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it looms

ack!

my future is getting a little loomy – its looming in my face. i feel like my brain is beginning to fragment after years of careful focus. every idea that is coming to me is…decentralization, emergence, abstractions and theories and radicalization.

my reading list:
– tananarive due’s the living blood
– beyond resistance: an interview with subcommandante marcos
– selu: seelking the corn mother’s wisdom
– epileptic (a graphic novel)
– an essay on nina simone’s journals and love letters
– uses of a whirlwind (a book on movement, movements and contemporary radical currents in the US)
– 20 us social forum reports
– 212 emails

and people keep asking me, what’s next?

i should sit at the feet of detroit elders and learn about movement for the next 5 years.

but i want to write.

sci fi erotica.

no i want to read – study all the great philosophers again with a new, 32-year old, post-ivy league eye (almost 32 year old, never-quite-graduated eye).

i should write something – an autobiography. which is pretentious at my age. just shy of justin bieber. i should write a how to guide – how to grow into a network. how to hold a us social forum. how not to build movement. who can i engage in writing those?

no i want to do organizational healing, facilitation that reaches the root cause of dysfunction. but am i an expert at that – what am i an expert at? how do i put being curious and interpersonal conflict resolution on a resume?

i should focus on my own health and healing. swimming, cooking, taking care of the chickens and learning to garden for when the apocalypse comes.

i should write an essay on black women obsessed with the apocalypse. i should edit that anthology actually. that’s morose – i need to be positive right now.

no i need to do something with the last decade’s worth of work learning.

or maybe i just need to move in with my sister and be super-auntie to my niece and nephew.

except i have to be in detroit, because i love detroit and i want to document – no i want to be a PART of – the renaissance that is absolutely afoot here.

i want to be a part of everything new and evolutionary in the culture – from how we communicate and heal to fashion to sustainability to magic to intergalactic localizing. i want my own personal health to be a reflection of the health that is possible in the species – and the change that labors to birth that possibility.

i feel like that salman rushdie novel midnight’s children – the voices of my generation in my head, intimately tied to the fate of my nation and home planet, important and negligible and responsible and helpless at this particular moment in history, on the precipice of the next great evolutionary leap.

i feel like my future is in the mirror i keep avoiding in the dark, standing right next to me and like arundhati roy said – i can feel her breathing.

i believe that love is the path to deeper and deeper radicalization. it is impossible to stay on a rigid, conservative, destructive path when you let love open you to the fact that difference is a mental survival process, not a reality. that is to say, you are not a mistake, you are part of the whole, so destruction and hate are self-defeating behaviors, and not worth your miraculous time.

maybe i need to spend the next year meditating. or in silence. but blogging about it. an overdocumented spiritual journey. which, i am arguably already doing.

thank god for my to-do list, tethering me to the reality that in this moment, at this time, all i have to do is finish what i started. i have finite lists, finite tasks, a finite immediate future.

and beyond that?

it looms.