#46 The year of the Dragon
Your home is yours.
2024 is the year of the Dragon. I recently read Alice Sparkly Kat's 2024 overview discussing the year of the Dragon in Chinese cosmology. Here, dragons represent rivers. Rivers are places that birth societies - they are where freshwater ground lies, where the first towns and cities were born, where language, culture, art, and ways of living first began. Dragon symbolism didn't begin as a way to govern or control - it began as a life-giving force, a structure that flows and shapes everything in its path. It wasn't until much later that dragons became symbols of control, dynasty, and power. Alice's column reminded me that we have dragons everywhere in the world; for dragons are rivers, running through entire continents, feeding and growing people who would later bleed into our origins, building us from one society to the next. We all come from a river, and so we all come from a dragon. Dragons don't seek to control or dominate or overcome. They flow. They shape. They run.
I've been thinking a lot about the river that cuts through the Amazon. The Amazon River [Spanish: Río Amazonas, Portuguese: Rio Amazonas] in South America is the largest river by discharge volume of water in the world, and the longest river system in the world though this has been disputed by those who claim it is the Nile. (for my sake, I'll say it isn't the Nile).
The Amazon River feeds into rivers that bring water to many towns in Brazil, spanning 6,400 kilometers across the continent. The river brought freshwater and fertile soil. It is the home that made the Amazon possible. It supports life in the very literal sense. The Amazon basin, the largest in the world, covers about 40% of South America, an area of approximately 7,050,000 km2. It drains from west to east, spanning Peru to Brazil, and into the Atlantic. Can you imagine, originating from such immensity? It is everywhere in the soil, it made its way into societies, it was the water that nourished what is now known as over a third of all known species in the world. There is nothing like it. In this way, it is the biggest home I know.
Going home is not only an emotional journey but a political one. There is an ongoing genocide; the home they once knew is now shattered, buried under miles and miles of dust and concrete, unrecognizable. The ongoing wars all over the world are demolishing cities, disrupting entire ecosystems, separating families from their physical origins or obliterating entire bloodlines. Going home is political because there are powers that, given the opportunity, would rob you of it. Going home is political because there is nothing more tangible or powerful that can be destroyed or depleted. Going home is political because many of us do not have a home to come back to. We must make of what we have and decide to build anew.
Like Alice writes, dragons don't govern, and they cannot be governed either. In many places, to go home is an act of defiance. It is also an act of survival. To go home is to go where the river feeds the land and to feel the freshwater and to swim in the sea, to feel the salt of the water in your lips, to be delivered from the mainland and into the great unknown. Many of us cannot go home. Home can be weaponized and it can be a way to divide people. Home can be given a division of us versus them and it can be a method of control, a way to force people into submission. But dragons are not things to control or govern. Homes are not meant to be administrated like political weapons. At the end of it, by the end of it, home is as intangible as it is physical; culture, food, language, music, clothing; all of these artifacts are ungovernable. They cannot be taken, they cannot be ruled over, they cannot be demolished like a building or hidden beneath piles of rubble.
These days I think about going home as a way to remember where I come from. I taste home in the corn flour I cook over a cast iron pan, blackened from oil that burned through for months. I see home in the bright yellow leaves, millions of them falling on the street below. I listen to home in audio messages and folkloric songs. I feel home when I remember the blaring noon Sun.
Going home is a physical as much as an emotional act. Home cannot be governed. Home cannot be taken from you despite what the bombs and the buildings, falling on their knees, will show you. Home cannot be seized or manipulated. Your home is yours. Your home will outlast any empire that tries to control it.