As I write this, fossil fuels are burning, bird and bee paths are being distorted, and a plane is taking off from desecrated yet majestic O’odham + Pascua Yaqui lands.
As I write this, I am holding the complexity of the destruction that makes it possible to feel the invigoration of traveling to the fierce beings of Minnesota.
I find myself finally consciously grounding in my why of going to Minneapolis now. Almost three months after Trump’s mercenaries have begun wreaking havoc on the ground, even before the official Week of Action was called, I felt a pull to come here, and it wasn’t just my friend and colleague continuously poking me with an invite. The WOA gave me the container, the Coalition gave me the funds, and still, there was this deeper call bringing me to feel life in this Moment of Change on Dakota, Anishanaabe, and Ho-chunk lands.
When the mainstream media gets quiet, when my friends and comrades I’m in touch with are feeling the flurry of emotional and physical angst once the adrenaline settles, when the rhetoric from our government says ‘we have succeeded, and we are drawing down’ yet I’m still hearing reports of 500-2000 agents in the MSP area, I am called to listen, with my ears and eyes and body and spirit, to what is moving through folks who have been involved in the protection of their homes, their families, and their neighbors over these last three months. This listening requires a particular presence that I could only find through coming to be Present with the Land, in and on The Ground.
What is the texture of life as occupation adapts to the badass, spirit-weaving response of the residents of Minneapolis, documented and undocumented alike? What is the texture of life as the organism of occupation mutates, splinters off to suburbs and less-organized neighborhoods?
How do the welcome centers providing food and warm beverages and PPE and bathrooms also act as a Body to hold the impacts of the daily, yet changing, threat and onslaught of violence?
How is the Mni Owe Sni camp, Dakota and Lakota camp that has been set up at Coldwater Springs, shifting what is possible for and in Minnesota on a spiritual level, alongside physical and emotional level?
How can the potency of this return ripple out, as the rivers do, to be a web of protection for those in the suburbs: A vigorous web of inspiration that tethers people, not used to fiercely responding to their neighbors, to each other with courage? A web that unexpectedly and decisively draws people out of their comfort zones, out of their complacency, to see the injustice happening around them?
How is This Moment that web for us all, whether the country’s eyes have been on the lands we rest on or not? With ICE populating at least one city, town, or village in nearly every state across Turtle Island, how do we see what is happening connected to where we are, no matter the difference in scale or quality of brutality. Rather than turning away from the less brazen violence that we are all connected to through mycelial webs and spores in the air, how do we see the inherent connection of violence anywhere to our place in space, across time?
This violence that ICE, BP, and other DHS agencies are perpetrating is the same violence that police enact on Black and Brown folks; is the same violence that our relational purity enacts with those of us who politically, or socially, differ; is the same violence that separates and ideologically elevates Israelis from Palestinians; is the same violence that laid the ground for the comforts and constrictions that made and makes ‘America The Capitalist Freedom’ possible.
Susan Raffo asks, even as and when and if ICE is less present in our neighborhoods, how can the tools we have been building, and watching Minnesotans build, over these last 3 months, bolster us in challenging state institutions of violence under the guise of security? Bolster us in finding safety and security through wrestling and meeting with our neighbors directly, rather than through ‘impersonal state apparatuses?’
So I come here, writing, to ask the hesitant and complacent parts of myself, and the hesitant and complacent parts of you:
Will you get nimbly stuck in the web with me? Which, god-willing, will lead to our infusion with the web itself? The web that roots us into our aligned and everchanging node of action as connection. The web that opens our eyes, our hearts, and our capacity to be with the complexity of comfort and devastation that exists around us in every moment? The web that re-members us into our interconnected agency to burst forth and to rest in organically aligned timing with those around us?
We are 7 days into the Jewish month of Adar, a month that invites us into the practice of prophetic imagination, as my teacher Annie-Rose London says. While we transition from the wet season and move towards the dry season, the rhetoric of ‘changing landscapes’ in Minneapolis makes sense to me. We are in transition, calendrically, climate-ly, politically.
In transition it is easy to fall back into old patterns. The breathful shift makes way for the emotional and physical discomfort that adrenaline quelled. For those with the ability to do so, it can feel somehow easier to turn away from the change. From the unknown. From the exhaustion and invigoration of practicing a deeper, more intertwined, more accountable connection towards each other. To live into the world each of our own prophetic imaginations dream of. Not to deny the grief and despair of the sustaining and morphing violence of colonialism over the last 500 years, but to hold the undercurrents and overlayings of Whole Love and Care that have existed and persisted alongside attempts to suffocate it.
My intention in moving towards the Twin Cities right now is to notice the ways that folks are choosing each other rather than choosing complacency amidst a quelling of daily, urgent responsiveness. When the vigor of violence subdues from the kinesphere — the space around us that our being can sense with all 5 (6!) senses — of those less directly impacted, are folks still choosing each other over the comforts of complacent isolation? What bolsters that choosing? When does it become not a choice, but a necessity to keep feeling the LifeBreath move through us?
[[And if this isn’t happening, why not? What actions can our mindbodyspirit take to elevate and enliven this sometimes dormant inherence of interconnection?]]
Take a breath. “Remember the energy of protecting our neighbors is the same energy as protecting the land that is our life,” Raffo writes.
Notice 5 objects you can see around you. 4 textures you can feel. 3 things you can smell. 2 sounds you can hear. 1 thing you can taste. [and if any of those senses are not active for you, just skip to the others]
You are alive, in this moment, to come into your whole-est sense of aliveness. Whether that means walking about patrolling the streets, sharing songs of resolve and reprieve from the wheelchair you sit in, googling ever new creative outlets for your kids using kitchen products, and/or rooting into prayer as a path of world-changing energy. Your Life Force is being called forward right now.
Hold my hand, breathe my breath, and answer your call alongside me answering mine, each of us intertwined.
We will fight for our right to be free.
We will build our own society.
We will sing we will sing we will sing!
Our own song, our own song.
molly block finds home in fallen gingko leaves, bodies of water, and the crisp feeling on her nose of a cool Sonoran Desert winter night. Born and raised in Chicago, IL (Council of Three Fires territory), she now twirls and whirls her mind and body reverently on occupied Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui lands in what is also known as Tucson, AZ. As a Kohenet, a Jewish community-minded ritualist, she spends her time kissing the earth, singing songs the winds inspire, and imagining and practicing ever-refined ways of relating to and with each other in creating the world we all crave, Now.
