sacred futurities

Welcome to Sacred Futurities. Not a horizon— a field. Time does not move forward in a straight line. It folds. It returns. It gathers. Futures are felt in the present tense in the body, in the land, in what moves, in what remains. Fragments appear, disappear, return elsewhere. These texts do not hold still. They circulate, touch, and echo across one another. Meaning gathers through encounter: through a [[voice]] through the [[body]] through what [[materializes]] through what [[convenes]] through what is [[touched]] Some paths hold. Some dissolve. Not everything continues. What remains is relation and what relation makes possible.

VOICE MOVES ACROSS BODIES, BORDERS AND TIME. The people who "cruzaron el río" carried <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/the-border-as-sacred-entity-in-the-work-of-celia-alvarez-munoz/"target="_blank">stories</a>, languages, and rituals across borders, embedding sacredness into daily acts of survival. The <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/songs-of-steel-and-current/" target="_blank">dialogue</a> between river and volcano reminds us that archives are not static repositories but living ecologies of connection: currents of ash, sediment, and memory that resist containment. There are possible worlds that also honor the knowledge and <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/new-choreographies-with-in-the-land/" target="_blank">oral traditions</a> that exist in the land and its inhabitants. Embodied <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/sacred-migrations-gestating-the-border/" target="_blank">prayer</a> spiritually and conceptually releases some of the emotional and physical anxieties that living close to the border placed upon the body. The platform became a spot to <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/against-ruination-building-sacred-futurities/" target="_blank">transmit</a> ancestral knowledge and to repair relations.

THE BODY CARRIES WHAT HISTORY CANNOT CONTAIN. The river’s voice moves seamlessly between English and Spanish, <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/the-border-as-sacred-entity-in-the-work-of-celia-alvarez-munoz/" target="_blank">embodying</a> this dual consciousness. The same currents that bore canoes now drag cargo ships. I have <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/songs-of-steel-and-current/" target="_blank">swallowed</a> their rituals, their prayers, and their pollutants. I have distilled the 2000-mile border through my body and senses, attempting to <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/sacred-migrations-gestating-the-border/" target="_blank">metabolize</a> the physical as emotional and release the border’s demands upon my body. With his body <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/against-ruination-building-sacred-futurities/" target="_blank">pressed</a> to the ground, he began to crawl atop the obelisk. The gesture of the embrace allows for the individual to <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/new-choreographies-with-in-the-land/" target="_blank">extend</a> themselves into the landscape, and even for a temporary moment become both a body and landscape enriched with encoded history.

MATERIAL IS WHERE MATTER BECOMES MEMORY. In my currents float the songs of canoes, the whispers of ceremonies, the <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/songs-of-steel-and-current/" target="_blank">toxins</a> of industry. One can imagine sitting within the immediate quietness of the desert, touching or walking across the textures of the <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/new-choreographies-with-in-the-land/" target="_blank">rocks</a> and simultaneously recalling memories of that same land. The violence embedded in Mexico’s <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/the-border-as-sacred-entity-in-the-work-of-celia-alvarez-munoz/" target="_blank">oil</a> economy, particularly its entanglement with corruption, environmental destruction, and the exploitation of Indigenous land and labor. Each vessel contained minute <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/sacred-migrations-gestating-the-border/" target="_blank">border</a> wall fragments. The future is being kneaded now by those who refuse to disband, to forget, to cease to commune with the environment—like the clay and water the <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/against-ruination-building-sacred-futurities/" target="_blank">adobe</a> is made of—and with each other.

TO CONVENE IS TO FOLD DIFFERENCE INTO RELATION. The history of humanity is filled with stories of people who <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/sacred-migrations-gestating-the-border/" target="_blank">left their homes</a> in search of a better possibility, more resources, and a different life for future generations, ironically starting with the very foundation of this country. What does building mean when a fixed structure is both <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/against-ruination-building-sacred-futurities/" target="_blank">encountered</a> and countered through human movements over time—through friction, traction, and contact? Migrants who “cruzaron el río” embody this permanent state of ‘in-between’: <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/the-border-as-sacred-entity-in-the-work-of-celia-alvarez-munoz/" target="_blank">crossing</a> into survival while entering into systems of exploitation. It may be then that the sacred exists in acts of extending ourselves within the <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/new-choreographies-with-in-the-land/" target="_blank">web of life</a>. Then flow with me. <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/songs-of-steel-and-current/" target="_blank">Let us carry</a> memory forward. Together we may insist: the sacred is not permanence but movement.

TOUCH IS WHERE MOVEMENT BECOMES RESISTANCE. A space for knowledge exchange that stretches across time, constituting a vital act of <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/new-choreographies-with-in-the-land/" target="_blank">transfer</a> between the living forms with which one comes into contact. Deep listening is <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/songs-of-steel-and-current/" target="_blank">co-laboring</a> with earth-beings. I am welded not as metaphor but as method: to remind humans that other beings also speak. Borderlands as a shared yet contested space, emphasizing that the histories carried by the river belong to those who live with it, <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/the-border-as-sacred-entity-in-the-work-of-celia-alvarez-munoz/" target="_blank">cross it</a>, and depend on it. Through <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/against-ruination-building-sacred-futurities/" target="_blank">friction</a> and great physical effort and vulnerability, his choice to crawl and not dance evoked a reclaiming of power and relationality with the elements. To <a href="https://uslaf.org/essay/sacred-migrations-gestating-the-border/" target="_blank">remove</a> that which no longer serves the body and soul, to emerge whole on the other side.