Subversive Creation (Time to Save the World Again)

Yesterday, I went to a day-long workshop at the Padua Center that a friend was giving. It was a good chance to see this friend again, meet new people, and maybe get inspired. I did get a poem out of it.

It was about changing ourselves in order to change the world. Change the world? Us? Yes, I'm afraid so. As someone put it in one of the Star Trek movies, "It's time for us to save the Earth again."

I've sometimes thought the title of my zine, Subversive Creation, to be a tad pretentious. But dammit, subversive creation is what we need! People talk about "smashing the system", but the closest they ever get are riots, which only smash shop windows. But fashioning practices and institions that embody alternative ways of seeing things- that's creation that subverts the system.

Destruction without creation is nihilism in action, but what we create can, like plants taking over the cracks in a crumbling concrete pavement, subvert and then take over from a system that cannot be sustained.