lately i’ve felt like god-is-change is saying to me something like ‘you can have what you want, everything you want, but you have to say it out loud.’

today i got to visit with a curandera, a traditional healer of the kalpulli izkali circle in albuquerque. and after she worked with me, cleansed and cleared me, she said, now say what you want, to yourself or out loud. i shuddered a bit (how did she know/of course she knows). i knew exactly the words i wanted to say, and i knew i had to say them out loud.

it felt so good. i love this practice, i want to encourage it.

so: i have at least four gray hairs now, and my niece is asking me all about my body. being unashamed and feeling beautiful as a big brown woman in front of babies is radical. i am no longer a beginner living in my body. i know that loving it and listening to it is political work for the babies in my life as well as for myself. i want my body to be a practice ground and conduit for healing and transformation.

earlier i was driving around in the desert, staring at red rock formations and mesas and trying to remember what i used to think a mesa looked like, when it was just an idea in a storybook. mesas and fjords and savannahs and volcanoes. i think i am less an environmentalist than an earth lover, an earth sensualist. i document and protect her as a body i love. i want to keep seeing and feeling this world and falling in love with her.

i woke from a dream the other night in which a boy i knew in college was showing me a poem that had changed his life, that was changing the lives of all the people who read it. it was such a powerful poem – i woke up and tried to write it. i got snippets and rhythms. i want that poem. if it comes back to me i will share it here.

perfect new people just came into my life and several others deepened into our knowing each other, all in some way because of my ‘let it cut more deep’ blog. i want this intimacy – i want connections through vulnerability.

i spent the weekend facilitating a circle of radical women of color in visioning and naming their work around providing support in all aspects of birth and/or parenting. watching them push out past the familiar and comfortable and into the new and needed was humbling, it felt like an important place to be. i want to always work with people living their values that deeply, creating ways out of dark ages.

last night was another octavia butler and emergent strategy conversation, this one perhaps the most intimate yet. octavia butler is such a liberating force in my life. in speaking about her ideas, people have the option to consider their own freedom, and pathways for freedom from prisons of mind, body, heart for all human beings. i can’t tell you how many of these conversations, from small to large, have been alive with tears, confessions, longings, commitments to live miraculously, and that incredible tingling up from within that tells me yes, this is it! i want emergent strategy to be a viable option for anyone trying to change the world.

these are not small desires, but they are true.

do you know what you want? you don’t have to tell me, though i will listen. but say it somewhere.

say it out loud.