adrienne maree, the luscious satyagraha

i was in a brownstone in brooklyn with this sweet older black couple. he says to me, with this twinkle in his eye, ‘come down and see what i have’. and she says, ‘oh harold. he loves to show off. go on go on.’

he opens a red door next to a bay window, and i realize that isn’t possible. the stairs beyond the door are piles of books. he makes his way down easily, i slowly pick my way down, wanting it all to be more solid. but i’m charmed.

we get to the basement and there is a slender blue black boychild tending a massive table, a table shaped like a continent, growing all over with little seedlings. there are intricate systems of sprinklers over it, and lights hung low and close, little pictures in cordoned off sections of this verdant basement table. there are shelves floor to ceiling farther than my eye can see, full of little packets and pictures and instructions. bees move amongst the green.

it smells like life down here, and i suddenly feel tears in my eyes.

‘you know what it is don’t you girl?’

i nod. i thought he was a myth.

‘and he’s the next one.’ harold nods over at the young man, ‘next seedkeeper. you do this too, i know. i see you.’

somewhere between the basement and my house i leave my scarf and the rain comes back to brooklyn.

—

conversations with the universe

me: give me one reason to stay in detroit, to let it be a home. please.
universe: loving it is enough of a reason. but i will give you two other reasons. (whispers)
me: oh. thank you.

(written by hand on plane, transcribed with a cacophony of frog songs all around me)

i am often now looking into beauty
wherever i am
seeing a falling down around me of cages, perhaps
some bar, some steel, something thought to hold me
or i thought it up to hold myself
through the awakening

when it is a chaos inside it helps to say
i am this
(tired) {known}
and not that
(desired) {unknown}

but in all the space i found a chaos without
a world, a familiar
an unreasonable joy
an unrealistic life
and i have decided to live it

because i don’t remember anymore when the heartbreak started
that emptiness larger than any single slight or withholding or person
but i do know this world will keep it burning and aching
twisting you and i away from any purpose
filling up the sight

i could, and i have, but
i don’t think i was put here to see the world and weep

i have full hands,
my work is to create more beauty
tho…there is enough and so much
so then, to show it, to let it be, and let it out
to conduit that love which is also always present
in this same plane, in this same little world
to notice the ways it is good to be of my species
on my planet
in this age
to remember how to love
all through these forgetting times

i spoke today at the annual gathering of the business alliance for local living economies.

the theme for this session was changing the story. fran korten facilitated, with gar alperovitz, d’artagnan scorza and myself as panelists.

i was selected as a BALLE fellow last fall, and am super excited about their work, although i ended up stepping back from the fellowship because it wasn’t lining up with where my life is going (babies, writing sci-fi, etc) and i wanted the resource to go to someone in detroit who loves entrepreneurship and could really bring the skills home (enter the remarkable jess daniels). they were deeply understanding about it and invited me to still come through to the conference.

i spoke after gar, whose brilliant book i have been reading (and I had prepared some questions for him but he had to dip early), and d’artagnan, who is a serious mlk meets will allen meets berry gordy type brother from l.a. who i have come to deeply respect since connecting in the fellowship.

though my formal work (facilitation, curriculum development) with the detroit food justice task force is done, i still wanted to share a little about what i learned there and what changing the story looks like in my beloved detroit. these are the notes i prepped for the talk, which came out a bit differently, but you’ll get the gist here:

detroit is the ultimate city of changing the story – narrative is the key to our future.

detroit is dying? ‘we see opportunity in crisis’, ‘detroit is what the country has to look forward to.’

time to right size the city? ‘we aren’t leaving the land we have tilled’, ‘now is the time to grow our souls.’ [grace lee boggs]

detroit’s a blank canvas? detroit is a city full of survival stories and brilliance.

noticing stories? we notice stories, we create stories.

my friend mia herndon often says, capitalism is not failing, it is working for the elite. beautifully. but in detroit, lots of people are beginning to practice alternatives, even if we don’t yet have language for it.

the businesses and organizations that we support are ones that honor the survivors, the resilience, not saying they are filling empty space or saving poor detroiters. detroit doesn’t need saving, we need folks to recognize the creative and brilliant ways detroit is still here.

even just what you see – you might see abandoned lots – we see fertile ground. we are detoxifying years of abandonment, corruption, and being forgotten, composting the —- people have spoken about/dropped on the city.

literally and figuratively. we have the fastest growing and largest urban agricultural movement in the country! land mass to compare to l.a. but just over 700k living there. do you understand that scale of potential food growth? but it hasn’t necessarily created sustainable business models – because the majority of the 713k people left in the D don’t want to eat it, or can’t get to it, or can’t afford it.

so the food justice task force charged itself with connecting the abundant food potential to the hungry people of the city – that’s why the twitter handle is @justfeeddetroit – looking at all possible options to feed detroit.

first, wow, it’s overwhelming how many challenges there are, how many systems need to shift. it’s a long arc, a long piece of work. but one of the things we realized was that we needed to change the story at the neighborhood level.

so cook eat talk was a series of events we created where instead of asking people what was wrong with their community, or training them on the crisis, we asked what works? what is your favorite food? who are your food heroes? who is feeding the neighborhood now? where are the gardens? how are your cornerstores and liquor stores, where you get groceries?

and then we could ask, what do you need, what do you long for, what is the new story of the neighborhood?

we heard about grandmothers cooking for the neighborhood, folks gardening found plots. to be real, a narrative and land battle is afoot in detroit, between those who claimed the land when no one else wanted it, and those who just realized it is the most fertile gorgeous place…

we also heard about chili cheese fries. how delicious they are, and the real question from a young person of ‘could they be nutritious’? (audience members told me to try parsnips and string beans btw)

the real question emerged: how do we create a desire for the healthiest food possible, the healthiest life possible?

it’s possible to get it, it’s possible to get the rights to grow it, we have a food policy, we have restaurants and farmer’s markets and grocers and cooks and pantries and foodlab and all the potential for a justice based food system. we must tune into and keep growing that longing, consistently.

the cook eat talk model worked for folks, and people have run with it, even using cook eat talk to have other community conversations. the task force is finalizing a food justice curriculum to use for the next round of programming.

i want to throw in that my other work is in science and speculative fiction, growing our capacity to imagine, practicing the right and responsibility of writing ourselves into the future. which to me falls in line here with moving past idealism and into new practices.

competition is not going to be eradicated with pointing fingers. we must ‘be the change’, we must ‘transform ourselves to transform the world’ – the older i get the more i understand we can’t change others. we can inspire though, we can show that something is possible. we have to do inner work, generate new imaginings, to heal the trauma and change the patterns within ourselves.

we have to practice. understand that every single thing we are doing is a practice. are we practicing old? new? very old? intention, with?

envision the new story, practice it into existence.

—

after this fran asked everyone to reflect on the story they are trying to change, and we created a map of the stories we are changing from (profit is our purpose, any job is a good job, american dream, change is impossible, dystopia), and the story we are changing to (we have many purposes and that biodiversity is good for life, abundance is the default state of earth, meaningful work, dreams for all, change is inevitable, utopia). we talked about how we make that change – naming the vision, practicing, creating art and culture, redefining wellness, practicing, practicing, practicing.

it was inspiring to hear how much this room full of small local business owners grasp these radical love-based thoughts. the great turning feels active.

this is just a little one, a request for your prayers/wishes/love/thoughts/having-my-back/futuring. however you call in good for others, call it in for me.

there are some blessings afoot in my life now that are gamechanging. they are of the life i want, longed for, created space for, held boundaries for, practiced and am practicing for. and now it’s all right there, within and without. happening.

so much is changing, i can’t lock my eyes on the future that’s unfolding (and my virgo predictions are mythology i trust y’all) – but i feel to the root of me that it is good, it’s the life i was made for.

so i ask you to say yes with and for me. i want god-as-change to know it’s a yes.

on june 3 we had an octavia butler dinner in albuquerque, an intimate event, just three of us (myself, host andrea quijada, and ob lover elena letourneau). this format made me kind of want to do it this way more often – the intimacy we were able to achieve was quite remarkable before we even started speaking about the book.

then we moved into speaking about wild seed, the first (and achingly good) book in octavia butler’s patternist series (the first series she wrote). this book is my favorite starting place for anyone who hasn’t read her work.

we had one of those gorgeous conversations where you get to the root by exposing it. a lot of what we shared wouldn’t fit into words. however, at the end we summarized the shareable things we thought/discovered together:

it’s quite possible that gardening and living together and building community together is the most radical work. intentional community is a skillset to develop. but in a u.s. context, individual spaces, interdependent. shifting to intentional living – but slowly. everyone has their own space in it, with shared kitchen, yard, garden.

the interconnection of these communities brings to mind safety in relationships. right now with the balancing between online and offline work and organizing, there is a way we can commune globally. (example given: march on monsanto). we have lost a lot of physical relationships with people, which leaves everyone feeling isolated. but safety is in relationships more than any other structure.

wild seed speaks to the isolation of being a leader, of being special. (how that loneliness piles up, how deep the desire to be met and matched.)

the radical strategy is to love.
we are in perhaps a dark age. our legacy might be that we maintained and remembered the way to love.
vulnerability, attachment, care, attunement, these are the ways we remember. we have to remember to feel.

anyanwu is the living embodiment of ‘transform yourself to transform the world‘.

this book is an incredible exploration of the arc of long term relationship, from the initial passion –> to negotiations and struggle over power –> to transformation.

noticing that in the relationship between anyanwu and doro, that they loved each other after seeing the shadow sides of each other. there are people who are our mirrors and show us what we don’t want to see, and we want to run. we need mirrors. we need also to be able to see and love ourselves. (moved to share nina’s song ‘images’

She does not know
Her beauty,
She thinks her brown body
Has no glory.
If she could dance
Naked,
Under palm trees
And see her image in the river
She would know.
But there are no palm trees
On the street,
And dishwater gives back no images.
- poem by william waring cuney)

loving the body, feeling the potential of breath and self-love and healing in each body is radical. (anyanwu is a study of feeling deeply – perhaps we all have her capacity to heal if we could listen inward?)

we appreciate our bodies when we use them. yoga! breath. walking and being outside doing what it is meant to do. ‘moved to tears using my body for myself.’

our culture teaches us not to love our bodies, that something is wrong. it is radical to reclaim loving our bodies.

gender and body insecurity is interesting too – men/boy bodies usually have to do something to get called names. women bodies just walk in, just people look at us and call us names. doing things for ourselves in our bodies is radical. other gender norms…women have to look good on outside, but vagina always good. men can generally look aight but their penis has to be big/just so. insecurities related to those stories. what does this mean for how anyanwu and doro traverse the world, him jumping bodies, coming to her in any body, with her healing and shapeshifting the one she has.

‘i want all women, all people. to lay on the floor and just feel your body and loving each amazing living part, the living organism of the body.’

what is most radical? to transform ourselves.

**

makes me wonder – what is your secret gift?

this life is miraculous. what if you don’t waste any day, any gift? if this day, this activity is as miraculous as anyone’s very best day and offering…what then is the call?

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.

she, alice smith – because you like sangin’, and original songs, and songs about all the different aspects of love and heartbreak. because alice is on par with the best vocalists singing anywhere today. because her cover of cee-lo’s fool for you smashes.

jake bugg, (self-titled) – because you like bob dylan but always wondered how it would be if his voice was a bit more tender. because you really like simple lines well delivered – ‘broke my heart when i knew/that i could never be with you’.

reincarnated, snoop lion – because it will make you feel like your regular life is smoking weed in l.a. and you’re on vacation in jamaica discovering your greatest self. all summer.

nomad, bombino – because you need gorgeous expansive road music that can play on repeat, and this touches that sacred ali farke toure place.

haim – because sometimes you need dramatic music that harkens fleetwood mac and the 80s and you’ve played your florence & the machine albums too much.

blah, blah, blah, denitia and sene – because you are unafraid of pretty, blatantly cool and well-produced pairings.

overgrown, james blake – because his voice is unique and meta-gender and the album is calm and sexy and kind of feels like bubbling up from a deep place.

ghost on ghost, iron and wine – because you have guests over and you want something warm and cozy and mature and easy on in the background.

passalaqua – because you want some detroit hip-hop that makes you laugh and feel your nerdy swag.

james linck – because though he is harder to find (has some stuff on soundcloud) he’s into making magic electro-soul falsetto music.

indicud, kid cudi – because some songs (not the whole ambum) are magnificent. primarily unfuckwittable and afterwards with michael bolton.

the 20/20 experience, justin timberlake – because it’s smooth and funky and unashamed of being pop. this is going continue to be good all summer.

songs:

queen, janelle monae featuring erykah badu – because it’s actually too good to even talk about. song alone, or video.

#beautiful, mariah carey and miguel – because i am loyal.

what y’all listening to?

Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
as few human or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
has made my eyes so soft
my voice so tender
my need of god
absolutely clear.
–Hafiz

i went to a beautiful talk last weekend at the clouds in water zen center in the twin cities. the talk, in light of memorial day, was on death. facing our own deaths, those of our loved ones, the inevitability of it, the truth of it. it was also on change.

last night i sat with my mother and sister also talking about death, grief, the way that when people die it seems for an instant they are everywhere, in us, in or with everyone they touched.

when talk of death starts i never want to hear it. superstition, fear, the way i love people (where i never feel done with it)….this is who i am. a student of change, but not interested in changes that take away my beloveds, in that pain which presses out from the center of things.

the talk offered the framework that sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair are born from loving and caring for others. this echoed through the conversation with my mother and sister – that all of these feelings are born from the same exact experience that yields the joy of connection, intimacy, wholeness, wonder.

while listening to the talk last weekend i remembered, as if he was suddenly beside me, a brief friend: jai. we met in hawaii and he did powerful reiki work on me. i was processing the dual griefs of death and lost love and he said, ‘grief is gratitude. all i hear from your guides is grief is gratitude.’ that has stuck with me – because it felt true, like a whole thing placed in my heart. and because he took his own life shortly thereafter and so his gift and his sudden absence are forever compressed around him into one important experience.

as things in my life end i absolutely notice how much they meant to me by the way grief doubles me over and wrings me out.

or not.

this is all relevant for me as i continue to be in a life where chapters are ending and new possibilities arise.

my time living in detroit as i have for the past few years is ending, changing. no matter how hard i try i can’t seem to stay there for even a month at a time. between traveling for paid work, babies, family, lovers…my life is happening elsewhere. i rarely see the beloved friends and amazing apartment i keep in detroit. there has been grief as i have considered letting go of my built life there, grief rooted in my gratitude for the love and life i experience there.

but there is past and present. it’s simple in words: to let go of what is past allows new possibility to open up in the present.

what does it look like to lean into this, to see detroit as a home rather than the home? a shared dynamic home? a few times a year home? a past home i visit? i don’t know yet.

i do know that i want and need more resources within my self to feel of use in detroit, more capacity to be solution oriented in the midst of crisis. i hope my somatics teacher training will help me find my right relationship with this city i love so much.

knowing where to root next feels easy – every time i am near the children i am home. i don’t have to tell y’all – anyone who has read a word i’ve written in the last few years knows i am smitten with my nephew and nieces and keep finding my way to them. i want the rhythms of my life to align with theirs for the foreseeable future. we are so in love, and i follow love. it’s how i came to detroit, and now how i am looking at minnesota.

knowing that sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair are on the path no matter how carefully and rigorously and wholeheartedly i practice, i want to lean into the places where i feel uncompromised joy, and where my full presence is not only desired but necessary.

fortunately, because of love, i have many homes.

i have family of all sorts along the east coast. i still know how to melt into a crowd in new york, shuttle between best friends’ homes, and pick a great restaurant. i know how to get from the airport to my parents’ house outside boston, or to the two families i love in cambridge. i can drive from atlanta up to my grandparents’ house on the border of south carolina by scent and sound alone.

then there’s california.

i moved from oakland four years ago but i can’t shake it, it’s home too. landing there, rolling down my windows and letting the sun and bay and mountains in, it always releases something in my shoulders. i have beloveds there, the highest concentration of my partners in coevolution through friendship. and my somatics teacher training is there.

so i’ve made it more official, i have been offered a room of my own with dear friends, and said yes. the bay is a home again.

in this abundance and change, i can feel home inside of me, after a long time of feeling lost with myself. i have let pain carve me out and i will continue to do so. it seems to leave behind a space shaped like a bell, i feel full of tones i can recognize when i let myself get still. a clarity of feeling vibrates inside of me.

this tone only came to me through loneliness. for some time, landing in detroit, i have been more aware of absence than anything else. in the company of dear friends, in my beautiful home, while dancing and reveling in the specific black cultural richness of detroit, i feel the absence. it’s specific – i miss the babies climbing in my bed each morning, and then centering my days and work around their learning and bodies, that feeling so needed.

and yet without the loneliness and heartbreak of the past few years, i don’t know if i’d ever have opened my life and schedule to these children in the way i have. without ‘something missing’ i may not have shapeshifted into such a good auntie.

it has required the death of a certain self, an ambitious important highly responsive doing self. i felt no small amount of grief there too, from my ego, for who am i if not a shaper of history? if i am not good, deeply and constantly?

i think arrogance can grow in the space between smart, well meaning and naive. it has taken me longer than most to realize the freedom of insignificance. of being one who lives and dies, amongst others who live and die.

within that, it becomes clear that the most precious, delicious life experiences are rarely the ones that make people famous or historic. loving and being loved, choosing to be with those who love you, who can receive your love, that is what makes for a good life…and perhaps even a death without clinging.

the changes that come with loving others are divine. to open your heart to another and become worthy of their devotions, trust, vulnerability – to ‘grow our souls’ together! – that is the sacred miraculous offering inside of each day.

last week, the teacher read that hafiz poem, and it allowed some good death inside of me, some submission to what is in the past. it let me notice what is composting, and what is growing. i am allowing myself to contemplate god-is-change, to feel the fleeting fragility of this particular tender life i am in. i am living a life free of obligation and full of willful loving.

and taking risks. letting myself love more people more deeply, knowing the risks. letting it all cut more deeply, letting something mysterious and divine, something i need, touch me at the root.

a four blog day, that’s what it is.

I am in Minnesota. they got this place in the fall. driving up tonight to the sound of frogs, green catching the light cast from the car, wet lush overgrowth pouring onto the dirt roads from all sides, i realize I’ve never known this spring.

I love earth most at moments like this, a new season, a new soundscape.

I left the concrete binding of new york again today, after stomping around and feeling the atmospheric heat and first blasts of air conditioning that confirm spring’s presence there.

I came through Indianapolis, perhaps for the first time. a very attractive coldstone creamery worker heard me sing happy birthday to my grandmother’s answering machine and helped me celebrate. I felt briefly smitten.

now I’m about to pass out. I can’t see the moon through this mist but I feel her. everything must change.

tomorrow I will wake up to the first day of summer for some of my favorite people. I’m right on time.

goodnight.

people ask me questions. sometimes i answer.

question: do you have instructions for running a fishbowl?

answer: yes!

(a fishbowl is a way to have an intimate conversation with a lot of people.)

set up three or four chairs in the middle of a room – these are the fishbowl chairs. set the rest of the chairs in a close circle around the middle. it should be easy to get from any chair in the room to one of the fishbowl chairs.

choose a small group of people as the starting speakers. they should be people who are familiar enough with the topic to get a juicy conversation going. (some people do better if they know way ahead of time that you want them to be a starter speaker, so keep that in mind in planning your fishbowl)

let them go for 15-30 minutes to get the conversation going.

when it’s time to open it up (generally when you can see the unspoken words forming on the lips of people in the outer circle), tell everyone it’s their turn to join the conversation.

the general rules:

anyone in the fishbowl chairs can be tapped out after they speak 2-3 times (…this can be more or less depending on how many people are part of the room and hoping to speak. i’ve noticed it’s hard to have a rhythm of conversation with less than two opportunities to speak, and hard to get other folks to tap in with more than three.)

obviously no tapping someone mid-sentence.

encourage the room to pay attention to who is speaking – you want to engage the difference in the room, however it’s showing up, and center voices of those most impacted by the topic at hand (whether its young people talking about youth incarceration, divas with their nails did talking about the dangers of gels and acrylics, or white men talking about white male balding patterns).

no one can tap back in til everyone (or at least most people) have had a moment in the fishbowl.

the facilitator can stay in one seat guiding and grounding the conversation while people cycle in and out, or float around and encourage participation. most groups can self facilitate once the conversation gets going.

afterwards consider having folks pair up to notice what they gained from the conversation.

voila!

(any additional tips or guidelines you know of? please share them!)