Sparks

Integrity is the art of navigating those moments in which no pre-scripted rules apply. To meet complexity, to make new sense of it, requires willingness to go forward without someone else’s instructions. It means not justifying continued destruction or limiting what is possible by pointing to history, or worse “human nature”, whatever that is.

Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte calls this kinship time, a way of experiencing time in relation to other living things.

“What tense would you choose to live in?” the poet Osip Mandelstam once asked his journal, before answering his own question. “I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle—in the ‘what ought to be.’”

Time lives in the body, not as the tick of the clock, but as a pulse in the blood. It is a thought, buried deep in nerve, leaf, and gene.