Category: threshold

have mercy.

On By ©️K.T. 2025In agraria, barn swallows, birds, Death, dirt road chronicles, dying, Earthling, fauna, Free Palestine, Funerary, funerary portraiture, Gaza, Genocide, holocaust, july, kill lists, kin, Life and Death, maternity, mortality, Mother, Mother God, Motherhood, ornithology, outer rural, Palestine, ruralia, threshold, wildlife, ZionismLeave a comment

in mid-July, the summer-resident barn swallows who had successfully raised and launched four fledglings by June 23rd, 2025, attempted to raise a second brood;

while i am not absolutely sure if it was the same set of parents or another in the barn swallow community that utilized the nest — as there is a collective of more than a dozen swallows that visits and assists in feeding sometimes too — it is most likely they are the same parent pair;

this is the second summer the barn swallows have nested here in my barn — using last year’s well-constructed nest which they attached to one of the joists like a balcony cantilevered on a Chicago highrise;

i began leaving the overhead barn door open when i first noticed them circling and investigating the barn a few years back; and i was thrilled last year when they began construction of their nest — they were so very welcomed and wanted here — i now know to leave the barn door raised from mid May through July to give them access.

the first brood of four swallows,
not quite fledged, but stretching their wings in the safety of the barn, June 2025
Continue reading “have mercy.” →

absurdity fathomed, sunday morning

On By ©️K.T. 2025In anti-zionism, Death, Gaza, Genocide, holocaust, Home, kill lists, Lamentations, Life and Death, liminality, Palestine, Proof of Life, Rafah, Sun, Sunrise, threshold, Zionism, Zone of InterestLeave a comment

the absurdity of the beauty of this dawn moment,

the absurdity

of the normalization of any moment or day, in life,

of the uninhibited and unselfconscious public documentation of both the ordinary and the excesses of life

simultaneous to

the People of Gaza documenting

Israeli Zionists

confining, starving, shooting, bombing, maiming, killing

and

incinerating
children,


in Palestine.

Continue reading “absurdity fathomed, sunday morning” →

a breakneck, yet-always foregone conclusion

On By ©️K.T. 2025In america, Autocracy, Capitalism, Essay, Fascism, inequality, lies, nationalism, neo-liberalism, neoliberalism, patriotism, threshold, U.S. Politics, U.S. PresidentLeave a comment

The rapidity with which this Trump administration moves — for those who had accepted incremental change, bureaucratic molasses and the long arc of justice as just par-for-the-course of the ‘democratic’ process and social progression in the US — those falsehoods and everything else that has been revealed in these last two months — is both mockery and insult added to our collective American (and global) actual injuries.

Capitalism and Neoliberalism paved the road for — and then engineered and constructed the super highway to, oligarchal fascism.

Continue reading “a breakneck, yet-always foregone conclusion” →

The time is NOW for applied anti-fascist actions of resistance and desistance and acts of courage —firstly, by elected and sworn state and local leadership

On By ©️K.T. 2025In america, American Indian Movement, anti-fascism, anti-zionism, antifa, Authoritarian, Autocracy, balkanization, Capitalism, Chicago, City of Chicago, Climate Chaos, Climate Collapse, Crone, Crone Consciousness, Earth, Earth hospice, Earthling, earthlings, ecocide, economics, empire, Essay, Fascism, Gaza, Genocide, kill lists, National Guard, nationalism, Nazism, neo-liberalism, Nuclear Weapons, Palestine, planetary hospice, Poem, poetry, Regime, Resistance, Revolution, State of Illinois, State of the Union, Tax Resistance, Tax Resistor, threshold, U.S. Federal Government, U.S. Politics, U.S. President, United States of America, WarLeave a comment

political & ideological opposition is meaningless now

Billionaire JB Pritzker, the current Governor of the State of Illinois in an annual constitutionally mandated “State Of The State” address of February 19, 2025, questioned the near and long-term State of the Union — of the United States of America,

the relevant paragraphs are excerpted below with a link to the full transcript:

Continue reading “The time is NOW for applied anti-fascist actions of resistance and desistance and acts of courage —firstly, by elected and sworn state and local leadership” →

how doing became forgetting

On By ©️K.T. 2025In abrupt climate change, anthropocene, Capitalism, Climate Chaos, Climate Collapse, Earth, Earth hospice, Earthling, ecocide, Fascism, Genocide, january, Manifest Destiny, mourning, nationalism, Near Term Human Extinction, planetary hospice, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Sixth Mass Extinction, Sunrise, threshold, WarLeave a comment

Winter Sky Sunrises and endless Horizon, Mountains, Forests, Prairies and Waters were traded for cities, skyscrapers and highways, built and named by corporations, governments and militias to populate with executives, politicians, engineers, administrators, marketers, managers, soldiers and subordinates — the wealth of the corporate-nation city-state dependent on the slow, then fast, destruction of all the Land and Waters and Beings on Earth

the Earth, on which i stood to take this photo this very Morning — and, the Atmosphere, which made the Trees, the Snow, the Clouds, and the Sky colors possible at all, this very Morning.

steel towers, stone temples, asphalt streams, and concrete rivers built to ensure that our feet rarely touch the Earth, that our eyes rarely witness Living and Being;

that we look up or that we look down, but, that we barely look around, that we rarely look within and that we that we never look beyond — so that we forget to remember.

the cities were designed and engineered for doing — which is the opposite of Being;

doing, which is a euphemism for undoing;

undoing, which is actually destruction — and which is ultimately,

a forgetting.

Forgetting to remember where we came from.

Forgetting to remember what we are made of.

Forgetting to remember what we were made for.

Morning of january 22, 2025

Our Elders say that ceremony is the way we can remember to remember. In the dance of the giveaway, remember that the Earth is a gift that we must pass on, just as it came to us. When we forget, the dances we’ll need will be for mourning. For the passing of Polar Bears, the Silence of Cranes, for the Death of Rivers and the Memory of Snow.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

from her Northland College 2015 commencement address
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Our Sacred Heart of Courage & Justice, Santa Luigi : for domestic & international use.

On By ©️K.T. 2025In 228 slaps, anti-capitalism, art is resistance, Capitalism, december, fuck the rich, inequality, kill lists, Luigi Mangione, neo-liberalism, neoliberalism, Revolution, Revolutionaries, Righoughts, Saint Luigi, Santa Luigi, thresholdLeave a comment
Continue reading “Our Sacred Heart of Courage & Justice, Santa Luigi : for domestic & international use.” →

waiting for the bough to break

On By ©️K.T. 2025In author, autobiographical, crone chronicles, death and other endings, december, dirt road chronicles, earthlings, endings, Essay, flora, Gaza, Genocide, grief, kin, Life and Death, liminality, mortality, Palestine, plant beings, Reverence, threshold, time, Tree, Trees, writerLeave a comment

i am waiting for the bough to break — or, to be severed by proxy at my behest.

earlier this week on my daily walk-about, i noticed that a primary limb, the major artery, on a nearly 80’ tall and likely nearing 100 years-old, elm tree on the land i occupy, had cleaved and that the fracture was migrating down into the trunk — and dangerously so.

i don’t know the cause: if it was the abrupt shift in temperature to freezing here in southwest Michigan — or, if the tree was stressed from a standing-water-wet spring followed by a very dry summer, or if “it” is simply at the end of their life — all the elms here had unusually held onto an abundance of their prolific leaves until the fourth week of November.

no matter.

the matters:

the massive limb of the elm stretches high and precariously over the old barn, and depending on the wind direction, there’s a chance if it falls, it could clip the back of my house or take the whole tree down with it.

i await the tree surgery & removal crew. i am at their and the northerly and westerly gusts’ mercy.

in the meantime, i have also been wrestling with the possible choice of whether to have the crew amputate just the cleaved limbs — if the tree is in fact salvageable — or, to remove the entire tree at once instead of forestalling the inevitable.

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slouching toward bethlehem

On By ©️K.T. 2025In Crone, Crone Consciousness, Didion, Joan Didion, Life, Life and Death, liminal, liminality, Poem, poet, poetry, Samsara, threshold, time, YeatsLeave a comment

i resist stirring, opening my eyes, or thinking

as the dog wakes, and waits

i am in the center of another dawn-dream,
on the precipice of
experiencing some thing, of understanding some thing

but it cannot hold,

evaporating
with every
slouch toward consciousness

i open my eyes to
the grey of the room, to the dark white gyre of the sky through these generous windows
i open my ears
to the beat
of crystals pummeling these generous windows,
once and again, realizing
i possess slow thighs,
heavy lungs, a heavier heart,
an entire weighted mass,
and a mind — less than half-known / half-known

i want to re-bury myself in the warm sands of sleep, the enveloping weightless numb
and drift back to
the liminal/

this must be the
feeling
of the fully-gestated
unborn fetus, warm,
quiet, still
waiting to be born
yet resisting being known, moving on

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asters, monarchs & crone

On By ©️K.T. 2025In autumn, Crone, Death, fauna, flora, Life and Death, limineen, october, Poem, threshold, timeLeave a comment

i offer purple bouquets

rooted in the ground,
not dying, wasted, in vase or pot

this purple
reflected in your eyes, my eyes

monarchs married in our october gaze

we’re not long for this world, we, monarchs, asters, and crone

still, we feast, without any gluttony, waste or fear

one of us, prepares for honeymoon flight to Mexico

where marigolds and death await

later, birds with bellies filled by aster, will seed a known, unknown future

crone’s eyes full and clear, she sees it all, near and far, past, present, future, winter and spring

she is rooted too, laughing and grieving in the threshold

between death and the future, future and the death

between remnant wild and final ravagement

between time and anti-time

thousands of purple petals cascade from her crown chakra like asters //

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a reader’s digest *almost-worthy* story

On By ©️K.T. 2025In author, biographical, childhood, crone chronicles, Cronehood, Essay, exposition, Life and Death, mortality, Prose, Survival, threshold, writer, WritingLeave a comment

as i sit here on my deck on a beautiful, late August, Sunday morning in rural southwest Michigan reading an article about surviving a bear attack at Signal Mountain in Yellowstone in May 2024,

i am reminded that

one of my very favorite things as a kid was to visit my great grandmother and to sit in her rocking and folding lawn chair, all by myself on the tiny porch — of her modest, peach-colored stucco bungalow at 2229 West Oakdale Avenue in Chicago — because we didn’t have a porch, only a stoop at CHA’s Julia C. Lathrop Homes where i lived as a child (privacy, peace and quiet were rare there) and comb through her Reader’s Digest magazine collection for stories of wilderness experiences and encounters with wildlife — especially the ones with predators: sometimes, not everyone survived in those excerpted stories /

but the intense desire to experience the outdoors that those stories inspired in me was almost entirely extinguished when i went, *with zero experience* on a three day/two night camping-canoe trip along the Fox River for our 8th grade class graduation trip; me and another 13 year-old female classmate were paired together in a canoe in a group of 5-6 canoes / i went [un]prepared with a borrowed, indoor Barbie slumber party sleeping bag from one friend and my best friend Jill’s dad’s old army reservist mess kit — everything stuffed into a single, tripled black garbage bag to keep my “gear” dry in case we tipped and went into the water/ Jill couldn’t go herself because that winter she was suddenly stricken with Raynaud’s Syndrome and was quite sick from another, yet-undiagnosed autoimmune disease /

my classmates and i slept outside on the ground without a tent and woke covered dew and very cold both mornings (while the adults occupied two very dry and warm pup tents) // we peed (and presumably, some of us also pooped) into holes dug in the ground within earshot of our 13 & 14 year old [boy] classmates and male teachers // the only other girl on the trip got her period the first night and had to use a sock as a menstrual pad because none of the male teachers thought to come prepared in event for that routine bodily function — and apparently, none of our mothers suggested this to us or to them — or planned for it either //

around the campfire the first night, which was a Friday, our teachers told us in a very serious manner that the camp in the film Friday the 13th — “Camp Crystal Lake” — was actually based on a true story at nearby youth camp— we had, in fact, passed a road sign for “Crystal Lake” en route; while, i had not yet seen the film — but the others filled me in in great detail — and it no longer felt good or safe to be on the trip with them — even after the teachers’ retractions and promises that they were “just joking”.

Continue reading “a reader’s digest *almost-worthy* story” →

sonlight [june 2014]

On By ©️K.T. 2025In biographical, childhood, june, Motherhood, relationships, son, Sonlight, threshold, timeLeave a comment

you drove away, West,

from Chicago, annoyed, yet exhilarated
while i was full of held tears,
a mother, trying to mother a boy,
on his bold edge of two decades of life

2014 was a rough
half year to June

we lost our first person to fetanyl
but he would not be [y]our last

i witnessed your grandmother’s January bitter coldness for the second time
and i still have a lasting bone chill from it

by the time you drive across the Mississippi River,
you have forgiven me
but i, you — even before you drove out of our alley,
we keep forgiving one another, me and you.

a couple of weeks later,

i am with our first, sweet dog in our Sun-filled back yard, as he is given a gentle, good death / we have shared so many firsts, but this,

i/we do without you; 17 years — ours, for sixteen — this loyal and strong dog that you chose on Mother’s Day weekend on LaSalle Street

how can it ever be a home again without you, without him

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The Neutral, The Liberal and The White Moderate: lifestyle preservation by any means necessary

On By ©️K.T. 2025In anthropocene, anti-fascism, anti-zionism, Capitalism, Climate Collapse, Colonization, ecocide, economics, Free Palestine, Gaza, Genocide, Liberation, nationalism, Nazism, Palestine, patriotism, Politics, Resistance, Revolution, Sixth Mass Extinction, threshold, Xenophobia, ZionismLeave a comment

“Do not associate with the neutrals, because they will betray you someday, because they are too cowardly [and comfortable] to take a stand.”

they will betray

with their

portfolio and corporate profit-taking,

dependence on and loyalty to government, organizations, institutions and electoral politics,

cultural appropriation, displacement, dispossession, exploitation, and gentrification of the historically and contemporaneously oppressed

greenhouse gas & carbon footprint privilege and exceptionalism,

ecocide by appetite, consumerism, and growth/development — physical, geographical and technological,

ultimate loyalty to the State and its forces for maintenance and protection — of their own wealth and property, and of private and corporate property, and of The System at the expense of People’s liberation and abolition movements

and finally,

by their neutrality to

particular

fascism and genocide.

Continue reading “The Neutral, The Liberal and The White Moderate: lifestyle preservation by any means necessary” →

Destroyers of World

On By ©️K.T. 2025In abrupt climate change, anthropocene, Climate Chaos, Climate Collapse, Death, Earth hospice, Earthling, earthlings, ecocide, film, Near Term Human Extinction, Nuclear Weapons, Palestine, planetary hospice, runaway greenhouse effect, Sixth Mass Extinction, thresholdLeave a comment

last evening, i finally finished watching the film “Oppenheimer” — a biographical film centered primarily on two forces of physics:

J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb

in the film, the cohort of physicists involved in the development of the atomic bomb postulated that the force and heat of the nuclear explosion could trigger a runaway atomic chain reaction by igniting atmospheric nitrogen —- thus, engulfing and destroying the entire planet — their confident mathematical conclusion: “near zero” — but not absolutely zero;

that infinitesimal quantum potential was apparently played to over-dramatic effect for the film — curious about the validity of this apocalyptic concern, i learned that this was never more than a scenario that required elimination in early mathematical and scientific due diligence;

still, the possibility instantly struck me as a parallel for the runaway greenhouse effect — where the greenhouse gas concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere trigger feedback loops that indeed ignite and fuel further feedback loops — causing abrupt climate change, planetary inhabitability and then mass extinction — where no adaptation, mitigation or survival is possible and plants, animals and humans die en masse —

conditions of which, we are on the cusp right now — an anthropogenic-caused-and-accelerated global temperature event horizon that is postulated as a very real probability by climate scientists and evolutionary/conservation biologists across the globe even as it’s played out as something that could occur over the next centuries or millennia rather than in this or the next decade or two —

yet, that more-than-zero-possibility scenario was detailed in a January 2024 article in Popular Mechanics based on a published model in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics

i write today to pay my belated respects and sympathies and to process my retroactive and present grief and rage:

Continue reading “Destroyers of World” →