Shifting through debris and ash remnants left
in the pit of the fire, an caithnín3 comes
to mind, a spark of light,
a speck of dust
a subatomic particle
a shard of broken glass
a grain of soil
a burnt branch
a drop of rain
a tuft of fur,
and I thought of why I may be so attracted to
these places in their lonely, chaotic,
contaminated, ever - changing states, because
these spaces speak to something other, often
ineffable and beyond. They act as thresholds
that position themselves between utopian
futures that have failed to come and dystopian
realities that we are already living in. The
portals they conjure offer alternative ways of
reimagining liveable futures. In our isolated
state, they remind us we are not solitary
individuals, we as individuals are material
things, each an ecosystem slowly returning to
the soil from which we came, disintegrating
into cosmic dust.