Last week we gathered for a heated and healing session attending to the fire within us. Today as people around the US who have felt despair as their representatives ignored their pleas for peace prepare to vote in a primary election, we remember that our nature is not just choice, but transformation.

In our workshop we drew on the “Archive of Fire” in my book M Archive: After the End of the World especially the deep teachings of candle calisthenics, inspired by my beloved mentor M. Jacqui Alexander’s “Anatomy of a Mobilization” in her book Pedagogies of Crossing. We looked closely at the fire within us, what air sustains it, what purpose do we burn for, what messages can we hear when we attune ourselves to our light?

Every message was a message of substantive change. Below is our group poem. May it nourish the fire within you.

This Fire

By the participants in “The Character of Fire”: Writing After the End of the World

“The feel of fire is strong, not hot.”

-M. Jacqui Alexander in Pedagogies of Crossing

This fire is complete.

This fire is gold thread in every cell

This fire is sacred

This fire is liberating

This fire is organizing.

This fire is informative.

This fire is hot

This fire is young

This fire is everything

This fire is needed

This fire is nourishment

This fire is churning

This fire is beauty.

This fire is nascent.

This fire is Underground

This fire is all

This fire is earthquake

This fire is a begining

This fire is tender

This fire is going to keep burning

This fire is guidance

This fire is teacher

This fire is hungry.

This fire is next time

This fire is clearing

This fire is me

This fire is memory

This fire is changing

This fire is justified

This fire is healing

This fire is for us

This fire is renewal

This fire is beyond time…it is difficult to distinguish and impossible to extinguish

This fire is spring

This fire is starlight

This fire is thunder

This fire is joy

This fire is silly

This fire is an honor

This fire is forever

This fire is sprouting

This fire is growing

This fire is here

This fire is flow

This fire is intuitive

This fire is ancestral love

This fire is communing with ancestors and descendants

This fire is painful

This fire is beloved

This fire is the sun

This fire is enough

This fire is liquid

This fire is maddening.

This fire is intense

This fire is silence

This fire is blue

This fire is wet.

This fire is a portal

This fire is purple

This fire is surface and depth

This fire is golden

This fire is beloved

This fire is deep black

This fire is healing

This fire is us

This fire is a companion

This fire is steadfast

This fire is translucid

This fire is ancient

This fire is flower

This fire is green

This fire is now

This fire is a cat

This fire is crying.

This fire is flow

This fire is irridescent

This fire is cackling

This fire is waiting

This fire is laughing

This fire is obsidian

This fire is patient

This fire is also ocean.

If you want to support our work, engage the workshop through the replay and do the writing exercises we did at your own pace you can find the recording here: https://sangodare.podia.com/the-character-of-fire-writing-after-the-end-of-the-world

Despite everything and because of everything, this is a time of gratitude and prayer. Audre Lorde’s birth week also known as the high holy days of my Black feminist faith. Join me on Twitter (@alexispauline) where I am resharing last year’s residency on Audre Lorde, the Caribbean and the complexity of sisterhood and love. The transnational ethic Audre Lorde embodied is compelling me even more now.

Audre Lorde spoke out against politically imposed famine and the US’s participation in violent repression all over the world, including in Palestine and we must too. I love you. Always.

There will be cake at this beautiful event created by the Black Unicorn Library Project if you come in person! And my keynote lecture will be livestreamed. More info her: https://carnegieart.org/event/litany-for-survival-the-life-and-work-of-audre-lorde/.

I'm also honored to be a featured speaker at this 4 hour Audre Lorde Read-a-Thon birthday celebration in Atlanta at my favorite bookstore Charis Books & More! You can attend in person or register for the virtual read-a-thon here: https://tr.ee/KjEuJr2Y-0

And last, but actually chronologically first, over on Twitter as @alexispauline (or instagram same handle) I am reposting my Journal of West Indian Literature residency on Audre Lorde. Read some details of Audre Lorde's last book, her status as a Caribbean writer, sisterhood and diaspora that I haven't shared anywhere else! Day One is up right now!: https://twitter.com/alexispauline/status/1757355745161408914

Also, speaking of multi-generational presence, remember that the Repetition is Sacred: Practicing Seven Generations practice space is open.

Love,

Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Last night about 70 people gathered last night in the love ethic of June Jordan. We wrote about what we want and how big our wants are and how small are wants are and how it feels to have to demand over and over again the very basic dignity we want for everyone. We wrote about what we commit to and how we feel about commitment and how it feels to create our own forms of commitment when patriarchal capitalist commitment has been extracted from us in so many ways. We wrote about our emergent beliefs and the possibilities love is making us brave enough to recognize in ourselves and each other. And then we made this group poem about what we mean when we say we want peace.

Love and gratitude to everyone who participated last night. If you missed it and you want to write along with all the prompts, the recording is here: https://sangodare.podia.com/i-said-i-loved-you-and-i-wanted-genocide-to-stop-a-reflective-writing-workshop-on-revolutionary-love

I recommend reading this poem outloud or even better, TOGETHER.

we love you.  we want genocide to stop.

by the participants in “I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP”: June Jordan’s Revolutionary Love Ethic

we say good night and we want all of us to make it until tomorrow

we say good morning and we want you to be alive

we say good morning and we want everyone to eat

we say these are unprecedented times

and we want unprecedented love to meet it

we say intifada and we want land back

we say we want the genocide to end - and we mean it

we say we are radical and we want a revolution

we say NOW and we want CEASEFIRE

we say it’s time and we want it now

we say ceasefire now and we want it now, now!

we say ceasefire and we want you to know that’s the bare minimum

we say ceasefire and we want olive trees too big too wrap our arms around.

we say none of us are free if Palestine is not free and we want everyone be able to see.

we say now and we want sooner than now. 

we say now and we mean immediately.

we say now and we mean ALWAYS.

we say we all have a right to be here

& that means the mangroves and the coral and the parrot fish too.

we say we aren’t afraid to die and we want to live fully

we say we say we want to be free & we want you to be free too.

we say to love thy neighbor and we want that love for ourselves

we say we love each other and we want genocide to stop

we say amen and we want peace

we say peace and we want all of us to feel it

we say we want peace and we want space to grieve

we say pa’lante and we want love that sets us free

we say freedom and we want to create new ways of being

we say we want liberation and we want love

we say love, we want love’s liberation

we say we want freedom and we want to experience nothing but pure pleasure

we say “love us” and we want to be seen for all we are

we say friendship and we want the critters too

we say please & we want our power back

we say “power!” and we want our children to know love without fear

we say children are our future & we want them to have a future to be our future in

we say we love the water and we want it clean for everyone, for every living being

we say we love the water and we want it clean and free for every whale, every whale

we say love is here and we want bridges

we say the world is loving and we want a loving world

we say we are sure and we want to believe

we say we are already worthy and we want to believe it

we say we are enough and we want to believe it

we say there is enough for all of us, and we want all of us to have enough.

we say “enough” and we want every living being to be honored always and in all ways

we say Fannie Lou Hamer and we want to come back to our folks with EVERYTHING

we say all our relations and we want well fed human dignity

we say we believe in all of us, and we want our actions to show it.

we say another world is possible and we want to be believed

we say another world is possible and we want no wars, no nato, no borders, no america, no thirsty child dying hungry beneath the rubble

we say we know and we do!

we say WE KNOW WE ARE FREE and we want ALL to know it and act like it

WE SAY WE ARE ALREADY FREE AND WE WANT OUR WORLD TO LOOK LIKE IT

we say we believe that maybe, just maybe, our love is enough to make the world we all want and deserve, and who wants us

we say maybe and we want it sure.

we say we are falling through the cracks, and we want a different way.

we say we are lonely and we want the loneliness to have a door

we say a new world and we want safe space to dream it into reality.

we say LovE LOVE LOve and  we want Belonging

we say trans lives matter & we want you to live in your body like us

we say “hello, beautiful!” and we want everyone to feel hailed

we say dive deep and come up for air.

we say no and we want love

we say fuck off and we want help

we say nothing and we want, so often, so much more

we say nothing because our words are insufficient to capture all of the grief and rage

and we want freedom and love and peace NOW.

we say tricksters are present, and we want them to help.

WE SAY WE LOVE HARD AND WE WANT KILLERS STOP KILLING

WE SAY WE CAN LOVE OURSELVES AND YOU AND WE WANT YOU TO STOP HATING

we say love is bigger than easy and we are mapping and learning its edges

we say we feel the dark feminine’s return and we want Patriarchy to take it’s final breath NOW.

we say this hurts, and we want competent protection.

we say it’s been hurting for too long and we want justice.

we say we're tired and we want to be heard

we say we are tired and we want the freedom to rest

we say i am tired and we want to the world to make a bed

we say rest and we want soft hands and loving arms to cradle us.

we say we are scared and we want our fear to make us bigger not smaller.

we know that’s not how it works.

we want the workings to be inverted.

power subverted.

we say “here we are” and we want to provide alchemical healing

we say peace words and we want them to soften your heart

and expand your mind

and grow your heart

and tingle under your skin

we say we want the warmth and stillness of the ocean

to be a balm and a peace that washes over

spirits suffering the lies we tell ourselves

we say we need to be safe and we say we need to gather and we want both for all, at all times.

we say our bodies are sacred and we want intense love

we say t4t & we want bodies like flags to nations without borders

we say we need refuge, and we want to dance, dance and dance.

we say “let’s gather” and we want to dance and drum

we say “guess what?” and we want everyone to recognize that capitalism is not inevitable nor permanent

we say butterflies and we want to hear the vibrations of all our wings fluttering soft and sure

we say Shhht and we want to listen to the birds

we say nothing and we want to hear the bees

we say nothing and we want to know our ancestors are speaking in the silence

we say peace and we want peace

we say freedom and we want freedom

we say love and we want love

we say we and we want we

We love you. Come write with us!

“When will we seize the world around us with our freedom?”

-June Jordan in “Nicaragua: Why I Had to Go There”

Last night hundreds of Durham residents gathered in City Hall and aligned and sang in peace and unity our urgent desire for a ceasefire and an end to the occupation of Palestine. “Ceasefire” a song by beloved sister adrienne maree brown held the multitude as mothers, children, and community members of all generations found peace within and made it audible and visible holding roses, demanding a more loving world and a ceasefire resolution now.

Image and song by adrienne maree brown

Many of those gathered were the same people who came together 15 years in response to sexual violence lift up June Jordan’s words in “Poem About My Rights” that WRONG IS NOT MY NAME. In "Poem About My Rights” June Jordan teaches us that sexual violence and colonialist violence are devastatingly interconnected and that our responses must be as well. The violence of occupation impacts our very breathing which is why the intentional measured practice of singing together helps us to bring our highest intention for peace, regulating the trauma responses within us when we know this violence is related to every form of violence we have survived. You can read the poetry zine that some of us created 15 years ago here to reclaim our names here.

Earlier yesterday evening 50 folks of all ages from around the world also gathered online in June Jordan’s name to support each other in being as brave as June Jordan was when she connected the imperialist violence she was witnessing in the world to the oppression she learned at home. In “and before that it was my father”: reclaiming our names we looked at the fears that have been passed on through generations of embodied trauma and committed to what June Jordan calls “daily and nightly self-determination” also known as the practices through which we can embody a different reality. In “Poem About My Rights” Jordan moves from embodying fear to embodying a self-love that makes her dangerous to colonialism. The beautiful thing is that, like Jordan’s poem, our love and transformation is non-linear. The very same night that we addressed our intergenerational fears committed to embodying courageous love, so many parents in my community brought their children to witness a different embodiment, teaching the next generation that in the face of genocide we sing, we love each other deeper, we remember how powerful we are together.

The answer to June Jordan’s question “When will we seize the world around us with our freedom?” is NOW.

In honor of this reality we created a group poem in honor of our new and reclaimed names. Can you sing this poem?

P.S. If you want to write into a new embodiment the recording of last night’s workshop is available here.

daily and nightly self-determination

by the participants in Reclaiming Our Names in honor of June Jordan

My name is song.

My name is breath.

My name is a portal, a catchment, a window.

My name is carnival.

My name is beautiful and none of your damn business.

My name is unavailable to anyone besides me.

My name is unapologetic.

My name is for myself.

My name is primordial.

My name is memory.

My name is a journey with no end in sight.

My name is bold.

My name is restoration.

My name is water.

My name is water carves rock.

My name is created from the songs carried on the wind.

My name is homecoming.

My name is one of endless containers with which to hold (parts of) my being.

My name is gratitude.

My name is patience-in-real-time.

My name is infinite opulence.

My name is yes.

My name is love.

My name is love.

My name is courage.

My name is peace.

Last night’s writing session "irreversible as light years traveling to the open eye": witness, world-making, June Jordan, Palestine and South Africa was full of love, bravery, grief and deep listening. We practiced clearing what is blocking us, we examined what is moving us and how, we held space for falling apart and we called on generations of solidarity to power us in this moment. And we lingered…we stayed even beyond the scheduled time of the workshop to create this group poem, our portal back to each other, and our open door for you. May these words (read them aloud) strengthen the endurance of our love.

It’s Us

by the participants in “Witness and Worldmaking: June Jordan, Palestine and South Africa”

“And the babies cease alarm as mothers
raising arms
and heart high as the stars so far unseen
nevertheless hurl into the universe
a moving force
irreversible as light years
traveling to the open
eye”

June Jordan “Poem for South African Women”

We are the ones we call ancestors

We are the ones our sittis (grandmas) sat with

We are the ones our tay-tas (grandmothers) held in their cells

We are the ones who are holding up our hearts

We are the ones who breathe and listen

We are the ones that know the language of love in all fields of time

We are the ones who come in twos and threes and become we

We are the ones who bring peace

We are the ones who wake each other up from sleep

We are the ones who embrace tender tethering.

We are the ones hoping to know intimacy with grief

We are the ones who linger a little bit longer in love; we never hold back our love.

We are the ones who play and scheme to create abolition

We are the ones who say yes to the unscripting, unmapping, unmaking.

We are the ones who will snag and scrap the colonizers language while reweaving the tapestry of our collective belonging.

We are the ones who laugh and weep with forces that shape us.

We are the ones who get to stay and leave at the direction of our wise choice.

We are the ones who scream and in so doing, create a song that births the world anew.

We are the ones who come before and come after.

We are the ones who get us all free.

The recording of our workshop is here: https://sangodare.podia.com/irreversible-as-light-years-traveling-to-the-open-eye-witness-world-making-june-jordan-and-south-africa

Last night participants in the Repetition is Sacred: Practicing Seven Generations practice space gathered and our ancestors gathered too. We found our questions and our gifts. We meditated and we wrote this poem together about repetition and practice.

Rainbow Somewhere

“And almost every day somewhere over Anguilla if you look, you’ll see a rainbow.”

                                                                        -Three Tries

By the Repetition is Sacred Practitioners

And now everyday we’ll see the sun meeting the waters.

And now everyday we’ll see the sun meeting the earth.

And now everyday we’ll see the sun meeting the plants.

And now everyday we’ll see the sun meeting the living and the dead.

And now everyday spiders creep along and do their business.

And now everyday I know that there is a flow flowing somewhere.

And now everyday the river will carry me where I need to go.

And now everyday we attend to our mourning.

And now everyday we meet in the meadow, I miss you, whether or not you come back

And now everyday I will remember and celebrate my child self.

And now everyday we wash ourselves in the ocean, whether or not we are near the ocean.

And now everyday we know the power of our tears.

And now everyday I look upon my face with love. 

And now everyday I look upon your face with love.

And now every day we stretch endurance into thriving.

And now everyday I have compassion for myself.

And now everyday we generate movements.  

And now everyday we embrace our vastness

and our intimacies to replenish the wells of possibility.

And now everyday we return home.

If you want to join the practice space, find out more here.

On Tuesday January 9th over a hundred of us gathered for the reflective writing workshop “Survival is Not a Theoretical Skill”: Releasing Institutional Harm. I decided to hold this space after seeing my community of scholars, especially scholars of color, reeling from the recent use of a national bullying campaign to push the president of Harvard University out of a job. However, we gathered to release institutional harm in general and participants came with their minds set on freedom from the harms we have experienced in academic, corporate, medical, non-profit and arts institutions, and also in relationships and the institution of the family.

The bravery, generous listening, interconnected reflection, revelation, liberation and love we experienced was healing and it was powered by the critical gathering energy of Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival.” We considered who was with us on the shoreline. We examined our education into fear. We looked at the intentions of the institutions that have manipulated our basic desire for safety and we celebrated “this instant and this triumph” that our love for ourselves and each other has outlived what was supposed to destroy us.

Below is our closing group poem, our affirmation of our survival and our clarity in the face of institutional harm. Feel free to share it. I recommend reading out loud because it feels really good!

And if you want to watch the whole recording and do all of the reflective writing prompts you can do that here.

Triumph

by the participants in “Survival is Not a Theoretical Skill”

“So it is better to speak

remembering

we were never meant to survive.”

 “A Litany for Survival” by Audre Lorde

So it is better to answer the call.

So it is better to answer the call.

So it is better to heal.

So it is better to make myself.

So it is better to be whole.

So it is better to be true to myself.

So it is better to be me.

So it is better to live.

So it is better to LIVE!

So it is better to return.

So it is better to write a poem.

So it is better to write poems and sing them to each other.

So it is better to sing from one shoreline across the ocean to greet the next.

So it is better to sing out as a collective dream.

So it is better to sing with the fierce clarity of love.

So it is better to hum like the hummingbirds do.

So it is better to breathe in breathe out with all our feelings even our fears.

So it is better to leave and try something new with love in my heart.

So it is better to let heartbreaks to open portals to new worlds.

So it is better to chart a path to another world, to a better world.

So it is better to get still and listen for the next step, knowing you are a channel for divine creative intelligence.

So it is better to ask “What are we dreaming about? How are we dreaming? And where do we get our encouragement from?

So it is better to remember and imagine.

So it is better to forgive & remember.

So it is better to remember we are eternal  and transforming.

So it is better to believe believe believe.

So it is better to try.

So it is better to cry.

So it is better to stay soft.

So it is better to be tender.

So it is better to care.

So it is better to trust.

So it is better to stay open.  

So it is better to keep trying

So it is better to acknowledge those on the shoreline and dream.

So it is better to water myself and those around me.

So it is better to build and steward a sanctuary for all living things.

So it is better to dissolve false comforts for the liberation of all.

So it is better to find the poetry in your spirit and ask all the damn questions.

So it is better to read these verses and walk all over their rules.

So it is better to create through anxiety, express through doubt.

So it is better to express than to be understood.

So it is better to be misunderstood than to be silent.

So it is better to be a killjoy and fully experience joy.

So it is better to love your own voice so that you may move closer to liberation.

So it is better to write a new narrative.

So it is better to listen for what really feels real.

So it is better to protrude fullness and envelope self

So it is better to disappear and fly on purpose, on my own terms, instead of disappearing into the heavy-footed.

So it is better to wear moccasins and walk gently.

So it is better to be playful and walk in a path of dignity.

So it is better to trust our hearts, create worlds of possibility and uplift our people in dignity joy and audacious love.

So it is better to listen to Abbey Lincoln and Nina Simone.

So it is better to break the parts of us that need liberation. 

So it is better to be true to self.

So it is better to plant and reach for joy inside each other and ourselves.

So it is better to eat food made with love!

So it is better to play daily!

So it is better to rest.

So it is better to create, write, play, rest, love and experience pleasure.

So it is better to make community with others with dance, laughter, food, and the LOVE that flows from there.

So it is better to go on loving and singing, and eating and writing and planting seeds for the next generation to find and harvest.

So it is better to BE in Blackfullness.

So it is better to live with community.

So it is better to be a we.

So it is better to find each other over and over again.

So it is better to make the world with others.

So it is better to dream.

So it is better to radically hope and dream.

So it is better to dream and imagine otherwise.

So it is better to live whole-hearted.

So it is better to remain present.

So it is better to remain free.

 Missed the workshop? Don’t worry! The recording is here.

Pop-pop and his “E-lexis”

I don’t have any picture of my grandfather as a child. He never saw a camera. My grandfather who grew up under colonial rule on a so-called desert island grew up hungry. By the time he was an adult and had found a way to leave Anguilla the governmental authority made their plan to “starve the people of Anguilla” explicit. They bragged about it. These were the conditions that inspired my grandfather to come back and participate in the Anguillian Revolution in 1967. A grown man who had scraped through his education, upgraded a coal and ice business in New Jersey into a heating and air-conditioning company came home to fight for clean accessible water, food, autonomy for whom? For his people. But also for the starving child he had once been.

In this moment, in my grief and shock at how many young children, intentionally starved by an occupying colonial force have suddenly become ancestors far too soon in the past weeks because of incessant bombing and displacement, I am reaching for the revolutionary child. The child in myself who knows that none of this actually complex. The child self who knows the stakes of survival. And I reach Jeremiah Gumbs, whose face I wouldn’t let go of once I met him. Whose beard I held to as if it would transfer his wisdom. But instead of the wise grandfather who recited me his favorite poems and let me record him sharing his memories, I need the little boy.

Here is a journey I took last year to imagine one week in the life of that little boy in seven different ways. And each time I learned something new about myself, my longing, my ethics, my beliefs. You can read “Three Tries” that ancestrally co-written experiment here:

“Once upon a time in Anguilla there was a little boy named Jeremiah Gumbs. He was the youngest of nine children and they never had enough to eat. One day while little Jeremiah was out fishing with his friends he saw a beautiful rainbow fish. Beautiful, as in, delicious-looking. And big.

The rainbow fish wasn’t big for no reason. The rainbow fish was wise and had grown large over the years by avoiding the hooks of the people who fished in the cove. The rainbow fish stayed safely beneath the edge of a rock watching. Keeping guard.

But little Jeremiah was hungry. And he had a vision. He decided he would catch the rainbow fish and bring it home to his mother to cook for dinner. He prepared his pole and his line and his hook and tempted the rainbow fish with the most delectable bait he could charm from the grown fishermen. When he lowered the bait near the rainbow fish’s home rock he just knew he would be victorious. The rainbow fish smelled the bait and got curious. You know, fish get hungry too. The rainbow fish peered out from the edge of the rock, but the sun glinted off the edge of the sharp hook. The rainbow fish quickly swam back under the edge of the rock. No way. Not today.

Jeremiah went home hungry. His mother fed him and his brothers and sisters with grease, salt tears, and hard flour rolls left over from what she’d baked for the workers that morning.

But Jeremiah was hardworking and patient and he believed that he would prevail. So the next day he went and told the fishermen his story about the sneaky old tricky rainbow fish and how HE would be the first one to catch him. The fishermen laughed and laughter was worth something. So they gave him an even bigger piece of bait… (continue here)

I end up telling the story seven ways based on the contradictions in our intergenerational conversation. For example sometimes my grandfather said his father taught him to fish, but when I asked more about him he said he didn’t remember his father who I learned from other family members was abusive to him and my great grandmother. When I centered each of these contradicting “truths” in the story and gave them their own space instead of allowing them to cancel each other out I saw that the longing in each revision of his story had something different to teach me and that I needed every lesson. My prayer is that our journey (which ends with an important question for you) can accompany you in this time where we need all our lessons and where the complexity of the moment, or the stories we are hearing need not stop us from acting on behalf of all children, including the children within us, including the children who raised us…seeming like adults.

And if you want to go deeper on this journey and access my guidance and love in a journey of reaching for your own ancestral stories, your ancestors as children and your child self, you can sign up for 2024’s first self-guided course “Repetition is Sacred: Practicing Seven Generations” which is based on what I learned from this ancestral experiment. The course goes live on January 1st and offers seven units of videos, meditations and journal prompts that you can engage at your own pace. I’m recording the videos right now and there is a good chance that you’ll see my crying, but I’m okay with that. Early in the year we will also have a live webinar only for participants in this course to that we can support each other and gather our collective ancestral support. Your offering for the course will support us in making a monetary offering to the ongoing work to save and protect children suffering from occupation and war right now.

Prayer for All Our Children

group poem by the participants in “they have already learned to dream of dying: audre lorde and an intergenerational imperative for peace”

*

“I’m speaking here not only about those children we may have mothered and fathered ourselves, but about all our children together, for they are our joint responsibility and our joint hope.”

- Audre Lorde in her Keynote Speech for the National Third World Lesbian and Gay Conference, Oct 13, 1979

May our children play at the edges of the world that was

May our children play a new world into existence.

May our children play undulled by the sharp edges of the world

May our children play with the skulls they are given until they are not skulls anymore

May our children play with flowers, with grief

May our children play with their dreaming

May our children play in the light of the amethyst crystals

May our children play beneath the light of the full moon

May our children play in the web we are always spinning together.

May our children play until their hearts are full.

May our children play amongst kittens running.

May our children play in the most gentle of tenderness

May our children play brightly and safely

May our children play without fears without borders

May our children play without shame.

May our children play without any forced gender determining how they play.

May our children play in safety and amidst abundance.

May our children play fearlessly

May our children play without being seen as a threat

May our children play outdoors in the rain.

May our children play past sundown

May our children play up middle white oak holler

May our children play loudly

May our children play with abandon

May our children play every string, beat every drum, and sing aloud every sound that arises with in them.

May our children play with their voices, and loudly.

May our children play alongside all the brightest colors.

May our children play the songs we dreamed we could

May our children play their way into the worlds we dreamed for them

May our children play held in community

May our children play with self-permission knowing it is core to power.

May our children play knowing they are whole magical and loved

May our children play knowing the world is abundant and built for them.

May our children play in safety and creative abandon

May our children play imaginatively and without limitation

May our children play, backhavers abundant around them.

May our children play and remind us of who we are, not who we’ve been conditioned to be.

May our children play in the roots of our trees while they are simultaneously lifted into the branches, warmed by the sun.

May our children play with each other, having learned- or having taught us, love across difference.

May our children play in co-creation with all our relations, catching sounds, songs and rhythems that connect us all in consciousness and joy.

May our children play in this intergalactic moment that transcends all timelines,  in the heavenly spiderweb of our ancestral prayer, in the healing balm of their own futuredreams.

May our children play with the impossible with ease.

May our children play like flowers freely flying in the wind.

May our children play and remember and remember.

May our children play unendingly.

May our children play with us.

May our children play within us.

May our children play as children

May our children still play when they are elders

May our children play so that we may remember that once we were children and our elders prayed for us to play.

May our children play play play

May our children play!

If you are interested in healing generations, sign up is open for next year’s practice space Repetition is Sacred: Practicing Seven Generations. Practice starts on New Year’s Day!

photo by Dagmar Schultz

We Are Ready

A poem by the participants in “The Difference Between Poetry and Rhetoric: Audre Lorde and Using Our Power” after “Power” by Audre Lorde

My power is within my words

My power is my community

My power is my possibility

My power is my radical black feminist lineage

My power is in my queer family

My power is my tender, childlike heart

My power is my voice, even when it trembles, even when it’s shaking

My power is my yes, and my no, and the space in-between

My power is a language of love

My power is in the songs I sing and cherish

My power is my love that gives me courage because I trust my ancestors that walk with me

My power is my feistiness

My power is my faith

My power is my sight

My power is my intimacy as illumination

My power is my desire to love you regardless

My power is trusting in wholeness - in me, in this moment, in you

My power is the reminder that more important than the “what” is the “how”

My power is my imagination

My power is my vulnerability

My power is my giant and my small

My power is my ability to hear the smallest voices, in me and others

My power is hope

My power is my humility

My power is my love of listening with an open heart

My power is in my ability to say the truth

My power is my ability to name and shame state violence

instead of blaming individuals for what the state has done to us

My power is learning to love this land without having to claim it

My power is my clarity

My power is my remembering

My power is trying

My power is my connection to my love

My power is my Black Southern heritage, my ability to rest and fight at the same damn time

My power is my humanity

My power is my refusal

My power is my evil being public domain, co-opted, collective, perpetrator and victim

My power is our entangled roots, always connecting us, always sending bursts of poetry

My power is my spiritual calling to love humanity

My power is my connection to all beings

My power is in my sacred solitude

My power is mine

My power is real

My power is my capacity to hold contradiction

My power is my capacity for love, my soul-deep rage, my embrace of both

My power is feeling my feelings

My power is my connection to spirit

My power is the breath of life

My power is my knowing is my faith is my surrender

My power is yet unknown to me

My power is my love

My power is my love

My power is my listening

My power is my belly

My power is my breath

My power is my uncanny intuition, my big heart,

and my fierce desire to protect my people near and far

My power is my ability to nourish my community

My power is my ancestors who hold me

My power is my Mother, guiding me to the peaks of my values,

so I may see the expansiveness of my Self and feel the winds of her Love

My power is the tenderness of my heart that keeps me present

and refuses to harden or go numb

My power is my heart, broken into a greater wholeness

My power is my connection to the divine

My power is my capacity to feel

My power is being present

My power is in both my tears and my rage and not numbing to either

My power is water medicine, the tears that flow and transcend the limits of words

My power is my creativity, my tenderness, my vision, my loudness, my connectedness to my people - both living and passed

My power is my unrelenting, deep love for the earth and all the living beings within it

My power is the dance that keeps me connected to the earth and all her beings

My power is my learned sensitivity to slowness in relationship to holding that space for others

My power is my joy, my dreams, my energy

My power is my song, my voice, my love

My power is my sexual energy unleashed and expressed

My power is my dead people who want more

My power is my deep knowing

My power is a holy well

My power is my strength

My power is my gentleness

My power is my practice

My power is my art and the endurance and stamina of my love

My power is in resonance , powerful togetherness.

My power is when I’m not my own

My power is my grace even when confronted with rage

My power is colorful, just like my soul

My power is my desire - delight - intuition – curiosity

My power is listening for the memory and medicine I have inherited

in my bones and in my blood

My power is my soul’s love for love

My power is my poetry

My power is my prayer being felt across time and space

My power is to believe

My power is knowing there is another way to be

My power is my love

My power is our power

My power is ready

If you missed the workshop you can still access it here: https://sangodare.podia.com/the-difference-between-poetry-and-rhetoric-audre-lorde-and-using-your-power

Becoming

"I was born a Black woman

 and now

 I am become a Palestinian"

-June Jordan “Moving Towards Home”

"High

above this desert

I am

becoming

absorbed"

 -Audre Lorde "Sahara"

a poem by the participants in “Black Feminist Becoming: Sand, Solidarity and Practice”

we are becoming our breathing

we are becoming focused

we are becoming the ways in which we belong to one another

we are becoming awakened to the world

we are becoming our fire

we are becoming ceasefire

we are becoming porous

we are becoming unafraid of play

we are becoming a chorus, singing solidarity

we are becoming free

we are becoming led by inner truth

we are becoming our legacy

we are becoming the ones we were always meant to be

we are becoming dangerous to empire

we are becoming the full embrace of our anger and our love

we are becoming soft and unguarded in our hearts

we are becoming breathing miracles

we are becoming liminal

we are becoming together, now, regardless

we are becoming our care

we are becoming wind

we are becoming our joy

we are becoming the leaders we need

we are becoming the sacred medicine for the world

we are becoming a balm for ancient wounds

we are becoming one name

we are becoming ready to bloom again and again and again

we are becoming unashamed

we are becoming militant lovers

we are becoming courageous

we are becoming the step forward

we are becoming free

we are becoming each other’s harvest

we are becoming who we are

we are becoming whole

You can revisit this workshop or engage it for the first time here. For more opportunities to practice see: https://www.alexispauline.com/classes

where day and night shall meet

a poem by the participants in “the perfect daughter/ who was not me”

a workshop based on Audre Lorde’s “in the house of yemanja”

where liberation and love shall meet and not be limited

where light and love shall meet and not be temporary.

where limits and love shall meet and not be scarce

where empathy and love shall meet and not be fiction

where truth and radical love shall meet and not be buried

where prayer and song shall meet and not be weary

where hope and joy shall meet and not be lost

where love and justice shall meet and not be dogmatic

where love and compassion shall meet and not be withdrawn

where compassion and truth shall meet and not be exclusive

where longing and devotion shall meet and not be limerence

where doing and passion shall meet and not be forgotten

where seer and seen shall meet and not be divided

where judgement and story shall meet and not be fixed

where masculinity and femininity shall meet and not be exclusive

where courage and doubt shall meet and not be frozen

where feather and bone shall meet and not be a remnant

where the memory and oblivion shall meet and not be wounds

where pain and joy shall meet and not be different

where time and space shall meet and not be erased

where love and duty shall meet and not be heavy

where joy and peace shall meet and not be empty

where faith and fear shall meet and not be finite

where fear and freedom shall meet and not be trampled asunder

where water and water shall meet and not be confused

where sea and drop shall meet and not be thirsty

where mother and daughter shall meet and not be painful

where water and earth shall meet and not be exploited

where possibility and responsibility shall meet and not be at odds

where tough and tender shall meet and not be afraid.

where care and trust shall meet and not be draining

where softness and tenderness shall meet and not be considered weak

where care and letting go shall meet and not be resented

where rage and love shall meet and not be contradicted

where you and me shall meet and not be eroded

where you and me shall meet and not be afraid

where I and I shall meet and not be afraid

a perfect daughter/ who was not me: audre lorde's intergenerational insights

o          love

for       let

o          love

for       dance

o          my

for       spirit

o          beyond

for       this

o          fearful

for       place

o          lift

for        love

o          song

for       this

o          above

for        all

o          who

for       hate

o          love

for       always

o          now

for        heart

o          take

this suffering

from my bones

o take

these muscles

make them wings

o take

this burden

give us sanctuary

o shae

for ever

Beloveds! Last night I had the glorious honor of being one of the inaugural honorees for Black Feminist Future’s North Star Awards alongside the great Barbara Smith, Dorothy Roberts, my wonder twin Moya Bailey and the amazing organization Snap Co!

Today is my father’s birthday and in honor of his memory and his presence I dedicate this award to him. Here is my acceptance speech from last night.

***********

Black Feminism Lives!!!!  I love you all so much.  And that’s my interpretation of this beautiful North Star honor.  I hope it means you can feel it.  It feels very auspicious to me that this gorgeous event is happening 2 days before my birthday.  Because Black feminism is my perpetual rebirth, my true love, my mailing address, my meaning, my reason, my religion, my every breath.  And thank you Black Feminist Future for honoring the eternity of the Black Feminism within which we live and breathe and have our being.

Tomorrow is my father’s birthday. He would have been 69 years old.  And he’s been an ancestor for almost 7 years now. But let me tell you he would have been respecting the boundaries and guidelines of this space and also livestreaming every session because, though he was a straight cis west indian man, he self-identified as a queer black feminist like me.  And yes.  This was an act of love.  An act of support for his queer black feminist daughter.  But it was also his own access to the transcendent possibility that keeps us waking up excited to keep creating a black feminist movement.  For my father, the queer vision that black feminism possible represented the level of liberation he wanted for himself, and that he like us wants for everyone. And it required of him what it requires of all of us, to grow beyond who we think we are, to lay down all our fears, our coping mechanism, the identities that are too small for us, and that Toni Cade Bambara taught us will not and should not outlive our revolution.  The queer potential of black feminism required my father to change jobs and change gods, to surrender all to the possibility of our freedom.  Which means that even though he would have lived in the light of my memory regardless, because he was a committed queer black feminist my father found eternity before died.

This is what I mean when I say BLACK FEMINISM LIVES.  Because Audre Lorde taught us that this work didn’t start with us and it will continue after we are gone.  Because I’m pretty sure, is this right Beloved Demita Frazier? that the most repeated word in the Combahee River Collective Statement after Black and Women and we and us is ALWAYS.

You know that from the experience of this weekend and of your own life. Black Feminism is made up of infinite acts of love and each of those acts was dreamed of by our ancestors and impacts our future generations, so therefore each of these decisions we are making these actions we are taking is eternal.

And this is why I love you Black Feminist Future, because you honor that eternity in space and time and practice.  Thank you for making structures for this infinite love we call black feminism to flow in all directions.

Thank you for letting me be part of your/our/this eternal life.

Now, if you would, loved ones, say it back to me.  Call and response style. Black feminism lives.  Black feminism lives.  Black feminism lives!

from The Color Purple

Last night Black Feminist Film School held a virtual workshop that activated the dinner table scene in the film The Color Purple as a practice space for ancestral listening. Love and gratitude to all the participants who brought their folks, their love, all their senses and their beautiful brilliance together. We had such a great time. We invited specific ancestors to watch the scene with us and noticed what they noticed. We used Sangodare’s Ancestral Reverence as Character Development activity to get to know our ancestors even better and we reveled in the abundance of how ancestral presence and practice is available in every moment. This is our abundance poem…feel free to read it out loud and in groups!

If you missed the workshop and would like to participate you can access the recorded version here.

Abundance Poem

From the participants in “Already Been Done” an Ancestral Listening Workshop  from Black Feminist Film School

We have more than enough power

We have more than enough energy

We have more than enough light.

We have more than enough wisdom

We have more than enough memory.

We have more than enough protection

We have more than enough power to manifest what we want and repel what seeks to harm us.

We have more than enough love

We have MORE than enough love to go around.

We have more than enough connection

We have more than enough connection to love.

We have more than enough mothering touch

We have more than enough time, we just have to make space.

We have more than enough time

We have more than enough space

We have more than enough joy

We have more than enough stories and courage to heal our worlds.

We have more than enough fire.

We have more than enough peace

We have more than enough activation

We have more than enough meaning

We have more than enough sweetness

We have more than enough laughter

We have more than enough beauty

We have more than enough kitchen tables

We have more than enough reasons to love ourselves as we are

We have more than enough clarity

We have more than enough gentleness

We have more than enough compassion for ourselves

We have more than enough intimacy

We have more than enough reverberation

We have more than enough music

We have more than enough audacity

We have more than enough breath

We have more than enough examples

We have more than enough bridge

We have more than enough capacity

We have more than enough illumination

We have more than enough poetry, everywhere

We have more than enough community

We have more than enough pathway

We have more than enough guidance

We have more than enough guidance

We have more

We have more than enough

To learn more about Black Feminist Film School check out: blackfeministfilmschool.com

Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised that there are so many images of Earth on fire on vectorstock. I chose the one that centers the continent of Africa.

“Remember the character of fire.” M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing

New Jersey caught on fire, but all we saw was the sunrise. On the top floor of the hotel where Rutger’s puts their guests, the view of the sunrise was neon. The sky over the Raritan river knows something about this land that I want to remember.

This is the land where my sister Ariana was born, where my grandmother Lydia earned her college degree as a mother of four children, where my Uncle Duane fell in love with my Aunt Carol. And this is the place where a beautiful community of scholars convened as BlackLab and committed to “experiments in theoretical Black studies” invited me to join them for a moment in the rigorous work they are doing to honor a brave multitude of diverse and committed students. This was an invitation made even more joyous by the fact that my own dear graduate advisor and dissertation committee chair Maurice Wallace, a founding member of BlackLab (along with Evie Shockley, Imani Owens, Carter Mathes, Erica Edwards and more) invited me!

It means a lot to me to be at Rutgers anytime because of my family connections, but at this moment when the faculty and graduate students are on the verge of a strike unless the administration honors their three part vision of living wages for all instructors, including graduate student instructors, more job security for non-tenured faculty including adjunct faculty and recognition and renumeration for the unpaid labor of oppressed members of the campus community.

And it did feel like a neon sunrise to witness the clarity and solidarity across rank, to watch one professor explain the reasons for the impending strike to their students and for the students to spontaneously burst out in cheers.

This is an adobe stock photo of the sunrise over Rutgers that I did not take and did not buy.

Yes the work of the union could be an opportunity for Rutgers to rise to the occasion. But the email the university president sent out the lie that it is “unlawful” to strike in the state of New Jersey and then daring to use the term “beloved community” to act as if the very reasonable improvements 94% of faculty and graduate students are requesting, which require the re-allocation of only 1% of the university budget are somehow both impossible and unnecessary, makes me glad that Rutgers has some of the best literary scholars in the world on the case. That type of communication doesn’t feel like a sunrise. I would call it a dumpster fire.

And wouldn’t you know, on the very afternoon of my campus visit and actual dumpster fire on a routine garbage train exporting New York City trash around the country got out of hand and spread into brush fires all along the New Jersey transit line, shutting down all trains past Edison, through New Brunswick and beyond. You all know I don’t believe in mere coindicence. All I see is connection.

Inspired by the brave connections Evie Shockley’s graduate students made between their most vulnerable breakthroughs and my apocalyptic writing and the generous connections PhD students Ashley Codner and JP Sloan made between my body of work and my way of working and crucial intellectual and spiritual work of their own connections to their beloved family members and ancestors, I too will look for generative connections between a New Jersey brush fire and the lessons we and I need to learn.

M. Jacqui Alexander asks us to “remember the character of fire.” That fire is not only hot, it is strong. And the nature of fire is to transform. Everything. And more and more biologists are recognizing and emphasizing the influence of fire on life on earth itself. The conditions that make our lives and any oxygenated life on earth possible are the same conditions that beckon fire. Because, as biologist Stephen Pyne reminds us “fire is not a substance, it is a reaction that synthesizes its surroundings.” Fire is a writer with a thick black pen, a cloud of hair recognizable even from far away. Or you can call me what Pyne calls me: “an ecological shape-shifter.”

Fire is not a component of an environment, it is a crucial connection between the components of an existing environment with a persistent way of making itself known. Which is why we don’t name a fire by what ignites it, but by what sustains it. We name fires after whatever fuels them to grow. A forest fuels a forest fire, the brush feeds a brush fire, and our prodigious production of waste fuels the dumpster fires of the world. A fire, like a perfectly lawful strike, is a reaction to a set of pre-existing environmental factors, a synthesis illuminating those factors, transubstantiating the situation into a path of irrevocable change.

A reasonable response to a fire must shift the conditions the fire signals with its presence, for example the gathered dryness, the piling debris swept under the rug at many universities in the United States where local cost of living goes up, and tuition goes up, but wages don’t. Where racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, transphobic, xenophobic practices fail to honor the actual population of students and workers the university purports to serve. The suppression of the small fires, leads to so much underbrush solidarity that the big trees fall. The university evasion of union demands, the suppression of the very existence of unions? Those are the perfect conditions for a fire, thus the nursery rhyme about the fate of the pants of the liar.

The demands of the union are water. And the river is literally right there. Why do our institutions continually chose to dump more trash excuses and toxic lies on the existing dumpster fire? Maybe it’s for the same reason I used to remember to charge my phone and check my email more frequently than I remembered to eat, or drink water. Or why I am so much more likely to deal with what I have than to risk asking for what I need. Because the bells, alarms, rewards and punishments of capitalism refuse to be ignored, and my ignorance of the wider system, the orbit, the planet in fire, makes me that much more available as fuel.

There is a science lesson about the different categories of fuel, from the perspective of a fire, because there is a difference between potential fuel, that which would ignite under the most extreme circumstances, and available fuel that which will ignite in THESE conditions, the conditions we find ourselves in NOW.

All that brush along the New Jersey transit tracks was available to fuel a fire, the moment the dumpster fire exceeded its metal. Kind of like the faculty and students who want to be available to each other, and recognize the need for that even more in the face of institutional lack of accountability. That’s fire too isn’t it? The way the members of this community want to change each other beyond their function to reproduce the institution they all inhabit? The fire in the dumpster changed the temperature of the train, which however could have continued on its destined track. The brush fire though? The brushfire shut down the whole Northeast Corridor, the brush fire changed the day itself.

And so I continue to study fire up close. I seek to learn the crucial difference between my potential and my availability. It feels hard to know what I should be available to and when, and what exact conditions ignite me, ignite us after all this time being fuel for a trash situation. From right here, cast aside from the deadening path. But that’s how ignitions works, because suddenly we know. And it’s like we never forgot. I love being brush alongside you, bursting into a shareable flame, scorched out our erstwhile randomness into a unified black char, more fertile ground than ever.

What if we embraced fire as the evolutionary message it is. The reason for thick bark on conifers, sturdy seedpods, long distance proliferations, a futuristic reaction to smoke by many species of trees, waxy leaves on bushes adaptation that not only help the rooted withstand but strengthen their lives and their intergenerational connections even after the fire is gone.

What if we let ourselves blacken and change? I already love you, bright shapeshifter, and how you always find me at the edge, call out my sweat as soon as you come near. And all I know for sure is you will never be the same and I will never finish knowing you and you swift rewrite my name. You wake me up.

P.S. I love you. I’m with you. I’m always here.

Here I float on the surface of earth, brown like the continent wide sargassum raft they are talking about on the news. For now, I too am full of air. Ecologist Patricia Edridge of Seaweed Generation says she has replaced her climate anxiety with sargassum anxiety and resort owners in the Caribbean, Florida and Mexico say that this prolific seaweed washing up on shore will ruin the beach tourist industry. And so we have something else in common. Brown menaces, visible from outerspace.

Or at least tracked by satellites.

It was satellite imaging that warned the watchers that this year the Atlantic Sargasso Belt is not only broader than broadway, it is wider than the whole United States. And I wonder if instead of living in the gun-crazed fantasy of someone else’s forefathers, a landscape of terror and cops, I could live on a copper raft of algae as algae, breaking off piece of myself to spread us wider, holopelagic, never touching the bottom of the ocean until I die.

Or is my anxiety sargasstic, keeping me on the surface, while what I do every day, this diving deeper, this grounding work what sargassum breathing as one, a billion tiny air bladders strong, would call the good death. The chance to clear the air of carbon and feed the prescient life underneath I had earlier been protecting with my latticed canopy of reach. When sargassum do wash up on shore they become part of the land, crucial to the structure of sand dunes, preventing shoreline erosion, but only if they have a good burial.

Right now, due multiple people made conditions, including rising ocean temperatures and possibly fertilizer runoff into the ocean the amount of sargassum washing up on the shorelines of the Americas is overwhelming the stewards of beachly whiteness. And like any dead body in the open air in the heat of the sun sargassum becomes toxic. It would not be good for your own air bladder, I call mine lungs, or your braid for you to breath in the rot.

Imagine, a species in toxic relationship with planet earth, that’s us, going to the beach to get away from our chloroflourocarbon producing or dependent occupations and being met with masses of dead algae bodies, offering toxicity back in kind. Kind of seems like a message doesn’t it? Karma, a brown philosophy .

Who knows, maybe all the multi-national beauty companies will pivot to seaweed skin products. My cousin Branden says that’s already starting to happen in Mexico. But the impossible to ignore sargassum that meteorologists are tracking like a self-contained hurricane is making me ask myself what in my life needs a journey to the depth, a good burial. Before I can’t take the smell anymore.

Algae are among our very oldest earth ancestors. It would make sense that they would teach us about death. And so we remember how African Antigone always was and how Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) revealed the colonial haunting undergirding European gender relations. When you don’t have a good death or a proper burial there will be a haunting.

It takes intention and a deep surrendering of ego, linearity and everything else colonialism taught us to value to allow our ancestral connections to be what they can be, what I believe they must be, nourishing fertile ground. Otherwise we live yet another zombie apocalypse movie, haunted by centuries of violence, haunting the air we breathe through cycles of harm and reaction, a noxious context that eats away our brains. (And I think all the Jean Rhys scholars would remind us that every new zombie apocalypse TV show and movie reveals the infusion of African and Caribbean stories of undeath into the western cultural imagination. Another haunting.

I am here immersed in a western culture that ignores and is obsessed by death at the same time, but what I know is that my ancestors deserve a good burial within me. A transubstantiation of vulnerability into love. We, the intentional repositories for our ancestors known and unknown can find intergenerational clarity in deep suffering, and powerful commitment and faith in the acts of love and resistance that came before us.

But I know that offering my ancestors a long good death, an honored world building role beyond their lifetimes requires me to let my ego die. To let go of my preoccupation with surface attention so I can go below the surface and contribute to the deep ecology of our home. It challenges me to release my fear of intimacy, all my methods for keeping you at the surface and not letting you in. It reminds me that my fantasies of being self contained with my little air bubble body cannot withstand how profoundly entangled we are. It is scary to let go of pieces of myself, that might grow into whole other lives, but that’s the only way we grow.

What if every step towards embodied liberation is a good death for the person I was before, sinking to the surface, healing the atmosphere and allowing new life to regenerate. Could I be as algae as that? Could we?

Is this what is so scary to transphobic legislators about trusting trans youth and supportive parents to lead their own evolution? Denials of life-saving healthcare to trans people of all ages disrespect all our ancestors, including the algae. They seek to legislate us into ignoring a spiritual truth: embodiment IS change. Change is life-giving. And how dare they project their fear of transformation itself on the scale of the planet and their own souls onto our sacred teachers, our true leaders, our children. June Jordan says, “children are the way life begins again and again.” And life is never the same. And let me be clear, targeting a group of young people who cannot even vote yet in order to harness the fears of a surface obsessed population fearful of change is not leadership. It is cowardice. It is rotten. It pollutes the very air.

What do we do when transformation become impossible to ignore? When the spectrum of being becomes wider than the national imaginary can hold? We go deeper, we love browner, we change the shoreline, we grow.

This writing is how I give you all my air, tubularly braiding our destinies here on the surface of something we barely understand. And why should we? This is BIG, our connection across oceans. Our surrender of pieces of our selves to a future that will float on without us. And our transformative love to be impossible to ignore forever more, to be visible to all witnesses of all species, even the spies watching through satellites. I want the offering of our compassion to all each others evolutions to take up more space in our imaginations than any national nostalgia. I want the brown interconnection of our boldness to change the topography of our possible shorelines. And so here I am offering air until all this good loving empties me out. And I believe you will still be with me when we go deeper than we know we can go, nutritious to the waiting ground as a welcome falling sky.

P.S. I love you and I’m here. Our Black queer and trans-led Black Feminist Film School team is leading a workshop on ancestral remembrance soon. More info here: https://sangodare.podia.com/already-been-done-black-feminist-film-school-ancestral-listening-and-the-color-purple

Note. This image is not from the ice age, this is a 2005 image of a currently melting glacier on earth.

Can you imagine this planet clothed in ice? Embraced by ice. Shaped by the slow movements of glaciers across continents? There is something glamorous about that to me. Like Jennifer Lopez’s character in Hustlers.

I know. Ice queen realness. But the closeness of ice, the slow smoothing impact of centuries of solid flow. I fantasize about that feeling. And I’m not even a person who like the cold. Not even for its contrast. Ask my partner what we keep the thermostat on at home. Sangodare will tell you: Caribbean.

And yet. And still. And not still, but imperceptibly moving mountains, I love that the surface of earth got some of her curves from the slow roll of ice across miles and millenia. I too have grown beautiful exactly where you tried to freeze me out. I too wear ice over so many parts of my evolution. And now it’s melting.

Can you remember what it felt like when your frozen places became rivers nurturing all kinds of life you couldn’t have previously imagined? Do you remember when what was a weight became a rush and you greened all over? That’s what my journey to turning 40 felt like and now I know why Audre Lorde called herself “a high priestess of 40” in that video after the Broadside banquet. (Thank you Mary Lu Lewis, Michelle Citron and the Lesbian Home Movie Project.)

Audre said she let go of all the pressure she had internalized about who she should be and what she should make happen and what other people thought and BABY! Talk about prolific erotic inspiration, talk about dreams upon dreams we still dreaming. I’m so happy to know exactly what she means.

And maybe that’s why I have an issue with dams. Stay with me.

This hotel I’m staying in, in San Fransisco, has a note printed on the bottom of the mirror, proclaiming the good news that we can drink the tap water because it comes from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir and is the cleanest drinking water in the whole United States.

And guess what? I love tap water. Our best way beyond the scourge of plastic bottled water. What usually fills my turquoise tumbler (after flowing through the filter Sangodare bought) is tap water. And I come from public water legacies. As part of the short-lived 1967 Anguillian Revolution, my grandparents prioritized free access to clean water as a collective necessity. Decades later my grandfather (who would have been 110 last week) still spoke of it as their greatest revolutionary achievement, that a poor child, like he had been growing up in Anguilla, could go to the pump and get the water they needed on an island surrounded by salt.

So why wasn’t I happy to read the note on the bottom of the mirror proclaiming I could drink the tap water in this hotel which they must have had to dig real deep to build up this high? And I have been drinking this tap water, even though strangely the hotel also gives out Aquafina.

I’m angry because I’m here in San Francisco, really only for a night on my way somewhere else, and I know how this city has displaced its Black communities. I watched The Last Black Man in San Francisco like everyone else did (or should). And it just doesn’t feel right to me that while the tap water in Jackson, Mississippi and Flint Michigan and too many more cities is poisonous sludge, this violent dream of a non-Black urban exception brags about having the cleanest drinking water. Of course you &^*(ing do.

While Oakland, which I can almost see from here, gets its water through old poorly maintained pipes from the Sierra Nevada and East Bay watersheds, San Francisco gets its water from 187 miles away in the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir over next to Yosemite.

And what is Hetch Hetchy Reservoir? A drowned valley, dammed up.

Millenia ago a glacier carved a most beautiful valley into earth, Cliffs and dramatic edges, a U-shaped curve in the land. And then when the glacier moved on and the ice melted, what a rich and fertile home for the people. The Sierra Minok, Yokuts, Washoe, Western Mono and Pauite loved ones and more tended the valley in loving relationship for thousands of years. And then. The manifest destiny dream fueled by the San Francisco gold rush unleashed state-sanctioned genocide against the Native people of the area in the mid 1800’s including the Mariposa War, inventing laws that called the beloved people trespassers in their own home.

Was that enough? Was it enough to steal the land these communities had made more beautiful with their living? This place that the white conservationist John Muir called “a grand landscape garden, one of natures rarest and most precious mountain temples,”? No. It is never enough in white supremacist capitalism. In 1913 adding more than insult to massive theft, the far away city of San Francisco built a dam that flooded the whole valley, drowning countless species so that 110 years later this hotel can tell Jeremiah Gumbs’s granddaughter to taste the cleanest drinking water in America? Clearly we do not have the same definition of clean.

This morning I woke up with a start. Some weird rerouting of sinus fluid to the back of my throat had me sit straight up to keep from drowning again. And dam. Maybe I should have never drank that water. Where is this happening in my life? What ancient treasures am I flooding for convenience, directing water to wherever the gold reside. Who do I push out of my life because their love demands too much of me, without even the good sense to love myself better in their absence?

I’m only here in SF because it’s a gay mecca. But my queer Black life (and all the lives in pinkwashed Israel by the way) deserve better than this stolen lie of clean. I deserve to be curved where I am. Curved and populated by the interspecies miracle of staying. Because the speculative housing market push-out in this and every other city I know can only produce more thirst. Of course we are unquenchable when we sever our deepest relationships and murder our teachers for teaching us what we most need to learn.

Once upon a time I wore ice and it made me who I am and it melted into every pore and the flow of it still overwhelms me. Once upon a time my curves, a fertile place of welcome growth that could forever surprise me. I call on the high-priestesses and the sages of all ages, I call on the displaced and the reaching. I call on my memory of Spring. A queer symbiosis, an ever changing love, a relationship that grows beautiful in the gaps of where we are. May it be so, again.

P.S. Are you ready to let it flow? Join me in one of these reflective writing courses.

Creator: AleksandarGeorgiev |Copyright: Aleksandar Vrzalski

“When this world peels away, the new one is right underneath.”

-Amaru Rufus an earthseedling child (as told to his mother and repeated to me in a reflection by Earthseed Founding Member Zulayka Santiago)

The overcast sky broke at sunset and the layers of cloud and not-cloud looked like the layers of the earth. Or at least what I think the layers of the earth would look like. But seeing the layers of earth as a visual is an apocalyptic fantasy isn’t it? As they are, the layers of earth are literally inside their own opaque sphere, rightly unavailable to any trick of light, even a sunset from another stage of star.

And it stops my breath to know the the strange clouds billowing over Ohio are dredged up stolen minerals somewhere in their radioactive process, raining back into our water supply to show us how toxic this system is, the one that we’ve stitched across this wounded land.

In all the diagrams that show too neatly demarcated cross-sections of earth, fossils, groundwater, ancient silt, crust, mantle, core, the earth is cut open, overexposed. I feel it like a gash in my gut, which is why I won’t share one of those images here. The rings of a centuries old tree may tell a complicated beautiful story, but I want the tree to live. I’m okay with the mystery.

Or maybe, as usual, this is about me. I want no further wounding. Spare me your curious incisions, too close in reasoning to the drills searching for oil in the oceanic and continental crusts of the earth right now. Stop. So we can live. Do I really have to prove my layers on this planet bleeding out? Stop all the drilling. We wouldn’t need to see the layers if we could learn to feel.

I have to learn to feel these compositional chemically complex layers within me, my thinnest oceanic crust, (still miles thick). The biggest part of me, my multi-various mantle a diverse inheritance of substance under pressure. My lisopheric plates of armor over the muck underneath. What can the asthenospheric parts of me, that slog of me, not solid not liquid not neat teach me now. And what about the hot liquid metal protecting my heavy core?

It’s complicated in here. When I get heated, under pressure I change chemically, physically. Who you thought I was melts and solidifies again. And if you would learn to recognize what’s going on here you have to look beyond looking. You would have to know who I am. Under this much pressure liquid, under this much pressure solid, at this temperature rock, at this temperature sludge and remember too, I am in orbit inside myself. How can you love the parts of me that you can’t see or even touch?

There are other ways though. The reason deep earth geologists feel confident about the substantial differences in the concentric layers of earth is that their best way of measuring what is happening under the surface is by calculating the seismic waves that move through from core out to the universe. They have to listen closer and closer to the vibration of earth. Which is what I am trying to do by learning to listen to myself. Which is what I’m trying to do by loving you. I’m listening closely for how we move through this. Because at the end of the day the sky will break, the consequences fall like acid rain. And I need the solid of you, the sludge of you, the malleable the thick. I need the flow of you the metal. I need exactly this, your melting armor and all your heaviest holding close. Because love moves through us like this. Listen. And so much should remain underground. Remain. A sacred mystery. Universe bless me with a heart better than all the Geiger counters. Universe bless me with a listening worth your iron, your nickel your change. Attune me grace, to all the layers of who you are I’ll never see.

P.S. If you are trying to listen to yourself more closely join me in daily practice. I’m here in Stardust and Salt and/or The God of Everyday.

When the plane descends and there’s snow on the ground, the earth could be a populated moon.

Yesterday when I was looking at the waning moon out my window at home I asked, “why do you turn back?”

Of course that’s just me asking myself a question I’m projecting onto the moon. I know that everything is round and the sun has found another angle from which to brighten the moon. But from here it looks like the moons finds its place in the sun and then turns and goes back into the cold again. From here it looks like the moon found away to fully shine and then went back into hiding one truth at a time.

There is a Macushi story about why women don’t trust the moon. It’s a survivor story. An incest story. Somewhat triumphant but you don’t have to go here with me. It’s okay if you turn back now.

In the story a young girl finds a way to show everyone who is sneaking into her bed and harming her in the night. She keeps her hands in the soot and smears the violators face and in the morning everyone sees that it is her own brother that has been nightmaring her nights, and they send him out into space to become the moon, we can still see the smudges on his face.

Now I do trust the moon. And I can’t 100% trust the source of this story which survives in the records of a colonizing anthropologist. But I would love to know more about this story from a more reliable source, especially if any Macushi relatives or other Carib language speakers have heard this story in circle from elders. (And please support wonderful listeners like the makers of Pantani Blog who have recorded cosmic Macushi wisdom from Auntie Paulette in Macushi language.) I would love to know if this story is authentic because, can you imagine growing up in a community where child sexual abuse within families is not the hushed pervasive terror it is in our current dominant society? Can you imagine what it would be like to grow up in a community where evidence of survivor strategies and accountable community response was a conversation as big as the moon?

We have so much to learn about cycles. Cold is a cycle geologists are still trying to understand. Right now they are digging ice cores out of glaciers and the bottom of the ocean to try to determine how long ice ages last, or more pressingly, when the current interglacial period will end. And of course in the meantime industrial global warming is causing climate crisis and messing up everyone’s math.

Multiple factors impact the relative freeze of the planet: the movement of tectonic plates and the shifting of continents can impact how water flows and freezes and melts. But mostly the larger cycles of earth herself are what determine how cold, how long on the geological scale. Changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun, (they call that eccentricity) how the earth wobbles on its axis (they call that precession) and shifts in the tilt of the earth on her axis. They call that obliquity. Recent research out of Melbourne, Australia suggests that obliquity has the most significant impact on ice age cycles.

Obliquity. Deviance from the horizontal or vertical, or the angle created by such a deviation.

I’m not an expert in geology or geometry so I know the word “obliquity” because of foundational Black feminist literary scholar Hortense Spillers and her essay “The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight: In the Time of the Daughters and the Fathers.” Spillers references Melville’s description of a lamp in Moby Dick to talk about deviance and straightness and the total disaster of patriarchy, specifically in literary representations of incestuous violence in literary work by Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison and others. The essay shows that patriarchy itself is sexual violence, (it just took Black writers to make it plain). And suggests that as Black americans aka survivors of white patriarchy taken to its enslaving extreme (but also inevitable) endpoint, we cannot reproduce patriarchy without destroying ourselves and each other. We have to create another relation. And another way of understanding relation itself.

This is why I will never stop reading Hortense Spillers (or recommending that YOU read her work!) because she takes us all the way there from A DEPICTION OF A LAMP that because of its tilted angle on board a ship sheds light on the “false, lying levels” of a room that was supposedly “infallibly straight.”

Obliquity. Our cosmic never straightness. How can we study the consequences of our angles, our deviation always from horizontal or vertical. Our tilting towards each other. Our way. My favorite abdominal muscles as a person tilted by scoliosis. My every movement an oblique meditation on tilt. A stretch. I want another relation.

I know. Sometimes it feels like I am giving you the cold shoulder, turning my (crooked) back on you, when I just need to reflect, take myself out of this projection for a moment and reckon with the impact of what I’ve done, what my mistakes have to teach me. Maybe this time I’ll let go of even more of the lie of my uprightness, but I don’t know yet what will melt and what will freeze. That’s the thing about the newness of a new relation, it’s like you or like earth, or like me, mostly unknown. But with our hands in the soot and across each others faces. With the lamp of our understanding swinging wildly in this crooked crooked room, what can you know?

That I’ll be back sometime, in some form. Still dirty. Still bright. That I’ll be shook and tilted, but I’ll be around. That I’ll be dreaming a new relation because I love you, even in the cold. Or when I barely recognize you in your sacred deviation. This is our axis aligned with change, this is our distance from the sun in a universe where uprightness never existed. This it the pull, the tilt, the spin, and I’ll be back.

P.S. Sky gazing writers join me daily in Stardust and Salt, a writing immersion.