By Chris Clark for Enlivening Edge Magazine
The colonizers are debating as usual inside my head, arguing about what’s best for me. I’m headed up the trail, standing up over the handlebars, pedaling hard, slicing through summer haze as if I could outrun their chatter. Seven miles go by until I stop. I look out at the lake and catch my breath, pulling the scents of stone and water and earth inside me. Some wild part of me wakes. I stand and listen again to the argument inside my head, but with a new vantage point: Whose voices are these? Where did they come from?
They are the representatives of foreign powers.
I realize that they do not, in fact, have my best interests at heart. They are someone else’s thoughts, someone else’s ideas about what makes a good life. So today is a decolonization day. I decide to shoot a video. The voices tell me I have nothing to say. But then they have always relied on my silence and isolation in order to keep the peace.
And I’d be willing to bet, yours have too.
