READ MY NOTICE TO EXPRESS MYSELF
AS A FREE ADULT CITIZEN OF THE STATE OF TEXAS

I keep returning to a small saying that I first encountered watching Star Trek: Discovery S02E01. It has been passing from mouth to mouth in the ruins of our moment:

Not every cage is a prison, not every loss eternal.

I do not hear this as comfort. I hear it as a discipline for surviving with dignity under the Current Empire, that drifting formation of neoliberal control that no longer rules mainly by walls and chains, but by channels, networks, incentives, and subtle modulations of access.

We live inside enclosures, but they are no longer only heavy walls. They are bubbles of constraint moving through ever shifting circuits of control: platform rules that change without notice, metrics that decide whose voice counts today, precarity that pulses through employment, visibility that flickers on and off, bureaucratic gateways that open for some and quietly close for others. These bubbles drift. They surround us temporarily, then slide elsewhere, then return in new forms. I do not insult you by pretending otherwise. The Empire builds real constraints. It corrals attention, reroutes desire, nudges behavior through soft coercions and invisible thresholds. It trains us to shrink our hopes until they fit what can be tracked, optimized, or monetized.

But a prison is something more intimate than a bubble of constraint. A prison is what happens when these drifting enclosures are taken into the self as fate. A prison forms when the channels of control begin speaking with our own voice, when the logics of optimization and scarcity become the way we narrate our own worth and limits. The wandering visionary learns to tell these two apart. Not in theory, but in the body. You can feel when a constraint is passing through the networked environment and when it has begun to lodge itself in your breath, your posture, your sense of what you are allowed to want.

This is why I practice showing-up. Not heroic resistance, not fantasies of purity or exit, but the quieter courage of offering myself to what is actually appearing and then meeting what is revealed. Some days that means naming the bubble of constraint without romance. Other days it means refusing to let a temporary enclosure define the horizon of my becoming. The Current Empire wants us to mistake the shape of a passing constraint for the shape of reality itself. I refuse that misreading. Even inside narrow channels, there are moments of lateral movement, ways of turning toward one another, ways of keeping the horizon from collapsing into a dashboard of limits.

And then there is loss. Loss that arrives through the same channels: accounts frozen, bodies exhausted by precarity, communities thinned by algorithmic disappearance, futures quietly foreclosed by debt and administrative delay. Some losses cannot be reversed. Some pathways do not reopen. If I speak of loss not being eternal, I am not denying the wound. I am refusing the Empire’s second theft, which is to take our grief and convert it into a permanent orientation toward scarcity. The society of control thrives when loss is internalized as the natural order of things.

Loss wants to spread. It wants to flood every channel of sense-making until the future looks like an extension of the wound. It whispers that the only honest posture is to live as if the damage were the whole world. I have listened to that voice. I still listen. But I do not enthrone it. Meaning is not only disclosed by what has been taken from us. Meaning is also shaped in how we move afterward through the networks that remain, who we move with, and what forms of care we keep alive even when the system makes them costly.

This is where I practice transisting rather than merely resisting. Resistance alone can leave us trapped in the Empire’s feedback loops of pressure and counterpressure. Transisting is different. It is the art of moving with the currents of networked control without letting those currents decide who I am allowed to become. I do not pretend I can step outside the channels. I learn how to bend within them, how to create eddies of care, how to build small shelters of shared breath inside unstable flows.

So when I say not every cage is a prison, I am reminding myself that not every bubble of constraint is sovereign over my becoming. When I say not every loss eternal, I am reminding myself that grief can be true without being total. I am speaking to the part of us that has been trained to collapse its horizon in advance, to give up before the world has finished appearing.

Accomplices, friends, fellow wanderers moving through these controlled channels: I am not offering you an exit from the network. I am offering you a way of inhabiting it without surrendering your interpretive freedom. Describe your enclosures clearly. Mourn your losses without building a theology of despair. Then, together, practice the small arts of widening: attention that does not flinch, friendship that resists isolation, and love that remains possible even in systems designed to make it inefficient.

Wind Saying: On Cages, Currents, and Loss

Do not mistake the narrowness of a moment
for the measure of the world.

Not every cage is a prison,
some are only passing bubbles
in the restless channels of control.

A corridor can still turn
to another possibility.

A channel can still carry you sideways
toward another face, another fire.

Grief is real,
but it is not the horizon itself.

Loss wounds the path,
yet the path does not end at the wound.

Show-up to what encloses you.
Do not enthrone it as destiny.

Move with the current,
but keep your name from becoming its name.

Shelter one another in the flow,
widening the way where you can.

What passes through you
does not get to define you.