I’m a Leo, and I don’t like to admit that I’m scared. In fact, a lot of situations that are traditionally scary to people like public speaking and saying something aggressive to a complete stranger is invigorating to me. I love a challenge and to prove people wrong!
But dreaming of a world that is so unlike the one we know now sometimes makes me want to piss my pants and cry for eternity.
To dream of a world free of white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, homophobia, ableism requires me to be present with the world that is dominated with all of those supremacies. It asks me to look reality in the eye and link arms with grief. As I wrote the other day, grief and I aren’t friends yet…I know I should be friends with grief, but I don’t want to. I feel like Parent Universe is gently nudging me towards a new friend who is eager for me, but I’m being a stubborn toddler and won’t make eye contact.
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From Practicing New Worlds by Andrea J. Ritchie (pg. 142):
“Kat Aaron points out that part of the challenge is ‘being able to sit with the truth of how profoundly our needs are currently unmet, how deeply unsafe we are — with the degrees of varying safety bestowed by varying privileges, and the collective unsafety created by the fact that all of our fates are bound up together.’ As a result, she says, ‘We not only live in fear of change but also fear of seeing the truth of the present.’”
Truth of the present is horrifying. We have been witness the genocide of Palestinians every day for FIVE MONTHS. We are learning of the millions upon millions of people in DRC and Sudan being displaced, exploited, SA’d, and murdered. Cop city and our taxes and unhoused folks and the horrors don’t stop. The truth of the present is unbearable while completely undeniable that there’s only one thing that is worth my whole life.
In Liberatory Imagination, I know from the depths of my being that grief (my unwanted friend) is the foundation.
How can we dream if we don’t grieve the loss of the present? How can we build if we don’t know what we are burning down? How can we sustain a movement if we can’t be present?
I don’t have the solutions. More questions tomorrow.
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