on anger and rage and the heat of protest.... with gratitude to kente circle
Hey friends, this is a talk, an offering, a keynote, some words that I shared at a recent Kente Circle training. I did some editing to make it more reader-friendly, but it is long. It is a speaking of close to an hour, so it’s a reading of the same. I weave between two things here - the somatic connected “we” and the truth that, particularly when talking about anger and rage, there is no “we.” Who can feel rage or anger without fear of attack and who can not is a massive line down our middle, it is a raced and gendered middle, it is about class and bodies, it is definitely about violence. I took out a long prelude that was appropriate for speaking and didn’t make as much sense for reading that talked more about this. Thank god for anger, for rage, for protest.
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For accessibility reasons (thank you all who asked for it), here is a reading of the piece.
But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies. Anger is loaded with information and energy. Audre Lorde
Before reading, pause here, already pause. Notice how you are feeling, what your aliveness feels like, right now, in this moment.
Bring your awareness to the ground, the physical truth of this land below you. Notice the way your weight feels against your feet, against the chair. This is the beginning place, the ground that we stand on, this Dakota and Ojibwe land where I am, this oak savannah and prairie. The ground holds our dignity. It is what we push against in order to lift up. When we are first born, emerging from a fluid life, our first instinct teaches us to know gravity, to know this support that our weight falls against, the support that never leaves us. It is here right now. Notice how your life feels against it.
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At one point this past September, a friend reminded me of a poem that I hadn’t heard in awhile. This poem, by self-identified Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist Alexis Pauline Gumbs, was written in 2010 for Marilyn Buck, on her passing. Marilyn Buck was a white revolutionary and feminist who is most well known for being one of the people who, in 1979, helped break Assata Shakur out of prison.
Part of being a revolutionary is creating a vision that is more humane. That is more fun, too. That is more loving. It’s really working to create something more beautiful. Assata Shakur
It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains. Assata Shakur
Many of you reading this know far more than I do about Assata Shakur and her involvement with the Black Liberation Army, about the move towards armed struggle that some took in those later parts of the 1970s, as the many different wars, on this land and in other lands, seemed like they would never end, when the exhaustion of years of resistance without big enough wins had settled in. I am not starting a conversation about armed struggle, yes or no, or about what protest should or shouldn’t look like. I am listening, though, in these times to the lives of those who have been unwavering in their clarity that the violence of white supremacy, of racism, of a hundred other violences needs to end, listening to their teachings to help me be wiser today. I keep turning to those who are ancestors as well as alive and asking, what gets in the way of our liberation? And how am I part of the getting in the way?
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Marilyn Buck was a white woman in solidarity with the Black Liberation Army, who, as I shared, was part of a team who helped Asata Shakur escape to Cuba,. For this and other charges, Marilyn Buck was sent to prison where she remained until she was released a few months before she died from cancer.
This is the poem that Alexis Pauline Gumbs wrote in honor of Marilyn and I won’t include all of it right now, but I will include one section...:
“Catch” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
For Marilyn Buck in Black August
what is a wall
patient gardener of the word yes
unwilling to wait for the language
we could say it in
*
what is a fist
what blooms in explosion
in excelsis
in the decision to risk everything
and never take it back
*
poisoned decades
flowering furiously
into cancer
*
answer me this
marilyn
*
you who can never again be
interrogated
isolated
chained
*
where do they grow
white girls like you
awake and ready
to catch hell with both hands open
*
what is a wall
what blooms
what is left
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Bring your awareness to the space at the base of belly, just below your navel. If you are comfortable, you can bring your hand there. It’s not surprising how much the mainstream culture, this emergence from Anglo Puritans, the first white folks on this land, brings shame to this space, expecting that adult bodies should always maintain the flat hardness of childhood here, if that was what our child belly was even like at all. This space is where the heat of anger emerges, shown in study after study, across culture and language, when we feel that clear and life-connecting heat,, this is where it emerges from, before it lifts up into the rest of our bodies, expanding into our chest, our arms, our face, our words, sounds and action. This is the aliveness, the heat, of a response that is a yes or a no, because of course, that is what anger is, that is what protest is, it is a fierce yes I want this I want that, I choose you, I choose this life and will protect it, cherish it. And it is a fierce no, not on my watch, this is not ok, catching hell with both hands, I will not allow this, no.
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What we do with this heat is based on what we have learned about it, how our culture, our family, the people around us have shaped this experience.
And the thing about white colonialist fear and rage is that I have nothing to do with it but my body still becomes a receptacle of this unmetabolized woundedness. At the end of the day, I find myself healing not only my trauma but also the trauma of whiteness. Lama Rod Owens
Let us talk, for a moment, about English. Language carries the clues of culture, the underbelly shaping that is in the feeling of a word, the teaching of a way of being. I am guessing that most people reading this were raised speaking English as a first language and that many of you, like me, have spoken English for more than three generations. Meaning, our kin have been shaped by it. I also know that we do not all speak the same English and that resistance includes taking that language and shaping it differently so that we can have our voices. I know there are a lot more legitimate Englishes than just the one that is taught in school.. And still, whether you speak the same English as I do and whether or not your people have spoken it for three generations, most of the bodies who make decisions that impact our lives speak the English that I am writing in.
The word anger is an old English word that means, and this caught my breath when I first learned it, affliction, sorrow, wrath or pain...it’s a word that means a constriction, a tightening, the opposite of what this heat wants to do which is expand… this word carries within it those histories of tightness and control, that has taught generation upon generation, strongest for those whose people are most aligned with the roots of this language, that this feeling, this heat that gives birth to the yes and the no, is an affliction that must be constricted, contained, controlled.
And so a weapon was born. This English.
In Yoruba, as I have learned it, the language spoken in many parts of western Africa including Nigeria, the word and concept for this feeling is ibinu/ibinuje which means a stirrup inside, an uprising.
In Akan, one of the languages of Ghana, I have learned that what we call anger is just described exactly as it is: ne bo rehye ‘his/her chest is burning’; ne bo rehuru so ‘his/her chest is boiling over’ (he/she is boiling with anger). ‘he/she is splitting open’ (he/she is bursting with anger).
In Yoruba and Akan, the sensation of the body is being described, this particular shape of aliveness. In English, the word for anger is an interpretation, not the heat but what I should do with it.
And if you are reading this and speak Yoruba or Akan as the language of your home, I hope that I am using these words correctly. For those of you who do not speak it, but it is the language of your ancestors, I thank them for your life.
To be raised with a language that describes a physical state means being raised with awareness of self. A self that then learns about the meaning of action because action, of course, is based on context. Sometimes we are burning, splitting open, feeling the rising within and we need to act and sometimes we are having a really shitty day and the best thing to do is go walk it off so we don’t take our mood out on someone else.
The feeling in the body is the same - that intensity of yes and no. As people who work with trauma and pain, we all know how much what has and has not been experienced in history determines how we experience the present moment. Knowing that we have the potential to boil over on top of someone who doesn’t deserve it does not stop the importance of our ability to boil.
It is not a small thing, it is a dangerous thing, that the culture embedded in the English word “anger” is one that calls this feeling an affliction that must be controlled.
And thus a weapon was born. This English.
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Pause - notice. What is rising in your right now? Are you reading fast, reading slow, your mind leaning towards these words, pulling back, idling in neutral? What is your aliveness like right this moment?
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At one point in this writing I thought, surely there are other words in English that have more space, surely there must be something that lets this intensity, this rising burning inside, just be its own physical thing.
So I looked up rage which comes from the sanskrit rabhas which means violence/being out of control; and then fury from the old French meaning fierce passion, frenzy, and again, being out of control, and then wrath from the old German which means Cruel. Extremely angry, furious, wroth. I had to go back 3000 years to the Indo-European word for wrath to find something descriptive… this word that means to turn, to bend, this ancient root of of the word we now call wrath, this meaning that isn’t implied in the English word anymore but which has a glimmer of what Yoruba has, being stirred up inside…….
And as I looked at the words and thought about histories moving forward, I thought here it is, Alexis, here it is..here is why so many of us don’t make little white girls like Marilyn, here is one of the places where internalized oppression is born. Oppression comes from the old French, it means to compress, to crush, to push down, in other words to force a constriction, a tightening that didn’t want to happen, on the bodies of other people who before just named it as being stirred up, as a heat that is bursting.
And the words became weapons and thus English was born. A weapon that shapes those of us who speak it by turning our tongue towards ways of being, sifting through them over time and saying this and not that, language holds culture and history and the ghosts of the past settle inside us, even when we are cute, new words emerging in front of parents and other adult kin, becoming one thing and not another.
When we are small, before we have words like anger and rage, we have the experience of this rising heat. This, what one of my teachers calls our healthy aggression, forms our earliest shout of protest, I am hungry, I am in pain, pick me up and hold me, the no, the yes, I choose you, now I know I am safe. As many of us know, how we are held and loved or not held and loved impacts how deeply we believe, in our guts not our mind, that we can trust, that we can be safe with other people. Here is where deep-belly memories of love live, here is where relationship betrayal roots in, here is where our relationship to protest is shaped - I am hungry, I am tired, I am in pain, pick me up, help me feel safe. This is where we learn, not through words but through experience, if we can hold the intensity of this heat as it rises within us, hold it and stay awake and thinking or if we learn to tighten around it, to keep it small or to let it explode because there is no capacity to hold.
And, of course, this small-person learning then weaves in with the things that the adults around us can not control, the truth of whether or not our family is safe from someone banging on our door in the middle of the night to take some part of our kin away. You who are reading this, I know that your childhood also carried dangers inside and outside your home.
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Pause - notice what is happening within you, again notice your own aliveness, each of us reading this who were once children and who were raised with some kind of relationship to this word, to anger, to protest. Some of you have innumerable English speaking or German or French speaking ancestors, the history of this word is your history. Some of you in this room have ancestors who spoke Yoruba, Akan, Ojibwe, Dakota, Quechua, Hmong, and more, languages whose histories have drawn different ways of naming this heat. Notice what is alive in you.
Now notice your breath.
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The first rule of colonization and conquest is to take away a people’s language and traditions so that it is harder to remember who they are. Renee Linklater, a member of Rainy River First Nations in Northwestern Ontario, calls this ethnostress, the specific form of group or collective trauma that occurs when there is a war or a conquest and, in the loss, a cultural community is forced into leaving their memories, their practices, their ways of being or risk completely dying. She talks about ethnostress as an expression of generational trauma.
Is it any wonder that the work of internal opening, internal transformation and change, of remembering and claiming our own sensations and words is a necessary part of revolution? It takes time to unpack the violence of these teachings so that we can feel and deeply believe we can fight for our own aliveness again. This is about knowing our triggers, what brings us to rage, what gets in the way of being in the present moment, of seeing and experiencing the complexity humanity of people around us rather than the stories we have been taught to carry...and it is also about knowing, attending to and addressing the histories that created these triggers, those generations before, being clear about how they are impacting this moment.
It’s about letting cracks come into these english words, these tight words, letting them be poetry rather than regulation, and supporting the aliveness to come through.
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Pause and notice...
What language does your body, your aliveness, most want to speak right now? Is it the language you learned growing up, one that you heard but barely remember, or a language that you still haven’t learned yet?
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In the middle of working on this piece, right after I read to myself the section above, this rooting into heart, a dear friend of mine, they are Korean and they are apprenticing with an elder to become a shaman, a traditional healer. They sent me a recording, eight minutes of ceremony. The speed of the drums, the bells, the sounds, it was fast, a heartbeat after running, jumping, dancing, and I put my phone down and got up and moved along, movement and heat and I remembered that there are three ways that our bodies can shift and change: touch is one of them, like skin on skin, like the way in which someone is deeply tuned to us, you touch me, vibration is another, like the vibration from singing or from being in a space where others are singing, or when we say or hear words that are not words but are moments of spirit and we are not the same on the other side, and movement is the other. Physical movement, a finger that rises because the finger wants to rise, hips that sway, arms that push, all of these things connected to something that is true and not performed, this movement and stillness, when this is what we want, when it is the right thing, is also a form of movement. These are how the cells of who we are change from one thing to another. Touch, vibration and movement, the deep change of becoming, I was taught these things by Suzanne River who has now passed.
As I was moving and with a flash I remembered being 8 years old and being with my friend in her church in Cleveland, a Black Baptist church in the 1970s, and feeling how it was when our neighbors and her aunt got up and began to move, catching spirit, so much intensity moving through their bodies, and I compared it to my Catholic Church, one of the older ones where old Italian and Polish and Slovenian aunties still got up and wailed, cried out, kissed the feets of the sacred statues of Jesus, of the saints, but only the old people did this, not many of them anymore. Us younger ones and our parents, as I remember it, we were embarrassed by their movements, those old European immigrant Catholic churches mostly disappeared now into something that is more quiet and controlled, and I am not saying there is a right or a wrong way to experience spirit, but I look at my own people and notice, we don’t have a place anymore for movement, for that energy of not being in control together without taking it out on someone else, my people know how to form rageful mobs, to move against, harsh against, to travel down Park Avenue in Minneapolis in the days after George Floyd was murdered, in pick-up trucks waving guns in the air, I saw them in May and June and I know they are still there, have you built safety plans with your people, making sure you are safe next week?
I remember one old grandmother, so old that her movements were small, but what came out of her body, the feeling of it was so very very large and when I remember her, I wonder what she was letting move through her, that heat that I can feel in this memory, and I remember the contraction, what I think must have been embarrassment, of the adults around me, old crazy woman, and already I am watching it unfold, asking deep inside, what happens to those feelings, that heat, that intensity if they can’t move? If it can’t move towards and with life, be out of control and not knowing, but be held and contained so that it can move and take us to somewhere we need to be, somewhere we haven’t been yet, or at least bring us back home.
Remember what I said about the ethic of white professionalism and what it manages to hide, even as it seeks to build a space that is supposedly safe for all? Think of how this same pattern of white professionalism, the constriction in the word anger, and then rage and wrath and all of them, this constriction and oppression around it, how this also shapes what we do in movements, how we respond to election, what happens if we can just be enraged, the we being not a shared thing among who we are, if we can just be enraged knowing that this is an anger that might take us somewhere? That this is an anger that isn’t going to make it dangerous for us to go outside, remember every single one of their names. Every single one.
The first rule of colonization is to take away a people’s culture and language, so that they, so that we, so that you no longer have a way to move grief and rage, joy and overwhelm, on their own terms, on your own terms. These are the practices that help us to know this heat, to feel and respond to its many shapes. It is where we get to witness and practice the wisdom of those older than us, those who have learned how to live with this intensity, to know how to expand around it, to get bigger and bigger yet, this is power, of course, this is the meaning of power.
Thank god for the resistance of bodies that refuse to forget, speaking the word anger in English but bodies remembering a whole other way of feeling this heat. Thank god for remembering to move.
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If you are sitting still, go ahead, take a minute, move. Stretch your arms, your legs, twist around, do whatever makes you comfortable move at your own pace...move as you are able…. Stillness, when chosen, when it is what the body wants to do, is also a form of movement. And notice if right now you don’t know what your movement would feel like.
Is it any wonder that aliveness turns to protest and that protest itself is a form of movement?
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The issues we have with anger are rooted in our ambivalence toward power and our struggle to embody our power or agency effectively. Lama Rod Owens
Before I continue, I want to lift up the work of Lama Rod Owens, gay Black Buddhist activist and teacher. If you haven’t read it yet, his book Love and Rage: The path of liberation through anger is a smarter deeper wiser way of talking about everything I am talking about here today, and he includes meditative body-based practices to support your, our deepening, in this place where the yes of love and the no of rage live together.
I want to see a culture of activism where we can celebrate our anger and rage while realizing they are not the issue. Our anger and rage are not the reason why we and the world around are struggling. We and the world struggle because we have misused our anger by reacting to it instead of partnering with the energy of anger to address the roots of why we hurt. Lama Rod Owens
I got into somatic work, therapeutic work, because I wanted to know: what gets in the way of our aliveness, individually and shared? What gets in the way, as Lama Rod Owens names, of partnering with anger and rage rather than turning it into another weapon that cuts our own hands even as it is cutting down violence? What gets in the way for my own kin, two hands held open, and for all of you and our kin, what is different and what is the same? How do I get in the way?
Let me ask that again, quietly and loudly, How do I get in the way? How do I get in the way? Even in this writing, how do I get in the way, because you know that sometimes, maybe often, I do. We do. You get to decide if you are in this we.
Somatic work has taught me, again and again, and it teaches me still, that the systems we want to change out there are also replicated in here. Internalized oppression. Internalized supremacy. Generational patterns, generational grief. . When histories are frozen in physical bodies like trauma, when histories are frozen in institutions and systems, like supremacy, then movement, vibration, touch is here to shake them up.
Agitation can be a part of healing, but only when there is some measure of consent. Agitation is movement, shaking things up, taking a settled pattern and unsettling it. Without consent, agitation has the chance to be violence, although sometimes it is a startle response that can open things that are otherwise closed. Sometimes movement, shaking, is the only thing that will unstick something….. Something…… so that, at the very least, on the other side, the pattern is no longer the same which then opens the space for different questions, different insights and potentially different relationships. This means the space for different patterns to emerge, patterns that aren’t the same as the ones before.
Discernment. Wisdom.
De-escalation work teaches that sometimes, when someone is boiling in heat and is moving to overwhelm, a steady calm presence will help bring the boil down but sometimes it only agitates further. Sometimes what a person most needs is to have their heat met, acknowledged, to be joined in the boil so that there are more bodies to hold it. Only then, only then can that boil begin to ease to simmer, to the place where more information can get in. As practitioners, as organizers, as healers (remember, what others call us more than what we claim), as people who are in relationship with other people, part of our work is to discern, in any given moment, both in the bodies of our clients and in the bodies of our selves, what is the medicine here, what does support look like? As organizers, working to change systems that are grounded in supremacy and the dehumanization of living people, part of our work is to discern, in any given moment, both in the bodies of those we organize with and within ourselves, what is needed right now, what does action look like?
Many a white therapist has supported a white supremacist to feel ok about themselves when what they actually needed was the right kind of agitation. Many an organizer has ended up causing greater harm by doing what they needed to do for themselves to feel better rather than what the moment needed to support the liberation of aliveness, even when that meant being uncomfortable, not knowing what to do, for a few moments longer.
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Embryonic stem cells, or the cells that are there right after sperm and egg say hello, are the cells that eventually become the sacred specificity of each one of us. Embryonic stem cells thrive, grow strongest, when they are shaken. They emerge out of movement, including the pauses between movement when they are still. Too much shaking, and they can not follow their own rhythm, they no longer thrive. Too little movement, and the same happens.
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This is not about politics, it is a question of intimacy. And then it is also about politics, what shapes our protest, what else is moving through that longing to build a world that is different from the one we live in, to stop the violence, to say yes to the deepest kind of belonging that depends on safety and connection? And again, the question that rises up, what gets in the way of liberation? What gets in the way of the aliveness of protest coming through, not boiling over but not constricted down, clear and directed, strategic and connecting?
How do I get in the way, oh my beloved kin who have spoken English for more than three generations, whose people have been shaped for generations upon generations upon generations by the same evolution that turned heat, a rising up, a boiling over into an affliction that must be controlled, oh how much we get in the way.
I will quote Resmaa Menakem who often says that if healing is not connecting you back to community, then why are you doing it? It is not about connecting to community, he says, then it is not about healing at all.
We need to be weapons of mass construction, weapons of mass love. It’s not enough to just change the system. We need to change ourselves. Assata Shakur
When I first became a bodyworker, I was confused. I felt like I was leaving the front lines of organizing where I had been most comfortable, using my body as a site of protest, organizing people to come together with their yes and their no. As the years passed, I realized that I was just changing my front lines. Like many of you, over these past months I have provided care and support for many working and living on the front lines of abolition work, of attending to or experiencing the violence of being unsheltered without care, and of identifying new ways of responding to harm and confusion that doesn’t create further violence and harm. This has meant being with anger and grief, with rage and hunger and desire and longing and numbness and loss. It has also meant being with the unexpected belly laugh and unexpected connection that moves through at the same time.
The original word for trauma, the oldest meaning, as many of you know, is wound, disruption, disconnection. We know that’s what trauma is, it separates us, isolates us away. These histories are embedded in the evolution of the words anger, rage, fury, this constriction and control that is brought in, shaped at the earliest moments of life, this control that separates a self from its own aliveness. It is what shapes any system that exists in a way that denies in the deepest most spiritual and cultural sense the complex and sacred humanity of those people it encounters.
Navigating all of this asks for deep unpacking and healing. We need our elders and healers, our practitioners and caregivers to help us individually and collectively discern what is happening in any given moment: am I driven by the need for control and constriction right now or is this the discipline of right relationship? Why am I boiling over, is there really violence in front of me or the perception of violence based on what I have experienced in the past?
When you ask my daughter what is one of the things that she heard from me over and over again while she was growing up, it is this: everything can be a tool or a weapon. It is context and relationship that determines which we hold in our hands. Ricardo Levins Morales teaches that we have all been taught by good and bad teachers. It’s up to us to discern which teachers actually cared about our lives. Discerning this tangle of history and harm, of relationship betrayal and the dignity of right connection, it takes time, space and support. We all need elders, healers, therapists, care providers.
Discernment. Wisdom. And oh, so much power, this boiling, this uprising, this rise, this is where wisdom is born, it is not an alone thing but a together thing, a together thing.
How do I get in the way?
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And pause. And notice. And listen.
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Non-Black and non-Native kin reading this piece, notice whose words I keep quoting here. Notice whose teachings ground me as I think my way through this. Maybe some of you were born with and raised by people who knew how to support you to have right relationship to anger. Probably most of you didn’t. And for those who don’t remember when their people first began to speak English, you definitely didn’t. Or if you did, you are rare indeed. I am sitting here, listening to my own words and the words of my teachers, and feeling this pain, this grief, this rage inside. Listen to what it means that we, that I, learn about anger and rage from those whose lives are still in danger when they show it.
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“Poetry = Anger x Imagination”
― Sherman Alexie, One Stick Song
I was telling someone about this piece, about the history of the word anger, thinking out loud, and she said that the word I was looking for in English was fervor, from the Old French fervor "heat; enthusiasm, ardor, passion" and before that, from Latin fervor "a boiling, violent heat; passion, ardor, fury," from fervere "to boil; be hot" and before that again, from the Indo-European, root *bhreu- "to boil, bubble, effervesce, burn".
Who says the word fervor, outside of novels and poetry? But she is right. This is what I mean. It’s a word that shares its roots with fever, or the way the body increases its own heat to protect itself, pushing out those viruses and germs that cause harm to this community of cells. Fervor, fervently, with a passion, a fever for justice. My beloved white kin, listening to this, our bodies have to join the burning, catching hell with both hands open, my god we have to boil, everything today is not just words, not just words….when we rise up and join in the heat, then there are more of our bodies to hold it and this, starting from the belly moving up, is where power is born.
This is what we fight for, the feeling of it, the sensing, the truth of greater connection. This is what we notice, what we can and can not feel, what we know in our most sacred places is possible and what we experience in the concrete day to day, in different ways for each of us, what we know is not yet possible. This is why practitioners, therapists, healers who are not afraid of their own heat are so deeply and fervently needed.
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And so we started with the ground, the place where your dignity lifts from, and then notice your widening, this movement even as you read these words, from left to right, like this, from that center line inside you, right there, that midline that goes from below your feet to up and over your head, into all that is, you are in the middle, the sacred glory of your own life, notice your left and right and let yourself feel, reach, sense what other life is here alongside yours in this present moment, your kin that you know and those you have never met, your human and non-human relatives, all of them are here, your left and right stretching wide wide and touching all….
And then from that, from this width, let yourself right now feel behind you, right this second, don’t skip this part if you can help it, feel into the space behind your back, all of the before, everything that has happened before this moment… and this one… and this. Here are your ancestors known and unknown, it is your past, your history, anger expressed and still held, grief and longing and joy, and however you felt when you woke up this morning….from who you were just before you started reading this blog to who you were before any memory became a story, the before and before and before.
Feel into that space at your back just feel it….and then, invite that sensation to not leave your back but to instead move forward, an expansion through your body, move through from the skin of your back, through the density of your body, oh let yourself be thick, to the back of your heart, your belly your legs and skull, moving through, moving and then out to the front.
Right here is the space of everything that has not happened yet, every moment after this moment we are in… and this one… and this one. And now here again, and then what comes next. Here in front, like the air against your face and throat, all of what stretches, can you get a physical sense of it, the space of this planet and beyond, whatever front looks like, in front of you, time yet to emerge, it is not a line but a circle, a series of waves, this is all touching right now against your belly, heart, the skin on the front of your big toe.
This is where that heat, that aliveness, this that starts in your belly and then rises, the power of your yes and your no, this is where it is shaped, from those behind, those you see when you look left and right, and those in front, with you in the middle. We are each in the middle of our own life, but only in the middle of our own life, not in the middle of any other’s, which is why here is your dignity, my dignity, their dignity, each connected to the other through the back and the horizontal and the forward, let it all come together - dignity, connection, history and what comes next… and just sit and let yourself notice your aliveness. Right now.
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And so then with a prayer: may your heat rise, lifting up and filling your torso, your arms, your legs, moving into words and into action. May you be filled, from skin and bones to deepest inside, and may this heat be one that connects you with the clarity of yes and of no. And may that yes and that no be rooted and clear, not confusing to you or to those you reach out to. May you be safe when this heat comes, may you not be alone, and may the power of it, linked as one with many, be something that helps us move from here to the places we can not yet imagine, and then when it is complete, may that heat settle, waves of it washing over and out, with whatever comes next, from tears to giggles to sleep.
May you be safe.
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We have to make justice the most pleasurable experience humans can have. Adrienne maree Brown
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*If this writing was useful to you and you have the capacity, feel free to buy me a cup of coffee (or a meal) as an offering of exchange!