To cut to the chase, a vitalist call of becoming-alive means walking hand-in-hand with death. We know death is inevitable; it’s rather like taking off a tight shoe. Death is not the issue. What is needed is not to “win” life but to overcome via a life the dice game of relativism and cynicism, “pure” chance and necessity, the so-called agency of “manifest destiny,” and (worst of all) the nihilistic objectification, commodification, and exploitation of Nature. (Note the advancing ownership of “natural resources” like drinkable water, rare earth metals (microchips, atomic bombs), breathable, unpolluted air, and ad-free space (virtual and physical), strategically and forcefully controlled by all but an increasingly narrowing dominion of disconnected, jaded techno-capitalists with an indiscriminate motivation to isolate, exploit, and commodify the lives of others.) It is not a stretch to say humans are dooming themselves. It is hopeless to try changing what is beyond change. Much can be changed, however. Nothing changes if nothing changes. We can change. We can end this soullessness—if only in this life, in our body, in our little garden. And if not in this life, then in the next. Love more. Do less harm. Admit it, it’s a hard thing to do in this life. It is not easy to suffer death and to be reborn, to start again. Take a deep breath, becoming-alive, music only you can hear, a lightning flash. Just this one moment.
It is vital that we become-alive if we desire to cease the suffering of the spirit in the flesh, and furthermore it is imperative if we seek to free ourselves and others from late/post-capitalism’s fallout and fatalist materialism. The truth is, short and simple, we do not yet know what a life is capable of. What is the point? You’ll never believe me, I once knew “a collective assemblage of forces that coalesced around commonly shared elements and empowered them to grow and to endure” (Braidotti, 96). Understand me? Go play your little heart out, it won’t matter then.
Curiouser and curiouser… What is that song my tongue cannot sing? Whose ancestral call is this?
Becoming-alive: a qualitative shift of perspective from an anthropocentric, mechanistic essentialism toward a non-unitary, nomadic, and so called “primitive,” return to (a) life: a radical affirmation and empowerment of one’s interbeing with others in all their complexity. Transcending and yet immanent to the body, mind, and intellect, a life is called toward a greater expression of “one’s freedom as the ability to take in and sustain connectedness to others. An expansion, acceleration, or intensification of interrelation” (Braidotti, 95). This nourishing view offers us new lines of flight, bright bursts of wild growth. It is a new day, a new plot of land. The future is NOW!
“Love is invisible except here, in us.
Sometimes I praise love, sometimes love praises me.
Love, a little shell somewhere on the ocean floor,
opens its mouth.
You and I and we, those imaginary beings,
enter that shell as a single sip of seawater.”
(Rumi, Big Red Book, trans. Coleman Barks, p. 79-80)
Spells for Protection and Vitality
Radiant Heart (3rd-level abjuration spell, vocal component, fire elemental, yellow):
Aditya Hridayam Puṇyam
Sarva Shatru Vināśanam
“O radiant heart of the Sun, I draw sacred strength; its light a shield, its fire the destroyer of all enemies.”
Effect(s): Invoke the radiant heart of the Sun. A golden aura flares from your chest, pouring with sunlight that banishes fear and weakens enemies.
Rama’s Blessing (4th-level enchantment/abjuration spell, vocal component, fire and air elemental, yellow and red):
Ayodhya Vasi Ram, Ram,
Dasharatha Nandana, Ram, Ram,
Patitha Pāvana,
Janaki Jīvana, Sita Mohana Ram
“O Rama of Ayodhya, son of Dasharatha, holy redeemer of the lost—Breath of Janaki’s life, beloved of Sita, Rama, Rama!”
Effect(s): Evoke a shimmering divine light, carrying the grace of Rama. Friends feel their burdens lifted, while foes weaken within the aura.
References:
Braidotti, R. (2011). Nomadic theory: the portable Rosi Braidotti. Columbia University Press.
If It Means A Lot 
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