It was not so long ago that like a rapid-fire domino effect, borders closed around the world. All of a sudden our presumed geographical interconnectedness, which saw plane travel routes create satellite maps of flight paths carrying scores of people, was reduced to freight.
As someone who has spent significant time outside of Australia, including a fair amount of time in northern India, I am now more than ever re-thinking borders and my relationship to them. The word seema in Hindi means border or limit. I learnt this as I often ask the meaning of someone’s name when I meet them. It is a way to start a perhaps unlikely conversation and learn language simultaneously; a way of challenging personal borders.
I think of the millions of migrant workers stuck near the borders of the Delhi National Capital Region and neighbouring states, and how these border closures globally have highlighted so much precarity, including that of migrant workers in India. Then there is the babies born through surrogacy who will not be united with their parents until restrictions lift, an industry that is built on poverty. I think to the free flow of information that I take for granted through the internet, and the digital inequality that has become more prevalent both in Australia and abroad.
In times of unprecedented uncertainty such as this, it helps to have some strategies in place to keep us anchored in what can feel like a wild storm. For me, one of those has been my own breath and paying attention to it. Another has been webinars with poet and philosopher David Whyte. His series in May was entitled ‘Just beyond yourself: the poetry of robust vulnerability’ which has got me thinking a lot about personal borders, the borders we create for ourselves, why we create them and the vulnerability in stepping beyond them. David ultimately talks about vulnerability as facilitating possibility.
Many of my recognised moments of great vulnerability have been very entwined with crossing physical borders, with meeting people who I otherwise wouldn’t and being challenged in ways I otherwise wouldn’t be. In the current scenario, with the collective grief that many of us are experiencing, in this time of great loss and change, I wonder what border crossing will look like going forward; what we it will continue to be and equally, what it will cease to be.
The hypervisibility of national borders reminds me too