the war never here

my nerves electrified, attempt to jump ship with the slightest whisper of sound. it was only the air conditioner’s clack, clack, clacking into autopilot, though. nothing serious, you see. nothing like the spontaneous plummet of black bombs under their white orders, they shrieking hello as they drop in for an unwelcomed visit. again. and again. and again. and still more. 

war. the only whisper heard there are the suffocated cries of the almost dead, the soft whimper of excruciating loss. 

this is how i know i’m far from it. these nerves terrify easy.

 

what is it like to feel grave uncertainty?

___

palestine,

your ever-rooted people

and your tortured borders,

are with me.

chemical weapons kill over 600 people in syria today.

i dare you to watch the videos of rows of motionless brown children laying on cold dark cement floors in makeshift hospitals. i dare you to hear the screams of Allahu Akbar by husbands and sons clenching onto their dead loved ones. i dare you to witness a child convulsing attempting to live a little longer, to witness a young girl with white froth bubbling from her mouth and nostrils, to witness the lungs of all those half dead violently searching for breath.

what will it take for us, for me, for me, for fucking me, to forsake our comfort to really begin to be in solidarity with people trying so hard not to die? like getting in the street rather than posting shit on facebook, like intervening in public rather than creating “safe spaces”, like making war felt.

if we remain comfortable, we remain complicit.

“In two days, you and the rest of the world will forget about this massacre the same way you forgot about the rest that have happened over the last 2+ years in Syria.”

gentrification or “urban renewal” (really a term used to invisibilize displacement of peoples) is essentially colonialism. when a place has endured a removal of lives, when its new inhabitants have joyfully erased its natives’ forced exodus (or have appropriated it to show progressiveness), when the process of “renewal” has replaced a natives’ culture and history with what is ahistorical (shiny shit that is used as an agent of forgetting), when there are forces of state violence (in this case the cops) protecting the lives and property of its new residents, what is it but colonization?

its appearance is just more comfortable to swallow now.

gentrifying san franscisco

sometimes i have these out of body moments where in the midst of quiet, my spirit is pulled to some place i haven’t quite been. i see something, i feel many. and then i’m back. tonight it happened again.

as i sit here on this sunday evening, reading my book nestled into soft brown couch with big warm blanket, war is happening.

so many with bullet wounds, bare stomachs and steel bars as their only windows.

so many fighting for their last breath, first meal and second chance.

so many with so many others yelling, pleading, whispering “freedom.”

this comfort is ugly.

it arrives with a pool of red sweat and carcass.

it arrives because this land is its graveyard.

it arrives because we crave it too much to stop it.

our comfort has become our only privilege and it has become dangerous.

dangerous enough that we will cry, die, slave for it rather than for our freedom.

dangerous enough to keep us chained to our tv, to our desks, to this couch rather than to the streets, to the struggle, to our people.

dangerous enough to kill us.

and tonight, unlike most nights, i smell death in the comfort of my own home.

“maybe love isn’t enough”

but it really seems like love is enough and perhaps what we think of it- our ideas, experiences and feelings about love are not enough.

our ideas not big enough

our experiences too few and too stagnant

and our feelings mixed up in the former two.

when we try to love one another, our selves and those around us, the trying (i.e. all the sexy, unsexy, difficult and oh so easy) is us in the process of loving- we’re tapping into the deep caverns of our most liberated selves, the selves that knew how to love beyond and before birth.

this  BIG  S T R O N G  UNCONDITIONAL love

is just another form of enlightenment, another form of liberation. and if love is that, if we are trying to love like that then love will not just have its sweets and easies but it will too have those times of heartbreaks and pelagic sorrows- times where we turn away, walk away from the path towards liberation. in those times, we will have to remind ourselves and each other that the path is there awaiting our precious hearts, spirits and feet. it is there no matter how many times we turn away from love, from our liberation, it is there awaiting our coming.

love is definitely enough.

we are on its path.

increasing the consequences of rape.

too often the desecration of our bodies, queer, brown and womyn, are dismissed or the fault of us, the supposed limp and lifeless of society. too often we single-file line to our governments asking for our rights, rights that we think we no longer have the right to demand. too often we are left in those single-file lines, we drop off one by one, tired of waiting and standing for an endorsement or a watered-down bill that too often protects the perpetrator. too often we are told not to take our life, dignity and sisterhood in our own hands and fight back. this time they will not hurt or rape us, they will not marginalize or discard us, they will not determine our fates.

let’s increase the consequences of rape:

steubenville 2013

—

*Please distribute website widely. Share with your loved ones, share with strangers.*

♥ ♥ ♥ Thanks community! ♥ ♥ ♥

to see and live within and beyond appearance is

spiritual awakening,

political awakening,

it is awakening complete.

happiness is a practice.

every day, may i recommit myself to happiness, the happiness of myself and the happiness of those around me, near and far, known and unknown.

learnings from darkness

walking in the shadows, purposefully out of focus, it was uncustomary for me to be illuminated. in dark places was where i found solace and safety, it was where i could not be found. it was where i could not be outcasted either, manhandled into the corner, into the margins. instead i was casting myself out, gently sliding into the crevices where i could not be seen, heard or bothered.

i don’t understand the term “leader” from my lived experience, to put myself so far into the light would blind me, it seems. but to be revolutionary is to be leader in some way or twist, perhaps not like how the so-called-revolutionaries-but-really-murderous-colonizers are characterized or even the watered-down-so-they’re-easier-to-swallow MLKs, Mandelas and Gandhis that our hystory books have taught us about. to be a revolutionary leader is to notice the reality of where we are- time, place and people. it is to listen to and recognize the hystorical moment as such and to act and adapt according to the need of it, the need to move it forward under the propellant of revolutionary intention, strategy and most importantly, the propellant of the many many beating hearts harmonizing liberation all at once.

to be in the light sometimes but not casting shadows, to speak loudly but never over, to inspire the people but to know that they already know, they just need to be reminded, is leadership that i’ve borne witness to but the light, the light is something my eyes are still adjustin’ to.

my strengths as a leader, the strengths that i’ve been cultivating since the days of hiding in the colors of midnight lie in listening deeply to those who i speak to and who speak back, to the time that tells me where we are at, to our people’s hystory when i will myself to know.

my strengths as a leader, the strengths that i’ve been cultivating since the days of hiding in the colors of midnight lie in thinking deeply about what i see and what i’ve been told, about learning new ways and old, about the fantastic and creative places our movement of liberation will soon go.

my strengths as a leader, the strengths that i’ve been cultivating since the days of hiding in the colors of midnight lie in going deeply into the experience of how we sense the world, into the context of why capitalism is designed to hurt us and into the strategy of how we can hurt it back so we can heal.

my strengths as a leader, the strengths that i’ve been cultivating since the days of hiding in the colors of midnight lie in supporting, in loving, in guiding the moment, the person, the people, the comrades, myself.

my strengths as a leader lie in the many many beating hearts harmonizing liberation all at once.

_____

written for a revolutionary study group in Oakland, CA.

prompt for this meeting’s readings- STORM; Tyranny of Structurelessness and Capitalism Destroys Us, Movement Heals Us: what does leadership look like to you, ideally, in political organizing and struggle? do you see yourself being / becoming a leader, politically?  what kind of leader?  what are your strengths or weaknesses according to your own ideas of what good leadership is? if you don’t believe leadership is positive, what other roles or arrangements, do you prefer, politically?

the practice of a revolutionary is

• to make the fight for a better world relevant
• to make the fight for our liberation relevant
• to make revolution possible through communicating its relevancy.