This blog is a combination of musings, culture, current events and hopes and dreams that are rooted in the idea that another world is possible. This world, which exists already in our bodies, minds and hearts, needs to be made manifest.

It is a world where the voice of the silenced are heard and consulted in the making of compassionate and helpful public policy. A world where education and culture are prized above designer clothes, drugs and babies. A world where health is is treasured– physically, psychologically and holistically–not marketed as a commodity only for the highest bidder.

A world where women, men and transgender persons are treated on the basis of their shared humanity and their common needs, not systemic patriarchal cosmologies that overdetermine all systems of socio-economic and political/legal expression.

A world where colonised peoples–indigenous, african, and asian racialized as non-white, despised for their non- judaeo-christian heritage– are recast as villains of the piece–needs to be transformed into a world where other ways of knowledge making and knowing need to inform the structures and systems by which we run our collective lives. A world where Islamophobia and Zionism are challenged and remade into visions of justice and peace.

It is a world where LGBTQ persons must determine and live their own sovereign lives, not dependent on approval for employment, housing and educational assistance, adoption, conception, citizenship and structuring of non-traditional families. It is world in which liberation and not the status quo, must be signalled.

It is a world where disabled persons ought to receive resources and supports concomitant with their needs, not their wallets. A world in which we should be able to achieve our dreams even with chronic illness and disablement. A world where international relations are signalled by peace, harmony and justice, not borders and militaristic praxes of nationhood.

Ear to the Ground welcomes you on the journey of exploring progressive and oppositional cultural work in a variety of genres and disciplines. It will also share the work of investigative and in-depth journalists writing about the literally, burning issues, of our times. I do not pretend to have the answers nor the solutions to issues of environmental degradation, workers’ exploitation, undermining of small famers and sustainable agriculture, privatisation of public services and utilities and other issues that underpin our current state of the world. But I believe that such solutions and measures exist– and that exposure, debate and discussion about these and many other concerns– can show us small victories on the path to some version of emancipatory humanism grounded in internationalism.

I will share my own musings, poetry and visual creations as a way of connecting the personal and political, the somatic and the ethereal, the sacred and the mundane, the banal and the awesome! I hope you will comment and provide your feedback and discussion to make this a relevant and lively space! In the words of Spain’s Antonio Machado, “caminante, no hay camino: se hace camino al andar”/ walker, there is no road, one makes the road by walking”. If you can’t walk, I invite you to crawl, fly and dream with me! Another world is possible with our ears to the ground.