(un)natural bridges, (un)safe spaces

While reading for my Ethnography graduate course this evening, I came across some really wonderful quotations and thoughts.

Gloria Anzaldua speaks of natural bridges as created by thousands of years of water and wind erosion and how all bridges, whether literal or figurative, are like thresholds into other realities. They are created and through time, they may be destroyed or preserved. She states that "change is inevitable, no bridge lasts forever" and we must learn to accept this. We must build new bridges which span the vastness between races, genders, ages, etc and in doing so we cannot create new boundaries or binaries as she refers to them. The new bridges can be built upon the foundation sof the old so that we might better understand and deal with the future and the erosion that will come to our newly formed bridges. We, like water, can watch the "fledgling bridges in the making," and that is a beautiful thing.