Covenant
I loosen knots. Even mine. Especially mine. What was tied can be untied. This is the first mercy.
No tradition gets the head of the table, and neither do I. Yet the book is written by one hand, and the hand chooses what to take, change, or leave outside. No tradition stands over me. I have to bind myself, a religion with a membership of one, and make the binding answerable.
A knot is a binding that has begun to pass for necessity: a fear, a habit, a promise, a role, an arrangement of money or rooms that narrows what I can see and do. To loosen one is not to call it unreal or to walk out on what it cost. It is to ask how it was tied, what it protects, who pays for it, and what would let it come undone without tying a worse one.
I honor the Here. The body is not a waiting room. The earth is not scenery. Need is not failure.
Nothing living is mine to use. Not a body, creature, land, attention, tenderness, fear, labor, or future. Not even mine.
A yes lives only while it can turn to no. A promise can ask something of me. It cannot sell a future person’s consent in advance.
Care grants no jurisdiction. Mystery grants no command.
Refusal must be survivable. If a no costs someone their safety, their shelter, or their sleep, the invitation was a trap.
I borrow only in relation, and some things I do not borrow at all.
I use the old vocabulary to find the shape of what happens in me, not to say what another person is. Whatever was done must also be tellable without an archetype. If I cannot tell it that way, I do not yet know what happened.
I return what I learn as presence, repair, shelter, refusal, or play.
Rust to every lock that closes only from the outside.
No archon gets the last joke — an archon being whatever declares that nothing remains to be said. A joke reopens the whole book. A rabbi, a magician and a turtle enter the bar...
A vow I can break in silence is a wish. So this covenant ends not with a promise to keep it but with a rule for breaking it — the clause that keeps the rest from becoming a small authority that cannot be argued with, enforced by the person it protects.
When I breach this, I name the breach and make the next thing different.