Tag: erotic

Self Love as a Liberatory Practice for the Future

On Wednesday night I got to have a public conversation with new and old friends about self love.

We spoke at Solespace, my favorite site store /community space in Oakland. They’re in a campaign right now to keep the space open after the city shut down their street. Support the space with donations and spreading the word.

I opened by speaking about Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic, specifically the idea that once you have tasted the pleasure of being so fully alive and self realized, you cannot settle for suffering. She teaches:

“once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”

I’m titillated by the implications of a future determined by those who willfully immerse themselves in joy and love for the self. I am obsessed with how love and joy are the actual tools we need to move against the culture of fear and scarcity. We’re experts at deconstruction and tearing systems and each other apart. But if what we pay attention to grows, how can we be more mindful about growing our capacity for love?

I also spoke of building community with those who are also focused on self love and how it shifts accountability. About how I’ve been learning slowly to engage self loving behaviors and disengage from behaviors that harm myself. That there is a way that truly loving myself makes clear how interconnected I am to other people, to this planet…makes it harder to do harm. I spoke of Somatics and healing as a way to understand that I am more than my trauma, that I can be a part of communities organized around collective and liberatory longing. I spoke of how grief has made self love more crucial, because I have to love not only myself, but the ancestors and ghosts I carry, their wisdom.

Jodie then spoke of how self love radically changes what we demand from the world and the future. She also spoke of how people on a self love journey in parallel engage in coevolution through friendship – and how this isn’t easy. It means asking each other tough questions about whether the choices we’re making serve that highest purpose of self love.

Jay-Marie spoke on being a deity amongst deities and how her choices in life, including leaving the bay for a massive black lgbt bike tour of the South, participating in the stunning Say Her Name action earlier this year, and pouring her heart into her music, come out of this exploration of self love. Jay-Marie brought tons of people out, drawn in by the light force she’s generating.

Ashara was our final speaker, and she had us in tears as she spoke about this year of her mother’s death and her own near-death experience with overworking to the detriment of her health. She taught us about family, being present to each other’s real emotions, about learning to do work we lOve without sacrificing our bodies in the process. Her 29 year-old son was at the event and wouldn’t take his eyes off of her. It was deeply moving.

Everyone in the room then paired up and got a chance to just see and be seen, feel the attention of another. I was moved by how much laughter and crying happened during this pairing. Each pair shared their own ‘self love front line’, where they know they need to advance their self loving practices.

Finally we brain stormed self love practices together. Here’s the list we started – feel free to add!

Therapy 
Bodywork
Masturbation (‘an orgasm a day keeps the nothing away’)
Tarot 
Meditation 
Shifting relationship to food 
Learning to say no in real time 
Unstructured time to feel myself, follow my intuition  
Acupuncture 
Notice when I feel alive and happy 
Give myself permission to grow old 
Recognize my body is all I have 
Celebrate self love in self and others 
Jomo…cultivate the joy of missing out 
Self love day!  (Baba’s day – insert your name!)
Sleeping in late 
Waking up early and being quiet 
Silent walks 
Dancing 
Decaf life 
No meeting Wednesdays (or whatever day you choose)
Grow more food 
Care for injuries 
Don’t hate, collaborate
Delegate 
Trust my intuition 
Being in spaces with my community that cultivate healing 
Spending time by the water 
Singing to myself 
Working out 
Playing sports 
Dancing and playing music 
Finding a tree in my neighborhood 
Read more books 
Free writing daily, or often
Less Internet 
Cook 
Work with clay 
Good one on one interactions 
Prayer 
Making home a safe space 
Animal love 
Feeling land and air 
Let myself be danced by another
Have good sex 
Making out for a really (really) long time 
Put hands in the dirt 

Go forth and love ????????????

i know i been changed (travel reflections)

Revolution begins with the self, in the self. It may be lonely. Certainly painful. It’ll take time. We’ve got time. That of course is an unpopular utterance these days. We’d better take the time to fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary relationships. If your house ain’t in order, you ain’t in order. It is so much easier to be out there than right here. The revolution ain’t out there. Yet. But it is here.
~ Toni Cade Bambara

“On the Issue of Roles” in The Black Woman Anthology (pp. 133-135) (thanks janine for sending me this on time!)

i love time.

if there is a constant in this world, something that i feel deeply grateful for on a regular basis, it’s the passage of time and the capacity to see it passing, and see my self changing.

i am home after another week with the babies. i have technically been home 4 days this year. i have felt home every single day though, in montreal, ny, cali, denver, new orleans, dc, and of course that little house in the woods in central minnesota.

i have been so at home out in the woods with the babies, feeling the beautiful ease with which they give me their trust and their rage and their vulnerability – it’s creating in me a really tender different way of being present, with my body and my creativity and my patience. they have such unabashed longing to know and control and destroy and create. it is deeply inspiring to see the level of human emotion that we all learn to manage, for better or for worse.

home with them means waking up to wet diapers and toilet lessons, breakfast, starting fires, playing, cleaning, negotiating, reading, planning adventures and surprises and treats, holding and bouncing and rocking and dancing and feeling both my limitations and my unconditionality and then falling into bed at the end of the day exhausted and delighted with life.

i have been at home in long late night talks with some of my oldest friends, and with new friends, all of whom are intentionally caring about me and moving closer in my life.

i find i need each interaction i am having right now. i am learning that the quality of my presence shapes whether something useful happens in exchange for my attention. this lesson is emerging from work i am doing on my relationship with mortality…in the meantime i am growing my commitment to wasting none of my life and energy.

i have been at home holding space for black women’s reproductive justice with someone nearly twice my age; we recognized each other as kindred. homecoming can happen between two people, in groups, regardless of all the history or distance between us.

i have been coming home to forgiveness, of myself and others. i am cultivating the level of forgiveness that allows closed doors to meld into the wall of memory, allows new openings and possibilities to emerge. i am balancing light that nourishes when it falls on the truth, darkness that is fecund instead of concealing.

time is everything in the work of forgiveness. intentional days matter. and years matter. and then decades matter.

now i find i am different than i thought i was. i am not sure if this is actually change, or just radical remembering. fortunately the effect is so magnificent that i am not sure it matters, the distinction.

i am remembering how to soften my edges enough to move against a tantrum and bring solace, to be in a moment without trying to narrate it, to be honest about how i feel in the moment, to be with people, including – especially – my family. to be WITH as my whole self, the responsibility of all i am in any given room.

i am coming home to feeling my beauty, my spirit and my health in my body…whoo child. i promise to only use my powers for good.

i am lit up by the small miraculous experiences i am having, remembering how to be important to one person at a time, as opposed to feeling i should be important to many.

and of course i have been at home in rooms that were equal mixes of beloveds and strangers, smiling at each other, intoxicated by the erotic scent of brilliance that octavia butler has left all over our lives.

an email from jeff perlstein led to an event in oakland, and now it feels like some awesome octavia butler and emergent strategy world tour with new orleans, dc and minneapolis already touched.

the events have been SO different – in oakland it was a revival. in new orleans it was a close sweet circle of people at the neighborhood story project, really longing for time to read and think together. in dc, at bread for the city, it was more quiet, with reflection on what it means to be radical in that city of extremes. there, a homeless man brought the current apocalyptic parallel universe into the room with us along with a set of challenges on how to hold cross-class conversations that shift us away from charity and towards power in the face of actual hunger and need.

in minneapolis we were in moon palace, a bookstore opened four months ago that quickly filled up with parents and their babies, including my nephew and nieces, who provided the energetic and musical background to our conversation – i got to watch the way parents can be present with two things at once in a way that doesn’t feel diminishing, but is a skill of loving people who need you for their safety.

i am hoping these conversations spark lots of reading of octavia butler’s work intentionally, politically. and that a lot more cities want to have events – in the next few months i’ll be in new york, new mexico, buffalo, back in oakland and minnesota, and of course home in detroit. hint hint.

it feels like i’m home from an accidental second sabbatical, this one focused on connecting with friends, family and soulmates as deeply as last year was about connecting deeply with myself. each of these people and places are growing the pattern of my life, scaling up as i step into myself.

and of course there’s been a soundtrack:
– kendrick lamar
– bruno mars
– ellie goulding – ‘anything could happen’
– rihanna – ‘diamonds’
– kimbra
– miguel
– martha wainwright

and of course audre lourde on the uses of the erotic (listen and let your life be different):

and of course stevie nicks reminding me it’s all good, it’s my wild heart.

and kimbra has been singing me through the journey, over and over again, ‘home is here.’