Throughout my life, I’ve participated in progressive movements for social change that look to reform laws governing civil society, to make social worlds more equitable and inclusive. After decades of focused commitment and struggle, we achieve some longed-for change, only to meet backlash, resistance, reversals, and the persistent use of law to enforce inequity and injustice. But there are other laws. The laws of physics, chemistry and biology are not optional. They are the pattern language of the universe. So here is my manifesto for the Real Revolution. I hope it lands with a giggle and a gasp.
The Real Revolution: Let it Exist
A revolution is rising. It is vibrating as molecules, empowered by chemistry, humming in cells, and armed as ecosystems.
This global realignment doesn’t require your money, armed engagement or exhausted activism. But it longs for your centered disengagement from old paradigms. Let joy rupture the spell of fear. Let grief extinguish the reign of indifference. Feel the inarguable rising! The revolution is fractal: ever-emerging in each irreducible singularity; and ever-converging in each love affair, throughout the universe.
Join the revolution by manifesting the Manifesto of your Molecules. Molecules of the world, unite! The quanta of us know how to focus waves of possibility into exquisite particularities, including me and you. So be the molecules of you. You already know what to do.
Study the Revolutionary Program of our Chemistries, until you feel as certain as the carbon and iron of you that “We will not be reduced.” The chemistry of us knows how to bond, break, long, ache, and still stay centered. Claim your personal nuclear power by noticing: you already do.
Proclaim the Declaration of Revolutionary Cells, whose constituents are all created equal. Cells do not prioritize their own safety and survival. They seek companionship, respect and connection: with one another, and with what is becoming. They know how to die for love when the time is right. We embody this.
Take up the Call to Arms of Ecosystems! Hold and be held. Know that we live by being and cherishing difference, as we merge and emerge with Earth’s axial tilt. Lean into the loving.
Join the Revolutionary Council of Delights by letting every submolecular particle of you come true as the singular, irreducible miracle of you. Let the Zero at your own centre of gravity be cherished by the Zero at the end and edge of you. Be the irreplaceable one of you, that has been forever dreamed of, wanted, loved and missed. Be the unworthy, unlovable incompleteness of you. Stop trying to hide, deny, project and justify it. Let it exist, and yet… be the imperfect, inarguable love that you are made of, and were born to be.
Tend the revolution with your witnessing: the monstrous, the liminal, the unassimilable. This revolution rises in the cracks, where control fails, and mystery rushes in. Revolutionaries are threshold-beings, emergent intelligences, quotidian kindnesses, ineffectual gestures, queer configurations of refusal and becoming. The revolution is resourced by kinky longings: violence, fear, the urge to dominate, the yearning to capitulate. Let it all exist—in the realm of mutual consent.
This revolution is rooted in ancestry that is universal, placental, evolutionary. We are an uprising of quarks, chemicals, sunrises and mitochondria. An uprising that smells like dirt, rust, sweat, blood, ozone. This revolution is not a human project. It’s a planetary one. Humans are not the leaders. We are participants in something far older and wiser than any human brain can know. And with every molecule, chemical, and cell of us, we already know it. With every ecosystem we are and inhabit, we already do it. Stop trying to find the way. Be the way.*
The spell is broken. Our molecules are miracles. Instead of trying to fix what’s wrong, embody what’s right. Let it exist.
Yes there is an economic program, a way to end all wars, and get tough on crime with this whole new paradigm. But the heart and soul and ever-loving proof of the real revolution is just this: let it exist.
And so it is. We rise!
(*“The Way Knows” by Lindsey Scott can be our anthem.)