Welcome to the Disruption. Issue No.1
Welcome to the Disruption
This is Issue No.1
We the editors are thrilled to welcome you to this inaugural issue of CHARGE Magazine. If you’ve read our Mission Statement, you know that CHARGE is more than a journal. It’s more than an art magazine, or an academic tome, or a lit rag. CHARGE is, at it’s core a space that invites transformational experience. Which is not to say that we somehow have cornered the market on transformation. Not in the least. Meaningful experience is available to us all the time, everywhere we are. The world is wild to interact with us. But it is easy to miss these points of interaction in our daily lives, in places we deem ordinary, or that we relegate to a specific purpose or function. With each issue of CHARGE we hope to be able to ask you to slow down. To look more deeply, to engage more fully and with more awareness.. and then just see what happens.
We’d love for you to think about this issue as though it were a gallery. Walk through the rooms. Allow yourself to spend time, to engage with what you find. Allow yourself to be surprised. To open to the interaction that might wish to occur.
As we began to put together this issue, a definite theme emerged that we’d love for you to think about as you wander through the art, music, stories, essays, and poems in this issue. The idea that again and again pressed itself to the forefront of each piece was that of Disruption. Which seemed fitting, and sort of meta-poetic, as the idea for CHARGE, this very endeavor, came to us (fully formed, battle-ready, a true Athena) as a Disruption. Transformation is disruptive. It involves change and as often as not the breaking down of something pre-existing for the sake of something urgent and emergent. Like Bjork reminds us, the act of emerging often puts us in a state of emergency.
This is The Disruption. Jake Bugg calls it a Lightning Bolt. For Emily Dickinson it is a Splinter. In religious terms, it can be an ecstatic experience. In the tarot, it’s a Tower, falling. Whatever the metaphor, we can try to run from it, we can turn to embrace it, we can chase it down, and sometimes, we ourselves must become the Disruption.
In this issue you will find stories about accidents, magic mirrors, shape-shifting fathers, and women who have had ENOUGH. You will find histories of layered disruption, and will be asked to consider what those mean. You will find open conversation, art that disrupts itself, poetry that pushes, and ecstatic flash imaginings.
Pull up the playlist, pick a room, and start exploring. You’ll notice at the bottom of most pages there is a section titled “Inquiry,” and that most pages are open for comments. We are delighted to encourage you to consider the lines of inquiry that each piece offers, and, if so moved, to share your thoughts, ideas, questions, and possibilities with us and with each other. Let’s disrupt the ways in which we usually interact - with the world and with one another. Let’s open ourselves to the possibilities and transformations that might occur.
Welcome to your Lightning Bolt. This is The Disruption.