TIME DOES NOT EQUAL PRODUCTIVITY.

In the underworld, time pools and buckles in interesting ways. Fairy folk drag you under a hill for fifty years/a blink of your eye. Cave systems take millennia to carve out, slowly formed from subterranean rivers and the settling of stones. Growing seasons rely on repetitions, on ebbs and flows.

In contrast, our own human time structures remain rigid. We set our time-pieces* to align with each others’. We clock in from 9-5. We try to match our output to an exact amount of hours put in, and when we create, I guarantee none of us are able to match the pace the world wants to set for us.

We cannot undo the insidious creep of grind culture quickly. To attempt to set a time for unlearning is a continuation of the problem. However, we CAN learn the shape of rampant productivity. We can recognize the first faint frostbite of burning out. We can choose, even for just five minutes, to sit with our eyes closed and do nothing. Let the underworld visit you.

 *WHAT A FANTASTIC WORD TO THINK ON!!!

SPACE DOES NOT EQUAL HIERARCHY.

In talking about the underworld, we are necessarily talking about hierarchies. While our examinations so far have focused on what is physically below us, we also need to talk about that energy and how it shows itself in our social structures.

We live in a capitalist/consumerist system: some people end up with A LOT of one thing (money, social status, land, stocks, etc) and some people end up with very little. There is a direct connection between those who have too much and those who don’t have enough — namely, because of the “too much”ness, there is “not enough”ness. This leads to a hierarchy: those with too much are on the top, with more power and stability and freedom than those on the bottom.

We see this replicate itself in our genders and our racializations and our sexual identities and our bodies and much more. Sometimes we get comfortable within these systems (especially if we’re near the top of them) because we’re familiar with them. Everything from our work to our money to our sense of place is design to exist on a hierarchy. Unfortunately, that does a great disservice to the vast majority of people.

So, when we talk about below, we need to understand that most humans have been conditioned forever to see above as BETTER. “She’s so hiiiIIIIIiiigh above me” comes on the radio and we all know what that means. Rich people are “high society,” at least in ever Jane Austen novel I’ve ever read. Snobs have their “noses in the air.” We go to movies and see the famous “stars.”

The thing to remember though, is that our sense of space is always relative. The underworld, with its infinite interconnection, shouts out that there is always “belower” below. You think you’ve reached the bottom and then there’s another layer. Below is not a static thing! It is always changeable, in direct relationship with WHERE YOU WERE.

Hierarchy is a shitty social structure, and we need to reconcile our ideas of the subterranean/unseen/buried/planted with many folks’ experience of being the bottom rung on a ladder of supremacy.

In order to fully give into the webs and cycles and spirals and scatters of the Underworld, we must dismantle these systems in our lives and in our art.