First: Beginnings from the Unlearning Intensive

It is the first day of a new year and a new decade. And for some of us that comes with anxiety and pressure. What will be the first phone call or text, the first meal, the first outing, the first poem of the new decade and what will it MEAN about the trajectory of the next 10 years and the rest of your LIFE!!!!!!!?????? During our last Brilliance Remastered writing intensive of 2019, “Cycles: The Unlearning Intensive,” we did some work to displace the “fear of firsts” that can often stall us in our process and send us into an overthinking loop that brings back our least helpful default stories and actions.

What if instead of turning a new beginning into an opportunity to judge and prove, we could celebrate the very practice of beginning? What if we could honor any of the infinite things we might do that would remind us that we can always start again? And then do that again and again and again. In the Unlearning Intensive, as we wrote and explored the ongoing conversations in our minds and turned things backwards and inside out, one of the things we noticed is that while systemic oppressions and family patterns of trauma have done a lot to shape the stories we tell about our own lives, we are also powerful storytellers with the possibility of creating new stories, and shifting and turning around old ones. And some of the practices that we want to prioritize allow us just that, opportunities to rewrite and invent our relationships to the people, institutions and processes in our lives. So as a gift on the New Year’s Day we offer you an abundance of firsts. Our abundance of firsts in the group poem that we created together. You can read it aloud as a way of remembering and recognizing that impulse to begin as it’s own miracles. And embrace that, like life embraces you. Happy and/or Reflective and/or Sweet and/or Slow and/or Pondering New Year Loves!!!!

P.S. And if you want a supportive space to write through some of these changes (during a meteor shower!) Sign up is open for Some Changes our online writing workshop this coming Saturday based on the brilliance of June Jordan’s FIRST book of poems, published 50 years ago at the dawn of the 1970s. Info here.

First

by the participants in Cycles: The Unlearning Intensive

First I will listen

First I will love

First I will love myself first

First I will ask questions

First I will look up and reach down

First I will stop knowing 

First I will dive

First I will float

First I will hold my own hands

First I will let go

First I will let go of trying to understand it all before becoming it

First I will rest

First I will lift my head

First I will pour my weight

First I will breathe deep despite congestion

First I will grieve loss

First I will have sweetness

First I will remember laughter

First I will feed you

First I will snuggle you

First I will ask the ancestors 

First I will rest in our wins

First I will sense the winds

First I will expect trauma-informed care in all power influenced interactions

First I will lay hands on myself, singing healing into my own blood

First I will knit something new and re member your hands with mine

First I will feed myself and others

 First I will smile with recognition

First I will exist

First I will ground to balance

First I will trust

First I will surrender

First I will ask my body

First I will have apple pie a la mode

First I will talk to the trees

First I will hold myself and then hold you 

First I will love myself

First I will sing it to the whales

First I will sink my feet into the soil

First I will breathe

First I will let myself receive

First I will leap although there is fear

First I will make offering

First I will plant seeds

First I will thrum my healing song

First I will scream and cry

First I will affirm love

First I will drum and dance

First I will center practices that open my heart

First I will tell the truth

First I will rest

First I will light the fire

First I will look around

First I will pulse

First I will be peace

First I will know myself

First I will listen to my dreams

First I will pray to ancestors

First I will dance

First I will be here now

First I will say thank you

First I will say yes

First I will say no and build in a pause

First I will adorn myself in the sacred

First I will tremble

First I will wait in the dark

First I will chant the sunrise

First I will say I love you

First I will ask

First they will call to me

First I will listen for my true name

First I will see it in my dreaming

First I will listen

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P.S. What’s the first online writing workshop of the new decade? So glad you asked! Sign up is open for Some Changes: June Jordan and the Decade We’ve Been Waiting For. More information here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/some-changes-june-jordan-and-the-decade-weve-been-waiting-for-tickets-87614833325

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