There is a potency that only being in the field of active resistance can accomplish. It is exhausting. It is invigorating.
My friends are exhausted. My friends are invigorated.
As I leave Minneapolis, I am exhausted, I am invigorated.
The exhaustion I won’t dwell on too much. It’s the early mornings, the late nights, the packed days, and a city of nervous systems on override. Still. Even though the numbers of ICE have dwindled and sprawled, the need for rent support, food support, the pervasive fear of ICE coming out of the cracks at any moment. It is all utterly exhausting.
And somehow, folks are still invigorated. I am invigorated. I am invigorated by the conversations I had with people across class, race, political ideology, and skill. The conversations of active alchemization from capitalist complacency to uncomfortably finding each other, and clarifying our spine, our purpose, our ratzon. The courageous attuning to another way of being, even though it’s hard!
I am feeling bolstered, to continue to push the lines whenever I see them. The lines that keep us in our ideological comfort zone. No matter if we’re used to only creating change through politicians, or if we’re used to combatting structural inequities through strategic extralegal tactics, I am emboldened to continue to tend the soil that connects each of us. To find the spaces of encouraging people to feel their power to create the world they want to see, alongside relying on petitions and councilmembers to vote the way we know is right.
I am bolstered to encourage those with a platform to expose the misalignment when the Tucson Mayor+Council and Police Department speak about not collaborating with ICE, yet clear the path for them to get in and out of various arrests, stagings, and investigations.
I am bolstered to work with clergy and spiritual seekers in my town to move our faith institutions to reckon with and recognize our complicity in the colonized conditions that have displaced and disposed of Indigenous people and their practices. To use our places of worship as homes and havens for those who are resisting colonialism, while excavating those same conditions of commodification that live inside of ourselves, our beings, our minds.
I am bolstered to attune to the land, the water, the wind, and the fire around me, and open up more spaces for Prayer, for all of us to connect in with the land, the water, the wind, and the fire around us.
How will I do this? How will I challenge the quiet, complacent parts of me to be a vessel for the current of revolutionary re-membering change? but I will do this not by only listening, but also by saying the politically pokey thing in meetings of mundanity. I will do this not by only praying with my words, but using my feet in prayerful action and encouraging other praying bodies to do this as well. I will do this by articulating the Spirit in gatherings that just focus on mind and body. I will do this by being humble and vulnerable, by feeling my interconnected between sky and earth, and letting the Divine Voice flow through me, again and again and again and again.
May I not forget this, and when I inevitably do will you help me remember because, I too ask you:
How will you challenge the quiet, complacent parts in you? How will you encourage the Divine Voice to flow through and tap into and be a vessel for the current of revolutionary re-membering change that is Alive and Potent in this time?
You can do it. In fact, there is a moral, spiritual, and embodied imperative to do so, and I Know you are capable. May you be still enough to feel and remember this knowing, too.
Don’t Buy The Lie by Kashimana and Thomasina Petrus
Don’t buy the lie
It’s gonna cost you, too
When they hurt me, they hurt you
We’re all connected, can’t you see
None of us are free,
till all of us are FREEEE
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.
