I have said a few times recently that confusion is a colonial tactic. You can get away with a lot of oppression and displacement while people are dissociated, overwhelmed, mis- or uninformed, or trying to figure out what’s going on. The level of multiple crises unfolding concurrently makes it impossible to keep up with everything, even with our own impact on the world. Especially for those of us…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This certainly wasn’t the 2021 I imagined, long ago, when I thought the whole future would be in effect by 2020 — I grew up expecting flying cars and space travel any minute now. But instead of negotiating black hole etiquette with aliens, I spent the year in often overwhelming grief cycles. I cried so much more than I thought was possible in one year. Part of me wants to write you a column that is just a list of the people who we lost this year, lost to COVID-19, lost to cancer, or other fatal illnesses, or police-perpetrated killing, or overdose, or suicide, or mysterious circumstances. Some even made it to a death from old age, can you imagine?
And when we weren’t dying, we were going through the tumult of trying to decide if it is safe to go outside of our homes. Many of us were tired of practicing collective safety practices in defense of those who won’t or can’t. We were moving cities, or to the country, tired of the same walls and landscapes. We were breaking up, tired of the same arguments. We were learning how differently we all define “safety,” and what some of us are willing to risk our lives for. We were learning the depths to which paranoia and mistrust are rooted into our collective psyche. We lost friendships; not everyone could handle the distance or the differences in our survival strategies. We lost organizations; not everyone could pivot their existence into something relevant and accessible for Zoom; not every group could weather the emotional storm of so much loss.
And, quietly, with no shortage of survivor’s guilt, some of us were devastated by the loss of what we had planned for these years. The journeys we were going to take, the love we were going to discover, the school we planned to attend in person, the friends we were going to go on girls/boys/theys’ trips with, the freedom from our parents or kids we were going to celebrate, the kid we were going to have, how lost we were going to get in new cities, the sabbatical we were crawling toward.
There is grief on grief, on top of grief, filled with grief, shaped by grief, held by grieving people.
But I have some good news… I think.
I lost my certainty somewhere in this journey and I am flying by the seat of my feelings and experiences. But that is the good news — we are more clear about how little we know, and how uncertain everything is, and how constant change is, than we have ever collectively been before.
And we are learning so much about how grief moves in us individually and collectively. We know we must get good at grief, because change — both the kind we want and the kind we dread — requires a letting go.
When we really sit with the truth of change, and how much of it is beyond our control, and how much we try to control, we can begin to let go of the misguided idea that we are in control, or that control should even be our goal.
When we sit with the work of grief — the nonlinear emotional journey of facing undeniable loss, a journey which is somehow recognizable even though it looks different in every iteration, in every face — we have to recognize that one day we will be the one who is grieved. And in every one of our current and future relationships, for everyone we love, know, or ever will know, an element of grief will someday enter — one of us will die before the other, leaving the other to grieve.
For me, this all culminates into an overwhelming sense of how precious life is, how precious this life, on this planet, at this moment, is. And how, in order to be in a relationship with life, I, we, have to be willing to let go of the practices and beliefs aligned with premature death.
We have to let go of capitalism, and the accumulation drive and supremacy posturing that it produces in us.
We have to let go of our destructive tendencies toward each other and the planet. We extract from each other, destroy each other — we do the same to this precious and only Earth we know.
We have to let go of thinking there is one way to do everything. I was recently given the gift of these words from Ojibwe ancestor Walter Bresette: “Thinking there is one way to do everything is the most European way to approach life.” We have to let go of that colonizer-thinking, which is at odds with the complex biodiversity of all life. We have to let go of trying to make everyone think the same way and act the same way, and begin learning real strategies for sharing a planet where we will never be fully aligned.
And along the way, we have to learn, with grace, to let go of the parts of ourselves that were socialized by capitalism and oppressive systems of unjust power. As those harmful patterns and behaviors become markers of our past selves, we become more curious, more complex and more compatible with the future. Ultimately, I believe we have to let go of anything that isn’t love.
I wrote a little spell for this particular release, inspired by my late grandfather. I share it here with you for your use, or to inspire your own spells and articulations of letting go:
papa’s prayer
let it go
you will not be here forever
let it go
let it be dust blown from your palm
let it go
the mistake was made
let it go
don’t build that wall of disappointment
let it go
that was your best, this is theirs
let it go
you cannot force anything real
let it go
keep only the lessons
let it go
your hands are smaller than godhands
let it go
you cannot even fully comprehend it – what a gift
let it go
be generous, you have enough
let it go
keep moving towards your joy
let it go
you can still be happy
let it go
live like a river, a long spill home
let it go
this is the only moment, the dream
let it go
with your next exhale
let it go
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In her book, All About Love, bell hooks borrows a definition of love from Scott Peck: Love is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
I love this definition. It is so active. It is about gardening the self and another, tending to growth, extending the self — the time, care, skill, the irretrievably precious moments of life — to the work of growth.
I love that it recognizes love as the same act whether toward the self or toward another, in family, friendship or romance.
This definition reminds us that though love can feel like lightning, and though it is pitched to us as a prize of fortune and spoken of as a pleasant dream sinkhole we fall into by accident, love is not a random occurrence. Love is a practice, an intentional act we opt into from the core of ourselves.
I have returned to All About Love several times in my life, in part because I love the vulnerability of the text, in part because I want to hear every scholar I respect reflect on love.
This time I am reading it with my partner as part of a salon called Black Honey on the new social app Clubhouse. The series features lovers reading texts from Black authors — before hooks, we read Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic as Power.
I’ve read both texts multiple times, but reading them back-to-back now, with someone I love dearly and daily, I feel a resonant message occurring about the taut connection, delicious or debilitating, between love and justice, pleasure and power. There is a tension, sometimes an outright contradiction, between what we practice at the most intimate personal level, and what we need to practice at the most collective societal level.
What does it look like to intimately practice nurturing our growth, claiming our own aliveness? Well, many of us are in that scholarship as pleasure activists, pleasure ninjas practicing pleasure politics, pleasure practitioners, joy pastors, love warriors, lovers, scholars of belonging and so on.
I often get chills dreaming of the kind of society that could emerge from movements rooted deeply in love that is cultivated not necessarily from the inside out, but in both directions at the same time — nurturing ourselves and extending towards the growth of the communities we belong to.
Where do we learn that kind of love, that kind of nurture?
Can we learn it from our parents? The parent could be seen as the ultimate embodiment of this love in our cultural narrative: The parent loves the child unconditionally and wants to see them grow fully into what only they can become, to love them, as Thích Nhất Hạnh teaches, in “such a way that the person you love feels free.” Free to make mistakes, get lost, hurt themselves or others, and recover, grow. Still be loved.
But bell hooks holds up a mirror to show that many of us grow up without the truth of that kind of love. We grow up inside of patterns of abuse that shape what we call and experience as love when we get older. Or we have loving childhoods where we try to hide abuse that happens in school or religious community. Or we get caught up in the patterns of abuse taught in magazines and movies about love, or elsewhere in the culture. hooks challenges us, pointing out that love and abuse cannot co-exist, and reminding us of a wisdom that Martin Luther King Jr. channeled, “There can be no love without justice.”
This definition of love and hooks’ writing around it make me feel clearer about what we need to attend to if we want a society based in love rooted in spiritual growth, versus war for material growth.
When we love our communities, we extend ourselves to nurture the land, the people, the relationships between the people, the dreams, the familial structures, the health, the spiritual growth of the community. This is not a transactional offer, made with the expectation of money, access or power. No, it is an offering of love — the growth itself is satisfaction.
Many of us have been looking for that love within an abusive power dynamic with the nation. I speak from the Black experience, from the queer and increasingly disabled experience, from the fat experience. I have felt the punishment this nation metes out in the name of justice and accountability. I have felt the absence of nurture at an individual and collective level. The U.S. has been, and is, the abusive parent, saying that if we change our behavior, it will stop hurting us — making love transactional, offering shoddy inauthentic apologies, confusing the controlling, dominant behavior of wielding power with the extended, nurturing behavior of love.
As hooks, Lorde, Hanh, King and so many others teach us, true love is non-negotiably bound up with nurturing, relating, with liberation, with growth toward justice — these are the strands of DNA for a human society that can survive its worst aspects. It’s clear enough to echo across love teachers from every background and timeline: Love is a practice that doesn’t have room for abuse or injustice.
So, this Valentine’s Day, extend toward your own growth and liberation as much as you extend toward flowers, chocolate or romance.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.