Stepping up here, to the finish line is saying one is done with the rape & dominance part of the walk into humanity. Significant sections of the animal world have—or appear to have in human study and interpretations—power hierarchies with group leadership determined by brute power. We have learned and are learning—as our human emotional and intellectual insight evolve—to acknowledge that many sectors “cooperate,” negotiate and “converse” without force. However we have evolved, we know there are models other than the one that says those best at being violent and aggressive survive. This belief and understanding of Human Interaction and Organization as one controlled and defined by brute force and/or aggressive coercion is no longer an easy default. It does not explain the brutality and militaristic models we continue to accept as primary and necessary. A model spilling domestic violence residue into all aspect of human life. We can change!
Knowledge and insight, our broader understanding of what exists in us and with other life forms in the world, the environment we inhabit, make it possible to contradict the violence-dominance paradigm representation of “human” what it means to be human. We can continue to develop our abilities to think, feel, empathize, project and—most importantly—grow in our empathetic awareness and ability to make informed choices. Group and individual dominance as deciding factors in who eats, who eats what part of the food, who gets sexual bond to propagate (and with whom), who gets to love, learn, breathe, and live free falls outside of evolving human definitions of human, of what it is to be and act civilized—form whole, vibrant community for all beings.
Step Right Up! Be done with rape & dominance! Cross on over, come on over the finish line.
You my peace, your smile satisfaction reflecting eyes, eyes in peace. Deep satisfaction in the belly of life, a satisfaction to quell hunger, eat rage, big peace with joy nucleus. Peace walk the mine fields defusing disaster, peace gather limbs blown away.
Powerful calm peace walk into death to listen to the destroyed—returns with truth. No vengeance, hear peace, no vengeance. Peace carrying arms fingers and toes, walking with death into death listening to the sent, those blown into death. Peace walks with a message, the message is no vengeance, there is no vengeance not bowing down to itself, living, rotting for itself, its silence exploding perpetual motion destruction.
Peace teaches it stops here. Peace teaches it stops here. Every “it” of violent clash stops, opens its mouth and gives voice to the blood shed, and begins the journey ending in peace. Big peace walking into munitions factories eating bombs, bullets and lies, big bad peace strut and prance chewing bombs with spikes, bombs with clubs, bombs with bombs; chewing bullets, flat nosed and pointed, ripping bullets and shredding bullets; eating guns and rifles, rapid fire and slow; eating grenades and jagged edged knives. Big Peace with Joy in the nucleus laughs carrying peace children, siring and birthing peace children.
Luna took the sketch pad she had been drawing on the night before with her to the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum for Art and Storytelling. Her mother had signed both Luna and Baybay up for summer classes. Luna would be there all day until 3pm—her mom said, “idleness needed content and container.” For Luna the words meant “whatever”; never-the-less, she thought the museum was fun and Tspice and Squirrel were enrolled in workshops there too—workshops were what the classes were called. Today in Luna’s workshop they had a guest artist talking about how light and dark defined shape and space. There were slides showing trees, buildings, furniture, and people in different light. After the talk and the slides the students were presented with differently lit things to draw.
Luna thought about light, darkness, shadows and walking through them, how a thing, how a person could seem to appear and disappear. Someone seeing, then not seeing Great-great grandma Hattie could think sunlight was playing tricks with their eyes. Luna noticed when Tspice arrived moving quickly because the collage workshop had already started.
It was nice that the museum was both efficient and orderly, and also flexible. Tspice rushed because of being interested in the workshop content, not from being scared of chastisement for lateness. Tspice loved collage because it facilitated bringing the word pictures in her mind into realness in an alive, visual way.
“Hey Squirrel.”
“Hey Tspice.”
“You see Luna?”
“Yeah.”
“Nature, Ms. Deena said the collage theme today is nature.”
“Nature?”
“Yeah—garden, forest, beach. you know.”
Squirrel had already meticulously cut out several different trees from the Nature and National Geographic magazines in the pile on the table. Tspice watched as Squirrel was now cutting out a rose bush. Squirrel was careful and exact with everything. He had cut the images precisely; same care as he used cleaning the bicycle chain—not simply wiping it but brushing the cleaning solution into every joint, then wiping. Now he cut the gross outline and then the fine detailed aspects of the image. Ms. Deena returned to the art lab, quietly, saying hello, with a smile, to Tspice.
The three friends liked the museum, the people were friendly; what they liked best was that it was an inside that was like being outside. They enjoyed the feeling of freedom the thoughtfully designed high ceilings and moveable walls and changeable room dimensions next to fixed lab areas provided. Ms. Deena told them that David Adjaye, the architect that designed the National Museum of African American History and Culture, had designed the building. They didn’t know who he was but they liked the feeling of knowing he was connected to this building. They liked how the entire space was art. Exhibits were hung on the walls and sometimes the art was part of the wall. A video screen flowing images as if you were seeing the wall moving as you stood watching. And then there was an art installation composed of paper, 1000s of 2″ square pieces of red, blue, green, black, white, brown—every color—arranged and grouped in patterns that formed a picture story filling three wall surfaces around the main hall of the museum.
Tspice and Luna’s classes had been invited to visit when the installation was being mounted. They were amazed by the detailed plans and mapping that occurred. The process was as interesting as the results were awesome. Among their other favorite of favorite exhibits was Faith Ringgold. Seeing the stories they had been read as young children as pictures hung sequentially on the wall was enchanting. A blow-up of eight years old Cassie Louise Lightfoot from Tar Beach flying over their Harlem neighborhood was grand. In these moments possibilities opened wider. Tspice could be a writer, Luna an illustrator, Squirrel an art installation crew leader—maybe they would design a building, like David Adjaye who Squirrel had of course looked up and shared his findings with Luna and Tspice. It started them thinking about architecture in Tanzania, where David Adjaye was born, the Middle East, where he lived as a kid, Ghana, his birth nationality, and London where he also grew up. Tspice said David Adjaye was a geography lesson.
The morning, lunch time and afternoon passed quickly. At 3pm the three friends met at their bikes and rapidly agreed that today they would go to Marcus Garvey Park. Tearing down Saint Nicholas Ave, taking turns in lead, middle and rear position, whooping like escapees even though they hadn’t been confined. Pass 125th Street they veered leftward on 121st going east toward the park. At the park they got off their bikes and half carried, half bumped them on the steps and surfaces they descended, ascended, and curved around on the way to the Bell Tower at the apex of the park.
“You think they will open the fencing around the Bell.”
“I hope so! I want to put my face next to it.”
“You stupid.”
“Adventurist baby, adventurist.”
They all laughed, filled with energy from biking, ascending the hill to the Bell and a full day of doing. Tspice yelled, “Three ladies!” At once, in one motion, they laid their bikes down and sat on the rock mound jutting through this courtyard plaza featuring the Bell Tower and leaned on each other. They were imitating the pose of the sculpture in front of the building near the park. The three women looked happy relaxed and carefree. They no longer remembered how they started this game of imitating, becoming those larger than life figures in vibrant repose on the corner of 121 and 5th. They loved doing it, falling against each other supporting each other in raucous quiet and laughter.
The few other people wandering to and through this Bell Tower plaza paid scant attention to these young playful teens as they went about their own enjoyment of the vast 3600 vista view of the city this high ground provided. In an earlier time this huge brass bell had a job. It was used to alert the fire stations of fires.
Tspice, Luna and Squirrel watched robins, starlings and squirrels, sky and clouds as they thought about everything and nothing. How clouds formed, how cumulus clouds formed into different shapes—some anthropomorphized becoming horses, dogs, goats, or a heart or a boat. They eyed the sparrows flitting in a mound of loose dirt like it was water; then they saw a squirrel scurry up the fencing around the Bell Tower.
“That’s me scaling the fence.”
“You wish!”
“Squirrel! You the squirrel, that’s you on the fence.”
The little shiny black-brown coated squirrel stopped in its fence ascent, seeming to look at the friends, before leaping onto a branch 6 feet or so from the bell enclosure, disappearing among the leaves.
“It’s tomorrow Luna.”
Luna replied, not in words, she took out her sketch pad opening to the drawing she’d started the night before. It showed a busy city street with all things comprising an urban metropolis densely concentrated, like in the kid’s children’s book, “Things That Go.” There were cars, trains, boats, scooters, and mopeds, drones, helicopters and trucks; blinkering signs and streaming video interspersed on and among the people and very tall buildings. At the end of a wide main street that ended at a river was a vertical cloud-like formation; there, a person, partially obscured by the cloud, could be seen.
“Grandma Pearl said Great-great grandma Hattie must of stepped into a time that was future to us even now. It was loud, fast, busy and, when a little flying machine headed towards her, she stepped backward into the place she hadn’t quite left.”
“Where was that?”
“Edenton, North Carolina, fall 1861”
“That time is at the beginning of the Civil War!”
“Yeah, and Grandma Pearl said the Tar Heel State was the last southern state to vote for secession.”
Tspice and Squirrel peered more closely into the picture. “Luna, your Great-great grandma Hattie looks like you.”
“Yeah, Grandma Pearl said I was the “spitting image.”
* Luna, Tspice & Squirrel–excerpt from novella continues; for first excerpt see February 2023 post.
Thanks to us participating in the Peace & Joy—many believe that Peace can’t face down tyrants, aggressors, and madmen. Peace can!
A peace that refuses to live and thrive off the manufacture and selling of weapons will begin the end of war. A conscious journey toward disarmament and the weaning of the United States’ economy off its dependency on arms manufacturing can lead the way. We can begin to transform the killing machines into technological wonders of wind, water, fire and earth power. We can energize our transportation, food production, house production and our ability to be artistic. We can take all that we’ve learned, regard the destructive and ruinous aspect of our development and let go attachment to behaviors we exhibited when we didn’t fully understand our human ability to create things causing vicious horror and hardship.
Let us give peace a chance—let us face the tyrant, aggressor and mad person that dwells within—let us transform us and heal our projections. Let us amaze and delight ourselves with the ease with which we face and embrace our fears armed only with our naked courage. Joy and Peace Work Everywhere!
Can we stop believing in armies and guards and soldiers and policing? Can we clear the road to go another direction? Away from mass displays of power and might in the form of tanks and weapons of mass destruction.
Can we be dazzled, awed and impressed by our own and others’ ability to sing, walk, convert combustion engines to solar power? Can we see through clean sparkling windows; can we be dazzled by water: seas, oceans, streams, lakes, rivers, creeks? Can we open each and every threat? Can we open each and every threat face to face in open trust?
Can we sit with each other and make lists of what scares us? Tall people with beards, unfamiliar shades of flesh, people going hatless in winter and wearing coats in summer; where does our distrust begin?
When, how does exploring and curiosity turn into interrogation and opposition? How do we deescalate hatred fueled by adrenaline fear? Can we open the grip, run the energy?
Can we run and run and run and jump and scream until we can breathe free hear free see free into the face of threat, recognize our face, sit down with our face, rest, eat, talk with our face. Can we continue clearing our road being dazzled, awed and impressed by our ability to just be?
Living Peacefully Every Day
Don’t make another bullet, no ammo holders, no chambers for bullets to pass through. No more bullets, not one last one for one last shooting. Let names fade, let children live; erase the names on those bullets: John, Maria, Shatequa, Carlos, Arianna, Alice, Dimitri, Yaseen, George, Yacov, Susan, Kwasi, Mark, Nihm, Mohammed, Yaso, Harrison, Rachel, Paolo, Yuri, Ahmed, Khadisha. Sand shrapnel, let filing dust strengthen road to peace. Lay water pipe lines with pistol barrels and rifle barrels; irrigate dry.
Bare your arms; reveal your beautiful loving arms. Use them to carry, use them to embrace the wounded. Bare your arms as you build peace. Bare your strong arms as your brain tackles the art of peace, the skill of resolution, the patience of conversation, the task of rethinking. Bare your arms, prepare your arms as you ready to dig through right, move boulders containing your rightness about rightness that becomes your every breath and thought, that you kill for, die for, live for.
Let’s get naked, wrestle with mud until covered completely, until we’re all indistinguishable mud, like the dead and wounded spilling blood and bone. Enemies and innocents, combatants and artists and musicians and skaters and dishwashers and mothers and planters and lovers all; the same blood and bone and torn flesh in every city, town, hamlet, village, in every state, government, country, republic; the same victory, the same tears. Bare arms, become naked in the mud, wrestle with right in mud until earth and dry fashion you into sculpture born of the same mud; soft wet, squeezed through your hands and fingers, slightly gooey harmless mud.
Riffing on this piece written in early 1990’s, one included in Thriving on A Riff a ms. from which several essays have been published on this site, in And Then magazine, and aired on Wbai, Pacifica radio; it hasn’t been published in its entirety.
2023 Riffing dips into and shares past writing to serve as reflection and assessment of current states of being and movement. The title of this essay says it all—the 2nd wave of feminism did not fail me. Sharing it now connects me to this 3rd possibly 4th wave of Feminism. Unfortunately the battering-violence statistics are still true for 2023. Fortunately rape is no longer legal in any of the U. S. states, although legal exemptions and qualification exist in several states. The variety of jobs occupied by women that pay a living wage is encouraging for the independence it provides.
Feminism, The Women’s Movement Did Not Has Not Failed, Has Not Failed Me: Feminist Radical-Feminist Lesbian Radical-Lesbian Anarcho-Feminist Anarcho-Vegetarian-Feminist
The feminist movement provided the woman in the Black Woman me a frame of reference, a perspective to think-reflect-respond-react-embrace-accept-reject-reconstruct-deconstruct and pontificate about harshly, affectionately, poetically, and philosophically. It affirmed-asserted that I as a woman am, that I have a right to my voice and to my being.
This information-affirmation-assertion did not come from any teachers in any classrooms. It didn’t come from my work within the Black Liberation movement and in life against racism and internalized racial oppression. Or my participation in peace and anti-imperialist work. It didn’t come from speeches or tracts. It came initially from sitting in circles of women talking, listening, studying, valuing and being valued as a woman.
If nothing else occurred as a result of there being a “woman’s movement,” the contribution to my life in rEvolution would be precious beyond price. Hence, I will not treat it as whores, concubines, women, and other women are all too often treated i.e., disowned, rejected, relegated to the shadows. It is my movement. And, as there has always been a woman in my black there has always been a black in my woman. The movement of women is not owned by any color or class. The composition of anywhere I sit is changed by one.
The “woman’s movement” this incarnation has impacted attitudes, laws and behaviors in relationship to: reproductive rights, childcare, pay parity, multiculturalism, equal access to employment, women’s studies, rape, marriage, family, sexuality, criticism, incest, health, international policy, structures for interaction and communication; the personal is political! We are the blood of life coursing through the veins of being.
Feminist ideology helped to make sense of my mother’s frustrations that went beyond what my knowing that we live in a white dominated society could explain. It illuminated my mother’s wanting a male child; it explained my inheriting that want. Learning that the society is also male dominated provided space to heal. I could want myself; achievement could be defined by me and reflected by me. My wholeness could exist with or without my having to have or own a child, of either sex.
My family validated the existence of racism, called prejudice; I was given an understanding of not only its wrongness but the inaccurateness it perpetuated. Sexism, which there was no name for, existed as women’s lot in life and had to be adjusted to, as in having a “slit” and having to “bleed.” A bizarre pronouncement that in retrospect seems to have had something to do with accepting rape and being quiet about abortions.
“Black Womanism” allowed me to see and feel my mother’s fears and denials without revulsion or terror so that during her life my speaking of rape, of fear, of need gave her permission to speak. And, at the end of her life I could express to her, without reservation, that I loved her, valued her and that part of her went with me to the circles and was my strength to speak.
Knowing, participating in the political and philosophical development of seeing and understanding the nature of sexism, allowed me to meet heterosexism. My sexuality was neither the box (a slang reference for vagina which allows for the double-entendre of the cigarette ad) or in a box, defined by state needs and property arrangements in the form of marriage and reproduction of heirs or workers for the benefit of the dominating propertied class of white males and wannabees.
Understanding the nature of woman oppression has allowed for the liberation of not only the fettered girl but the awakening of the child-self that exist in an all-powerful state.
Obviously this is not a critique of the flaws, errors, detours and mistakes of the “women’s movement,” which contains all of the ‘isms, some egregious beyond belief in their manifestation and fallout. This isn’t even a critique of its impact and success. It is an affirmation of its existence and necessity. Battering is number one cause of injury for women in the United States. [note – This statistic from 1990’s is statistically accurate for 2023.] Marital rape is still legal in at least six states [note – Marital rape as of 2023 is illegal in all 50 States.] Non-marital rape is a potential reality that a majority of women [still] must contend with. Poverty is systemically imposed or threatened on women of color, elderly, working and marginally middle class white women. Women not only lack reproductive freedom and sexual freedom, too many lack the freedom to even acknowledge the lack of freedom. Political office, political power was created for and is still dominated by white men with the wealth that provides access.
I am now part of a very old language, one that has been as long as we have and will continue that long again. I am part of a circle of generation and regeneration. My we is all encompassing and perfectly in sync with my womb-ness which is wholeness. I see in the dark, walk in the light, fly through the stars and live among humans, other animals, insects, trees, rocks, and smart-bombs requiring neutralizing. I’m neither bored, tired, or pessimistic when I breathe and remember myself and the life that I am living.
Yes, we all need to be Feminist as we become Joy-workers fully present in the joy of our breath.
“My grandmother told me that her grandmother walked through time.”
“Huh” and “what” came from Tspice and Squirrel as they looked up from Tspice’s dislocated bicycle chain.
Luna repeated, “My grandmother told me that her grandmother walked through time,” as if saying it again would make the words make sense.
“We heard you,” said Tspice and Squirrel. “But what are you talking about?”
“My Grandma Pearl said that her Grandma Hattie had twice walked through time. The first time was in 1861 when she was 12. She walked into a place so loud, fast and unrecognizable that she very quickly stepped backward through the time opening.”
Tspice and Squirrel both rubbed the grease residue from the bike chain between thumb and index finger. Tspice returned to trying to get the chain back onto the sprocket. Squirrel looked at Luna, waiting to see if they were all going to start laughing. They all did laugh, but it wasn’t an “I gotcha laugh” come from joking. This was nervous laughter.
The sun was bright above the horizon. It was too early for sunset colors at 5 o’clock in summertime. They would have to go home anyway; it would soon be dinner time. Tspice got the chain back onto the sprocket. Squirrel examined it intensely—not that interested anymore, but not wanting to look at Luna.
“You need to clean that chain Tspice; grit grease is why it keeps slipping off.”
Luna, Squirrel and Tspice were all waiting. They talked about everything eventually—school stuff, home stuff, other friend stuff. Tspice spun the bike pedal, idle not agitated, part of waiting in time frozen. Because Luna just spoke out loud that her great-great grandmother had walked out of Civil War time into the future.
Squirrel’s phone vibrating unfroze the moment. Tspice’s mom was texting Squirrel to tell Tspice to get home. Simultaneously Luna received a text saying the same thing. As usual, Tspice’s phone was off. Squirrel and Luna pointed their phones toward Tspice, both saying, “Your Mama!” Also as usual, Tspice laughed saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” They picked up their backpacks and stood up, preparing to ride home, ready or not.
Luna said, “Tomorrow.” They knew that meant the full story would be told, but not now, not today. At that moment Tspice’s cousin Grigri and Squirrel’s cousin Smile could be seen and heard as they biked into the threesome, oblivious to the moment.
The five biked off in synchronized motion through the park and toward the street. They became a cohesive swirl of incoherent whoops and whistles as they rode alongside and pass cars and pedestrians. At this hour they headed for Saint Nicholas Avenue; it had the least traffic except for near 145th Street. There it was slow, a one lane creep because of double parked police vehicles or cars going to the fish joint. They navigated the minimally dangerous course with unity and exhilaration; separation began at 148th, where Tspice and Grigri kept left; Luna, Squirrel and Smile went rightward onto Saint Nicholas Place. Leaving Luna on Saint Nick’s Place, Squirrel and Smile would continue up toward 155th Street and make a hard right onto Edgecombe Avenue.
Luna’s mind was busy, and stayed busy through dinner and dishes, thinking about how to tell the Grandma Pearl Grandma Hattie story. Grandma Pearl would be gone two years tomorrow—left to take care of her sister across the ocean. The date was circled on the calendar in the kitchen. Luna noticed it on the way out to meet up with Tspice and Squirrel, maybe that’s why Grandma Pearl’s story showed up today. Now Luna had to remember it all and decide how to tell Tspice and Squirrel. She wasn’t going to tell Grigri and Smile; that would be like putting it on blast. Tspice and Squirrel knew how to be cool.
Luna was nine when Grandma Pearl first said something about her Grandma Hattie and walking through time. She wasn’t really talking to Luna in a way that Luna could ask questions, yet she had that look and tone she sometimes got when she was going to tell Luna something important and beneficial, even if the importance and the benefit was not obvious to Luna. Luna was an only child until she was nine. She was often under tables or slouched next to a couch absorbing grown-up conversations. She was also the listening ear for her grandmother’s pontifications about the country, the city and the neighborhood. But when her Grandma Pearl told her the Grandma Hattie story it was like entering a trance; words became very vivid pictures.
Luna had to wait several weeks before her Grandma Pearl returned to the Grandma Hattie story. She knew not to ask about it because Grandma Pearl did not like being asked anything. Direct and specific questions lead to long detours and often included pontifications—how Luna described Grandma Pearl’s talks to Tspice and Squirrel. Luna had learned about pontiff in her religion class, that a pontiff was the pope, the head of the Catholic Church, and his word was a pontification. Grandma Pearl was not pompous, except maybe in her holiday outfit, but she definitely spoke with authority. Had her words been recorded, there would be volumes of pronouncements.
Grandma Pearl pontificated that “the mayor needs to do his homework on the homeless shelter issue.”
They figured out with each other that the mayor wasn’t in school, that “homework” meant research and preparation, and that the “homeless shelter issue” was important.
Grandma Pearl pontificated, “God and goodness is more than a one day Sabbath affair!” Then her words veered toward clean streets and daily tithing, “You do both, give money and spirit. Make it a habit!”
From this Luna, Tspice and Squirrel interpreted she was saying clean up after yourself, and contribute at least ten percent a day to kindness and sharing.
Luna sat on her bed, staring at the bed where Baybay was asleep. She picked up her sketch pad and started drawing the images Grandma Pearl’s story had conjured in her mind, shimmering translucent light where her Great-great grandma Hattie had appeared. To Luna she looked like Luna, once past the distraction of the clothes, the bare feet; her hair was short too, cut very close to her head. But the face looked like her own. Luna fell asleep drawing the vehicles and buildings she imagined her great-great grandma saw when she first stepped through time.
Luna’s mom entered the room her daughters shared; it was midnight and Luna had again fallen asleep with the light on, earphones in, and marker pen in hand. Rosa gently and carefully removed the marker and pad. As she moved the earphones Luna looked up at her, smiled and turned over. Rosa kissed her big daughter’s cheek before turning off the light and leaving their bedroom.
Choice, conscious decision making is a key element in human claims of distinction from other life forms and, for many, claims of superiority. Reading, observation and feeling awareness tell me we’re not that distinct, and the aspect of “superior” that has importance is our ability to control and dominate—and destroy on a mass scale—other animals and the environment we share. We can choose to care & share in abundance.
We have more information from people and cultures past and from contemporary cultures than ever before. We have extraordinary access to our own hearts, minds, and souls—also access to the hearts and minds of others. We have arrived at this access as a result of art, literature, work, and study of those come before us and the synergistic pace of energy moving through our light. This informational sharing comes by way of our computers and cellular devices, through our evolving common awareness and perception because more of us can physically visit each other in each other’s neighborhoods and homes, and increased connection between those of us aware of existence on levels extending beyond physical form. This allows many more of us to awaken and connect in ways that once mostly occurred with shamans, witches, holy people throughout the world.
Living in the cell phone and internet age has increased information available to the literate, semi-literate and those not able to read at all. We can be in our world and aware of across the world in intimate ways simultaneously with text, images and sound. We can be almost anywhere in the world in a matter of hours; less than a day will get us nearly everywhere a map can locate. Whether one frames this as positive or negative, good or bad or like myself neither, more a fact of current existence, we have to increase our learning and ability to be fully responsible and caring for our contact and intimacy.
The dominant choral songs encircling horrors defiling humanity are mostly binary and discordant.
News streams in – live stream, on tape, in stills, in print – constant flow; it begins to feel like, and is a death dirge, an operatic lament. I am faced with how to speak, how to write from the intelligence my “heartmind” understands. In the weeks preceding this essay hundreds of Muslims, in the period of Ramadan (July 2016), have been killed by attacks on public gathering places by a very, very small sect of other Muslims who have claimed singular rightness in practice and interpretation of faith. Two black men have been killed by white police officers. The “reasons” for these killings is not known. I have little to no information about the mind-intellect-reason for these murders, or the heart-feeling-reason for these murders.
Matter – what and who matters is central to refrains being sung out about shootings and killings in the United States. Listeners in a competition for misunderstanding of the lyric – black lives matter, all lives matter, blue lives matter, and do Muslim lives matter. Are women included in black, all, blue. Are children? My youngest sister once wrote, “We love as we love” in response to my writing in an email that I loved her. It rings true in this contemplation seeking understanding and change. We matter as we matter. I matter! What I do and what is done to me matters. You matter, what you do and what is done to you matters.
I do, you do, is done is the we in this one shared earth turf ‘hood.
Black Lives Matter is response and action facing up to a haunting specter of inaction, numbness, powerlessness, and giving up claim to fairness in the face of the specificity of “attack black.” All Lives Matter is reaction. Blue Lives Matter following Black Lives Matter (and we will prove it with legislation) is focused coordinated reaction. Black Lives Matter then reacts to the reactions, and the truth in the specificity of this movement dilutes and rigidifies into false truth. Breathing, breath inside hearing and understanding becomes thin.
From my experience, my reading, my listening and observation, the vast majority, if not all of us living, have been subject to some indignity, some behavior action/inaction that affronts us. Too many of us have been subject to horrors that defile to us as human beings—defiles humanity.
There is need for healing in the core mindheart/thinkfeel DNA. Binary, dualistic thinking will not achieve the oneness of heart that disallows the violation of self and another. The practice of holism requires unity of thinking, feeling and breath.
Several days into the writing of this essay, five, then three police officers were targeted and killed, and two additional incidents of concentrated mass violence resulted in deaths of children, men and women.
Weep and pray, pray and weep; be love, act love, see hear, speak love. Respond, train reaction – compassion inseparable from wisdom; wisdom inseparable from compassion, a means, a model, an understanding to have results look like and be a world in harmony with itself.
Matter appears in Black Lives Have Always Mattered: A Collection of Essays, Poems and Personal Narratives, Edited by Abiodun Oyewole, 2Leaf Press, 2017
