The Commons of Life, Love and Loss – the psyCommoner
November 23, 2017 § Leave a comment
The Commons are not only resources. They are about the ways in which we live, survive, love and interrelate within our material and social worlds. They are infused with life, love and attachment; pain, loss and resentment.
Too often we are displaced, defined and alienated by the powerful enclosures and pathologies of the market and its state partner. Our real needs and experiences captured and reshaped by powerful cultural narratives of the ‘natural’ social order of things; by the relentless dictates of homoeconomicus, free markets and state bureaucratic systems. Blinded to the deeper connections between us, we are defined in ways we haven’t consented to or don’t understand. Too often our fundamental needs are left unmet and we are left with a lingering dissonance and fractured social world; a sense of distress and the unexplained and unresolved.
More than resources and production, the challenge of enclosure weighs heavy on our mind, body and spirit; where the commons of love, caring, intuition and the possibilities inherent to our social worlds come up against structural limitations.
Below is a passage of experience from the psyCommoner that depicts some of our often turbulent and confused responses as we try to make sense of experience; often in search of rebalancing, renewal and a more inter/subjective rationality:
The One Stop I carry our silent final terms past the one stop on my way to bed each night then dream of Sea Pinks in June over St Ives with peacocks in my wake, with headland chapel overlooking the Celtic sea and commemorative benches dedicated to those who loved the sea views; were reclaimed by the ocean spray and were loved and missed dearly by their family=========>>>>
Come morning I’ll reach with bleary eye for two cups then remember with a wrench of the heart this morning I’ll only need one and ponder what science is this that separates time from place and ends all my many beginnings – I’m homeless, rationalized and alienated. The riches; the slums of abject failure. But regardless I carry on with this stuff inside towards the end of your street, Winchester Avenue surrounds me like enclosure as if to prohibit my going back then lights dim, scenes fade and hope is still-born to the memory – and what business here now?
With wrought Iron neck and leadweight limbs I ache to prove those days meaningless through the ever changing oil paintings and charmed landscapes of my mind’s eye – so onwards to autumn and renewal in the dying of the year: Things that I remember today – by day, waterfall and mossy boulders, over beck grassy bridge with clear water pools swollen by the rainfall, overtures, a crescendo of sound, we conduct an orchestra of awakening now new born in this amphitheatre in the mountains.
By night, secluded beneath the trees and awoken by early birdsong tucked up behind modern fort – yellowed plates hang from the walls and comedic candlesticks lilt sarcastically from one another, hope emerges in crevices, musty carpets and crushed flowers found within book pages; in contradictions; three once-were armchairs face one another in silent communion, onwards to Autumn, the dimly lit industrial streetlamp struggles against darkening skies in ignorance to its’ grave warnings — stave off my early winter warning dreams with colourful crimson leaves in turmoil before leaving muddy incisions on the margins, soon to be frozen; leaves pile high against either side of the curb, red wine, reduced to clear, warmth, now I forget and thaw but I’ll wake within my fear again.
psyCommons 
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