So many cultural stories speak of stones as a kind of suffering – like a human gets turned into stone for their disobedience. But if you hang out with stones long enough, they feel like part of a long, animist song.

One of the inspirations for the Still Here | Three  concerts  is Sangamithra Iyer’s tender memoir, Governing Bodies: A Memoir, a Confluence, a Watershed.  She is a hydro and soils engineer by training, interested in possibilities.  Soil, water, family, revolutionary politics, and our animal industrial complexes are interweaving characters, oscillating between joy and harm. 

Stones are reliable witnesses to our rapid, short lives. They encircle water, standing in stark relief when water levels falter. They are remarkable, luminous in their own kind of star system.

Too few humans are polite enough to ask stones what they want. Would you want to end up in a pile around a parking lot,  or jammed in a burn-it-all-down building, away from all your friends?  

Once upon a time, when the data centers used so much water that the people died of thirst, stones held a conference. They encouraged all the leaves, birds and waters from the sky to swallow those data centers whole. Everyone had a good time, crashing, hopping and raining down from the heavens, pressing the remains down into the earth. Like one would a photo, in a yellowing family album of very badly dressed ideas. The End.