Story 

I believe nothing truly ends and nothing truly begins anew. There is always history, precedent, and new manifestation. The generations behind us and before us.

And also, I believe in the power of ceremonies to mark milestones. I appreciate rituals that help us look back on where we have come from and look forward to where we are going. 

This is such a ritual, co-created with you. This is a reflection on endings and beginnings to mark this last issue of Starlight & Strategy. At least for now. At least in this manifestation.

~~~

I love this photo of the full moon above a march in Philadelphia. It’s from my colleague Joby Gelbspan, who writes over at Outgrained. She sent it to me with this reflection: 

“As we filled the streets surrounding Rittenhouse Square, we paused to hear from a few speakers, with a sound system in the bed of a pickup truck draped in Palestinian flags. At the moment I noticed the moon, the speaker was talking about the end of the U.S. empire, and the endurance of resistance. Looking up, I felt really intensely how much that moon has looked down and witnessed on this planet—so much brutality, so much destruction, and such determined life and resistance.”

I love how Joby’s words remind me of the vastness of human history—the length & depth of it. And not just human history. I think of the history of this planet, and this universe. A vastness of time that I can’t comprehend. But I feel it, somehow, in my molecules and atoms that are the stuff of stars created at the very, very beginning of the universe.

It brings me closer to knowing that this present moment is simply the tiniest speck, an eye-blink. 

Empires fall, cultures collapse, people die, relationships end, projects come to a close.

The moon rises and sets, waxes and wanes, eclipses, and keeps traveling around the Earth. As we keep traveling around the sun.

Someday, the sun will die, and all life on this planet will end. But we are stardust, and stardust will remain. And maybe it will become life again, somewhere else. In another time, in another dimension.

In the meantime, we struggle on, in the bodies and lives we have been given in this time. Many of us doing our very best to move from a place of love and compassion under daily injustices and entrenched, harmful systems.

~~~

As the poet Destiny Hemphill reminds us, the end of one world makes space for the birth of a different kind of world.

I often pull the World card in my Tarot spreads. Last month, when it came up, I wrote: 

“All things come to completion. Completion is not the same as perfection. The World card makes space for mistakes, flaws, contradictions, difficulties. I hold all the beautiful and hard things I have learned on the journey. I accept all that I have not done, or not done in a way that I would have liked. Resolution comes from accepting all of this as part of the bigger picture, part of the lesson, part of what has brought me here and will take me to the next phase of the journey.”

In her book Tarot for Change, Jessica Dore writes this about the World card;

“The Fool’s journey to the World is not choosing between the edge or the center, civilization or the wild, male or female, above or below. Rather, it has more to do with a sacred liminality… [I]t is walking between worlds with as much grace as is possible.” 

~~~

I had no idea what to expect when I started this newsletter in March, 2019, with 153 people on the list. 

Since then, I’ve published 62 issues and this one is going out to 557 people. 

I know that in the universe of “successful” newsletters, these numbers are very small. But that doesn’t really matter to me. 

What matters is that it has been a true honor to be in dialogue with you about the world, the systems we live within, and the forces—seen and unseen—that we contend with. What it means to be human and alive and caring in this moment in human history. And to read some of your own thoughts and reflections on these topics.

My partner and friends remind me, too, that I can’t know the ripple effects of what I write. How perhaps some of you may have carried with you an idea or turn of phrase that you found here, which might have shaped a conversation you had or action you took—and how that moment might have affected others, and so on. That is a beautiful thing to contemplate.

And, together, we’ve made a material difference. Since I turned on paid subscriptions in April 2020, I’ve funneled the money from these subscriptions to organizations working toward the liberation and thriving of BIPOC and transgender folks—about $3,500 in total.

I’ll be turning off paid subscriptions after November 28. I invite you to continue to support the organizations I’ve been sending funds to (Families for Justice As Healing, Soul Fire Farm, Transgender Law Center).

You may be hearing from me again, periodically or maybe regularly, at some point. I’m feeling called to create material things that you can touch and feel. Perhaps there will be an old-school zine delivered to your mailbox? But, at least for now, you can also find me on Instagram (@tamiko83).

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for the attention and support you’ve given this project. Many thanks to those of you who responded to my invitation to add to this final issue. And a HUGE thank you to those who volunteered their time and energy to proofread and edit these issues: Ari, Gabriel, Charlotte, and Patti.

I feel so lucky to be connected with each of you in this way. I wish each of you well in your journeys. In your writing and spirit.

Until we meet again.

Starlight

Three prompts 

Meeting The World

Wonderfully wise Cecily Sailer at Typewriter Tarot offers this spread on the World card. (If you like this prompt and want more opportunities to work with Cecily, sign up for her newsletter and receive a 21-Day Creativity Reset journaling experience.)

~~~

Times of change

On reflecting on beginnings and endings, writer and therapist Vanessa Rosage offers this reflection and Tarot spread:

“Some of the most healing I’ve experienced has happened from admitting I have no idea what to do next. I don’t know how to solve a problem. I can’t seem to make this thing work. I am lost. 

Somehow admitting this often increases the closeness I feel with others. It allows me to grieve whatever I expected of myself. 

Most importantly, I no longer feel alone. This allows me to feel as though whatever I encounter, I have a whole community of people to help shoulder the weight. This gives me hope and I think it surges through each of us as a reminder that we are holding it all together.”

Tarot spread for times of change:

1. What transformation is coming for me?

2. What will support me in this transformation?

3. What do I need to move away from?

4. What will I move towards?

5. What will I leave behind?

6. What will will I embrace?

~~~

Freeing your creativity

If letting go of perfection and expectations is part of your endings and beginnings right now, I recommend this offering from insightful poet and creativity coach Sarah Cook: 

“Relaxing into an easeful position, close your eyes and envision your creativity as a pet whose leash you’re holding onto. You might take a moment to notice anything familiar or mythical, common or imaginary, about this creature. Do you know what this animal is called? Could you draw it?

Now: take your creativity off of its leash. What is the first thing it does?”

Sarah shared with me her experience of doing this prompt herself. I wanted to include it here because the questions she raises resonates with me, around how we judge or have preconceived notions of what our creative process or outcomes should look like. She wrote:

“I was surprised to see that my creativity didn't immediately run amok or even move away from where it had already been standing, which I thought was how it would assert its freedom. What changed was that it no longer moved in a line—the line of a leash, the line of a paved trail; the line of predictability and expectation. It zigged and zagged, sometimes moving according to (as far as I could tell) scent. It was slow, and intentional, and unanticipatable. 

It was, I suppose, like a dog following a trail that’s obvious to them but not me. I can either tug on its leash and say, no, the path's here, or I can let its movements create the path. So I guess the question I’m sitting with is: when am I forcing a straight line when there's something to be discovered via another shape? When might I be jumping to certain words of assessment—aimless, drifting; even the word ‘unsuccessful’ is coming to mind here—at the expense of recognizing a different kind of path?”

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Stargaze

Other newsletters to subscribe to

If you’re looking to subscribe to some new newsletters, now that Starlight & Strategy won’t be coming to you on a semi-regular basis, here are a few more that I find myself eager to open when they arrive:

• Anti Racism Daily. Currently a great source on Palestine, always smart and informative.

• The Audacity. Roxane Gay’s roundups are truly the best.

• Cmoon. Reflections of a badass zen priest.

• You Are Here by poet Kate Schapira. So wise, so necessary, so needed.

• Comic artist Madeleine Jubilee Saito’s monthly quiet breath of calm.

• The Radical Copyeditor. If you want to nerd out on language and justice, this is the place.

• Things That Don’t Suck. I always appreciate the reminder that there are, in fact, many things that don’t suck. 

• Seven Best Things. By fellow poet Jay Thompson; incredibly intelligent deep-dives into seven things each time.

• Ann Friedman’s newsletter. One of the OG newsletters. She is going on parental leave for the next few months, and offering a serialized essay during that time. How cool is that?

• The Unpublishable. Helping me break up with beauty culture.

Also, please keep calling Congress, showing up on the streets, signing letters, and writing and sharing poems for Gaza, for Palestinians, for life, for peace, for justice. And taking good care of yourself and each other. 

Starshine

Announcements from the Starlight & Strategy community

A reminder that for every copy of Poetry as Spellcasting sold between now and December 31, 2023, up to 108 copies, North Atlantic Books will make a matching donation to the Women's Prison Book Project. Just reply to this email to let me know you’ve bought a copy, so it can be matched.

I’m happy that Poetry as Spellcasting is part of the 2023 Brew & Forge Book Fair. For $20, you can get a signed copy (by all three editors!) and support the Palestinian Feminist Collective.

Thank you for reading to the end of this last-for-now issue! I don’t know when I’ll be in your inbox again. Until then, sending much love and wishes for ease, joy, and peace to you.

Beloveds. It is the full moon lunar eclipse, and below is the post I began preparing last month. Yesterday, Israel cut off all communication in Gaza and intenisfied its already devastating bombing overnight. More than 7,700 people have been killed in Gaza—probably many more.

My heart continues to break and break, my anger continues to mount and mount.

I’m getting my news from Al Jazeera. I’m stepping into the space of collective grief and prayer with adrienne maree brown. I continue to call Congress and take action, to pray, and to cast spells.

I sent a post last weekend with a love poem to so many in this moment, and links for more resources on Palestine.

If it feels right to read about portals and ancestors, I invite you to do so below. No matter what, I am sending love and care and outrage and prayers.

~~~

Story 

On Tuesday evening, Patti and I will make a simple, delicious dinner. Maybe murasaki potatoes, mushrooms, and greens. We’ll put a third place setting, fill up a third plate with food, and eat silently. We’ll welcome our ancestors, blood and beyond, those we’ve loved and lost, those whose name we don’t know but whose love and support we feel and honor. And there are so many this year.

In many cultures, this time—Samhain/Halloween/Days of the Dead/All Souls Day—is acknowledged as a time when the veil between the material and spiritual worlds is thin, porous. It’s a time when transitioning from one state to another feels like it might be easier. 

In this time, Patti and I invite those who’ve passed to stay with us a while. To eat and drink with us. To receive our offerings of gratitude and love.

~~~

In Japan, that moment of mingling of the dead and alive happens in late summer, during Obon, which I’ve written about before. 

A few weeks ago, fellow poet and spellcaster Kenji C. Liu posted a painting he made of Bon Odori, a communal dance that happens during Obon festivals. His caption:

the japanese gateway between life and death is communal dancing. i am trying to learn from the pleasure of dancing with and for the dead.

As a child who loved to dance, I adored Bon Odori. On summer evenings in Tokyo, I couldn’t wait to get into my yukata and geta. I’d clatter down the street holding my mom’s hand to the corner park, which was decked out in paper lanterns and lined with vendors.

I loved the street food and games of the festival, but I loved most of all the thudding rhythm of the taiko drums after the sun set, calling all to join the Bon Odori circle. Traveling around and around the drum as traditional songs blared from tinny speakers, I’d lose myself performing the simple gestures with my neighbors and friends.

Little Tamiko knew the pleasure of communal dancing, but she didn’t know anything about the spiritual dimension of that ritual. 

So, after seeing Kenji’s post, I did a little research. 

What I learned was that, because Bon Odori is an integral part of the Obon season when the dead are welcomed back home, ancestors are invited to take part in the dance as well.

In this podcast episode of Uncanny Japan, “Bon Odori: Dancing with the Dead,” host Thersa Matsuura describes a version of Bon Odori from Akita prefecture, which she says is at least 700 years old. The dancers of Nishimonnai Bon Odori cover their faces with half-moon-shaped hats or black cloth. As she puts it: 

“You can imagine as the night wears on, everyone becoming a little dizzy and drunk on the atmosphere. How easily it would be for an ancestor or two to slip into the line up and dance alongside everyone else. Especially with all those hidden faces.

What does it mean to dance with the dead? To feast with them, to drink with them? To spend some silent time with them?

~~~

I’ve written here about learning from ancestors whose worlds ended, the new worlds they built and what we might learn from them.

I wrote recently that I think of this moment as a portal, still, going on three and a half years since the start of the pandemic.

By which I mean all of the ways the world continues to crack open. 

War, the climate crisis, the continuing pandemic, the rise of authoritarianism, book banning, the Supreme Court tilt to the far right, hyper-racial capitalism, necropolitics, and on and on. 

Inside all of the pain and suffering that these times bring, I believe there are possibilities. Openings for change to take hold. For the ideas, dreams, visions of those forced into the margins to bloom. 

I feel this moment (which might be years or a decade or more) is a rent, a tear, through which this broken, breaking world might be flushed out and better, brighter ones welcomed in. 

~~~

Perhaps to eat and drink with our beloved dead, to dance with and for our ancestors, is, in part, to celebrate the body and its pleasures while remembering that such pleasures are finite.

Perhaps it is to touch into an embodied experience of transcendent love. To invite the possibility of feeling a love beyond this corporeal experience, an infinite, nonlinear love that connects us to all other beings, in this world and beyond.

Perhaps it is to become more intimate with the cyclical nature of our existence, to remember and feel how an ending is a beginning is an ending is a beginning.

~~~

What I remember most about Bon Odori dancing as a child was how I felt invited into the circle. 

In 1970s Japan, my multiracial family always stood out. On the trains, on the streets, in the stores, we were gaijin, foreigners. My earliest memories are of feeling different and strange—to myself and all those around me. 

But in the Bon Odori circle, I was an unremarkable part of the whole. 

I was part of the dance that never seemed to end as we went around and around the drummer in the center, repeating the same movements again and again. 

I was in my body, neither gaijin nor nihonjin, or both and everything. I was neither alive nor dead but perhaps both. 

I danced, seemingly forever, with my family, my neighbors, my best friends, the spirits of the land, my ancient ancestors who whispered, we are home, we are home, welcome home. 

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Special Announcement

Dearest reader,

I’ve been writing Starlight & Strategy for more than three years. And whether you’ve been here from the start, or just subscribed, I’m so grateful for your attention and energy. You’ve helped me learn—about myself, this world we share, and the craft of nonfiction prose.

For a while, I’ve been feeling an invitation to shift what I’m doing with this newsletter. And I think this time of portals and transitions is a good time to start this shift.

I don’t have a clear sense of what the shift will be, but I know I will be taking a hiatus after next month’s issue. This may be a permanent hiatus, or not. We’ll see.

Here are some logistical details:

• For those of you who have supported this project as paid subscribers, I’ll be turning off paid subscriptions after November 28. I invite you to continue to support the organizations I’ve been sending funds to (Families for Justice As Healing, Soul Fire Farm, Transgender Law Center).

• I won’t be shutting this Substack newsletter down entirely, so you may still hear from me once in a while. There’s no action you need to take to stay on this newsletter.

And finally, I’d love to highlight YOU, Starlight & Strategy readers, in the next issue. Specifically, I’d love to feature:

• Your answers to: What opportunities do you see in endings? What new things have arisen from endings in your life?

• A writing prompt or tarot spread.

• A photo or song you love.

• A link to a resource you want to share.

If you’d like to take part, please reply to this email with any of these items, or fill out this form by Nov 15.

Starlight

A prompt 

Try your own version of a silent dinner, communal dance party, altar for the dead, or other ritual on Oct 31 or Nov 1 to invite your ancestors to stay with you a while. 

If it feels right, invite your ancestors to communicate with you. Take some time to write what comes. 

Or, a day or two later, describe the ritual—the physical, spiritual, and emotional experience of it. Turn it into a poem, an essay, a short story. Be open to being surprised. 

Stargaze

What I’m reading and listening to

Over the past few months, I’ve read A LOT of books! I have been enjoying reliving my childhood pleasure of going to the library and checking out huge stacks of books. Some of the books that have stayed with me are:

• A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers. I kept thinking this book was like a (M)olly Costello art piece come to life. A beautiful evocation of what is possible, with plenty of humor along the way.

• True Biz, by Sara Nović. I’ve never read a novel in and of Deaf culture. It was both educational and an engrossing plot.

• Sorrowland, by Rivers Solomon. A deeply satisfying, harrowing, gorgeous sci-fi queer Black revolutionary novel.

• How to Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis. The main point: your house should take care of you; you don’t need to take care of your house. This has completely changed my relationship to chores—or as Davis has renamed it, care tasks.

• Wag: The Science of Making Your Dog Happy, by Zazie Todd. As I go further into learning about fear-free training and how to learn and understand my pup more, this has been a great grounding text.

Starshine

Announcements from the Starlight & Strategy community

• I’m excited to announce that for every copy of Poetry as Spellcasting sold between now and December 31, 2023, up to 108 copies, North Atlantic Books will make a matching donation to the Women's Prison Book Project. Just reply to this email to let me know you’ve bought a copy, so it can be matched.

• Poetry as Spellcasting is coming to Durham, NC! Join us on 11/18 at 5:30 at the NorthStar Church of the Arts for an evening of poetry and spellcasting toward liberation. Featuring all three co-editors, Destiny Hemphill, Lisbeth White, and I; and contributor Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

• We (the co-editors of Poetry as Spellcasting) had the pleasure of speaking with Amy Torok on the Missing Witches podcast recently. You can listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.

• I can’t wait to get my hands on fellow poet Kate Schapira’s forthcoming nonfiction book, Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth. It’s a book of stories, reflections and exercises that people can use to live within climate change with purpose and care, available for pre-order now.

Do you have an event, a book, an album, a gallery showing, a theater production, an action, a rally, a retreat, a podcast or other artistic/spiritual/activist announcement you’d like to share with this community? Send it my way!

Thank you for reading to the end! I’ll be back with perhaps the last, or last-for-a-while, issue of Starlight & Strategy in your inbox on November 27. Look for it—a noncapitalist island among all the Cyber Monday emails that might be flooding it that day. LOL. In the meantime, I wish you beautiful moments of silence and communion with what lies beyond.

Dearests,

I write to you not on a full moon because right now, the Israeli government is committing genocide against the Palestinian people, and I must act from where I am.

Last weekend, fellow poet Jane Wong and I led a workshop on poetry as spellcasting toward abolition. Collectively, we read Aracelis Girmay’s vast, kaleidoscopic love poem, “You Are Who I Love,” and then we wrote our own litany or list poem using her refrain.

Lying in bed the other night, meditating on what Starlight & Strategy can offer in this moment, I heard those words: “you are who I love.”

In this moment of so much anger, trauma, hurt, and horror, we need as much love as we can muster.

There are so many courageous, wise, beautiful souls who are speaking out, organizing, and leading in this moment. There are so many who are confused, afraid, grieving, angry, surviving, and dying right now.

I wrote a love poem for all of them; for you.

We also need information and inspiration in this moment, so I’ve included a few links within the poem for you to follow as you choose. (If you would like a more straightforward and comprehensive list of resources on Palestine, here’s one I found.)

Salt and sand and wind and blood and bone

After Aracelis Girmay

You are who I love, picking your way through the rubble of concrete and metal, past the crumpled razor wire into blue air, sirens, and dust
You, greeting the sun which, somehow, keeps rising on another impossible day of bombs, blood, and thirst

You are who I love, wailing and clutching your chest
Your daughters—gone, mother—gone, son, father—gone, sisters—gone, brother—gone, aunt, uncle, aunt, aunt, uncle, cousin, cousin, cousin, beloveds—gone, gone, gone
You wailing a grief that will never end, grief as long as the curving river, as deep as the salted sea

You typing feverishly into the night, writing to the world the only thing to say: we are human, we are human, we are of the land, we are salt and sand and wind and blood and bone

You are who I love

You handing your baby a slice of apple in the middle of the march, a handwritten cardboard sign propped on top of her stroller: THIS JEWISH FAMILY SAYS FREE PALESTINE

You are who I love, cooking a pot of chickpea stew to nourish your friends while responding to texts from student organizers

You are who I love, posting memes, quotes, statements, pages from books of poetry—even when you feel you are shouting into the echo chamber, even when showered with enraged messages from strangers

You explaining once again the long history of colonization and occupation

You are who I love, remembering out loud the family you stayed with in Gaza, how they offered you tea and laughter and more tea

You are who I love, unable to sleep because of the children, the children, the children

You are who I love, picking out oranges and onions in the grocery store, your limbs heavy with grief and rage

You are who I love, invoking Darwish and June, Davis and Grace

You are who I love, calling Congress every afternoon at 3 pm

You are who I love, holding a press conference in front of the scene of carnage, forcing the world to see what has become a daily reality for you
You, reporting and reporting and reporting under the hail of bombs and rockets

You are who I love, calling on your Asian American kin to make connections, to understand the Palestinian occupation in the context of global imperialism and colonialism

You are who I love, drafting a resolution calling for the end of bloodshed, introducing it on the floor of a fractured House
You, sitting on the floor of Congress with hundreds of fellow Jews, singing and chanting in civil disobedience, demanding the end to the genocide in Gaza

You are who I love, grieving on the only land you have ever known
You, longing for home, for safety, lost in echo and scream

You are who I love, hurrying through decimated streets in search of water, food for your family
You rolling up your sleeves to doctor without medicine or equipment

You are who I love, dreaming larger than nations and borders, imagining a world of flow and freedom, cooperation and care
You with knowledge that today is the day for the biggest NO – NO to genocide, NO to the sharpest edge* and bluntest weapon of patriarchy
to make way for the shining YES of a different world

You bringing your queer Black feminist heart and mind to weave a blanket of black and red and green to drape over the shoulders of all your beloveds

You are who I love, speaking up in discomfort, asking questions that rock the boat at work

You are who I love, watching the cars zip past your bus, clutching the sign you painted in the pre-dawn light: CEASEFIRE NOW!

You pulling the blankets over your head

You are who I love, kneeling and praying, sitting and breathing

You—scrolling in anger, whirling into lonely despair—who I love

You sick with fear for your cousin and her wife who haven’t responded to your messages, checking your phone again and again

You are who I love, confused on the sidelines but slowly making your way through the tangle misinformation and lies

You finding your way to the shore where your feet sink into cold sand and small waves wash over your toes—here, here, here

You, reading poems for Palestine, organizing fundraisers
You are who I love, text banking to turn people out for the mobilization, you organizing despite the doxxing, despite your fear

You are who I love, casting spells and making magic for the end of the world

You facing the board of directors, you risking funding to take the stand your organization must take, you are who I love

You are who I love, sitting down to speak the words as simply as you can to your grandmother, love and dread and grief coursing through your body

You, your pen running out of ink, filling page after page in your journal

You are who I love, listening to the sounds that will always be with you until the end: your aching heart beating, your breath catching, then moving through you

You are who I love, struggling through the thick fog of ancestral trauma formed by centuries of persecution to seek clarity in this moment

You, leading the way toward liberation through breath and wail, song and story, poem and prayer, connecting one heart to the next to the next to the next to the next you

~~~

* “Sharpest edge of patriarchy” is a phrase I’m borrowing from Malkia Devich Cyril who used it to describe war.

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Thank you for reading. Thank you for all the ways you are showing up, learning, listening, and taking action right now.

Earlier this month, I was working to send you a Halloween/Samhain/Day of the Dead post for the full moon in a week or so. I still hope to send it out, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, take such precious care of yourself, those you love, and those you have yet to love.

Story 

This is an essay of not-knowing. A collection of descriptions and questions, of reaching toward and not quite arriving. Of opening doors and leaving them ajar.

I say this up front so you know. The path might be like a labyrinth: doubling back on itself, arriving at the center only to lead back to where we started. Or like a spiral, or like a lake.

I say this up front to give myself permission. To enter where I am called. To leave when it is time. To go where I need to go.

So you have permission, too. To scroll, dip, skim, delve. Where and when you feel called. 

~~~

Yesterday, I went in for a pap smear and a mammogram. 

The cis women doctors, nurses, and technicians were kind and honest. But as they poked and prodded, contorted my body against the machine, squished my breast between plexiglass, and instructed me to hold my breath, I thought (as others have): this technology was created by white cis men. 

I understand these procedures have saved countless lives. And if my own life is saved, I will be grateful.

Yet I knew as I lay there with my feet in stirrups that my dignity and sovereignty were secondary, an afterthought in “the battle” against cancer. 

~~~

I am tempted here to explore the metaphors of war that have been the mainstay of cancer discourse. 

And to delve into why there has been so much focus on battling cancer, and so little on identifying and ending the poisoning of our bodies and the Earth, which lead to cancer.

But others have written on both these topics.

I’m still thinking about whose technology and why.

~~~

I once heard the poet Natalie Diaz say we are nature’s technology. I think that’s what she said.

It was during a virtual reading, early pandemic, and I’ve never found any reference in her writing about this.

But I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve tried to understand it in my body.

Or, maybe I know it in my body already, but my brain teeters on the cliff of understanding.

I understand plants, stones, water, trees, and mushrooms as manifesting the life force of nature. I understand this as nature’s technology

I feel and know some ways in which we, humans, do the same—manifest the life force. Praying, writing poems, creating community, loving deeply and profoundly.

But what about dumping plastic in the ocean? Creating artificial intelligence? Extracting and burning fossil fuels toward the extinction of most life on this planet? 

~~~

I have been reading aloud this passage from Poetry as Spellcasting to audiences, in person and virtually:

Human language is transmitted socially, yet the words we speak and write begin in the most intimate and most uniquely creative corners of our psyches. What we think and believe lives in internal language before (and regardless of whether) we utter a word. 

Is this internal language the most elemental aspect of nature’s technology in humans?

I think of it as a sacred expression of ourselves. Not ourselves as individuals but ourselves as a form of consciousness connected to all other forms of consciousness.

I think it is how we understand ourselves and the world around us before it is mediated—warped—by the forces and pressures of human society (nature’s technology gone wrong?).

If humans have this internal language, I think other beings must as well. Hazel, my dog, stretches her belly across the cool wooden floor next to me. She pants into the fan. I know she has an understanding of herself, in her body, in this world, connected to other beings, other consciousnesses. 

A sparrow lands on the railing outside my window, their bright eyes alert. They cock their head, listen for what I cannot hear. They make some kind of internal calculation that I will never know, then fly off. I think they are inside their own language, inside nature’s technology.

~~~

One definition of “technology,” according to Merriam-Webster (in both the Collegiate 10th edition on my bookshelf and on online) is: “a manner of accomplishing a task especially using technical processes, methods, or knowledge.”

If we (living beings?) are nature’s technology, what task are we accomplishing?

Life, I think.

Living, growing, becoming. Celebrating the miracle that is our every breath and heartbeat. Cherishing all that is pulsing with life.

~~~

I recently listened to this conversation between On Being host Krista Tippett and technologist James Bridle. Early on, Bridle expanded on a phrase used by evolutionary scientist Lynn Margulis: “everything is equally evolved.” Bridle said:

Everything has been on this planet for as long as everything else. Everything has been in this universe for as long as everything else. Nothing is more evolved than anything else. Everything has been evolving for the same length of time. Everything has been becoming for the same lengths of time.

As nature’s technology, we have all been becoming, together. I feel this truth in my body.

I am not more evolved than the echinacea that blooms every year in the same spot in my garden, not more evolved than the mice I catch in my kitchen and release in the cemetery, not more or less evolved than the orcas teaching each other to protect themselves. 

Not more or less evolved than the stone along the river, nor the lichen marking the stone, nor the mushroom growing at the base of the oak next to the stone, nor the poison ivy climbing the tree trunk, shiny and green protecting themselves and the space around them. 

~~~

I am using human technology—language—to try to express nature’s technology, to express the sacred language inside myself, connected to all other forms of consciousness, equally evolved. 

It feels clumsy, awkward. Like using broom handles to knit the finest lace. (I’m noting the technology of the metaphor, the potential gendering of these human technologies.)

Perhaps the bridge that connects these two technologies (human and nature) is poetry. Sacred utterance, song, dance. 

The more I think and talk about poetry as spellcasting as I have been doing these past few months, the more I am convinced it is the simplest of things. And also, as these things are, the hardest to access inside human society and its pressures.

The return to our internal language. A return to play, to ritual. Translating our inner knowing as it is connected to all the knowings. 

Maybe it is something I will always fail at. But it feels important to practice.

~~~

There is still the question of human technologies that, to me, feel directly opposed to the sacred, to life, to thriving. 

Technologies of war, yes. But also all manner of technologies designed for “progress,” which now we see and know and feel are harming us and so much of life on earth. 

And now, generative AI, which mimics our language and our creativity, but without the internal language that connects it to consciousness. Another technology created inside capitalism by cis, het, white men because it’s possible, because it is fun for them, and because it makes them money—without meaningfully engaging in profound moral questions around whether they should do it, just because they can. 

I cannot help but be wary of this technology created by humans who most likely have been separated from their internal language, from the sacredness of life and nature for too long. Technology made in their image, reflecting their ideas and worldviews. 

~~~

Sometimes, technology stops becoming a way of accomplishing a task. It becomes something that exists for its own sake. An endless, self-replicating loop.

That’s how I feel about social media. And most of the internet.

That’s some of what people fear about AI.

Maybe that’s what happened with humans.

~~~

I admit I don’t know much about generative AI.

(I know I am now pulled into learning about it because it can do some of the work I do to earn money. A story as old as the industrial revolution.)

But from what I think I understand, the inexpressible is illegible to AI. Our internal language—for now?—cannot be searched, processed, and reconfigured by ChatGPT.

AI may perfectly approximate spiritual language, and it can write all manner of bad poetry. But its products are not actually expressions of the sacred, of the unknowable, of what lives inside of us before language. There is no there there.

~~~

I don’t want this to be about a war between human technology and nature’s technology. Especially if Natalie Diaz is right, because then what would it be? A civil war? An internal battle? Maybe.

But if not war, what could it be? A calling in, a coming together?

~~~

I want ever widening circles of love and connection. I want the sacred and the profane playing and praying at the edges of knowing. 

~~~

Liminal spaces are where I have always found myself and where I have found myself. 

Despite all that has (and has not) happened since March 2020, this historical moment still feels like a portal. A threshold. A space on the edges of becoming. A way to evolve into a different way of being.

~~~

I think sacred language, our internal language and knowing can be the building blocks of technologies that will tip us into the world we all deserve.

Technologies created by those with the least power and privilege in this society. Technologies of survival and thriving. Technologies that facilitate deeper community and sharing, and technologies that begin with profound respect for life, dignity, and sovereignty. 

I know it’s happening right now. Through poetry, in code, as machines being built in suburban garages by kids who insist on a future. Whispers of ideas on podcasts and radio waves, circular essays, the chatter of toddlers learning to play together. Dough kneaded by knowing hands and slapped into perfect circles between calloused palms. Gardens tended to in the desert. Evolving in ways and places I cannot imagine.

Remembering our original purpose as nature’s technology.

What are the rituals, practices, and organizing we need to bring all this forward?

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Starlight

A prompt 

If you have a copy of Poetry as Spellcasting, I suggest “Writing to your Absent Presence” on page 29. 

Otherwise, or in addition, try this prompt.

• For three, six, or nine days (or whatever works for you), gather images from your dreams and your waking life. Use the simplest technologies: books, prayer, sleep, paper, pen.

• Before going to bed, read a poem or a passage from books you love.

• Invite your ancestors, Spirit, or any other forces/energies that you pray to or petition to help you access your internal language through dreams. (If you’re interested in getting support from plant allies, the episode “Sleep as Spellwork” from The Herbal Highway podcast has tons of great information.)

• Keep a notebook by your bed and pen by your bed. When you wake up, write down or draw images or fragments you remember or think you remember. 

• During the day, be attentive to images, phrases, colors, sounds, tastes, textures, or ideas that catch your attention, especially if they resonate with your dream images. Keep the same notebook handy, and write these down or draw them. 

• At the end of this period, look through what you have gathered.

• Arrange them in a poem or an art piece. Meaning is less important than sound and resonance. Push your language to the edge of knowing. Play. Welcome what arrives, even if you don’t “understand” it.

• Revisit this piece in another three, six, or nine days. What has changed? How have you changed? What do you do now?

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Stargaze

What I’m reading and listening to

• Welcome Our New A.I. Overlords. I loved this episode of Imaginary Worlds about how U.S. history filters into how Americans are thinking about A.I., and what the real concerns around A.I. actually are (hint: they involve the people, not the A.I.)

• The Democratic Dilemma of AI: Navigating Ethical Challenges for Political and Advocacy Campaigns. I found this article useful in thinking about the role of AI in my communications work.

• Two Sinéad O’Connor links, both by the brilliant Hanif Abdurraqib: Sinéad O’Connor Was Always Herself, and this Instagram post.

• Two Barbie links: Barbie climate propaganda and Protest Barbie.

Starshine

Announcements from the Starlight & Strategy community and beyond

• A trusted colleague shared this fundraiser for women street vendors in Sudan. The funds go to worker cooperatives to provide food, hygiene, medical, and other basic needs for the vendors who can’t afford to stay home while war rages in their country.

• A project dear to my heart is Brew & Forge, an organization that brings artists and organizers together to “brew & forge” radical change. I’m organizing a funders gathering on September 12 to raise money for the next Witches & Warriors retreat, and everyone is invited.

• I wrote about queer magic for North Atlantic Books’ June newsletter.

• I’m offering a workshop for the QTAPI community here in Boston, through the Asian American Resources Workshop on August 19 from 1-3 pm. Stay tuned for details either through AARW, or on my Instagram.

• And finally, keep an eye on the Boston Book Festival, coming October 14. Jane Wong & I will be leading a generative, poetry-as-spellcasting workshop toward abolition.

Do you have an event, a book, an album, a gallery showing, a theater production, an action, a rally, a fundraiser, a retreat, a podcast or other artistic/spiritual/activist announcement you’d like to share with this community? Send it my way!

Thank you for reading to the end! I’m taking a summer break and then working on other projects in the fall, so I’ll be back in your inbox on the full moon and lunar eclipse on October 28. Until then, may you have ample access to your internal language and life-giving technologies.

Story 

I walked into the rehearsal space for “Poets Against Rape” in San Francisco, clutching my poems in sweaty hands. The room was filled with mostly queer people who, to my shy 20-something-year-old self, seemed impossibly cool. I stood awkwardly against the wall, wishing I knew at least one person. Suddenly, someone appeared at my side. “Hi!” Ching-In Chen said, and introduced themselves as another poet. And just like that, I had a friend in that intimidating space.

Over the years, we each journeyed our own path of becoming queer writers engaged in the world of organizing and justice. I have deeply valued my relationship with Ching-In as a kindred spirit, collaborator, and a friend. The generosity of spirit and instinct toward inclusiveness that they showed that first day I met them always moves and inspires me. 

As you’ll read in their essay below, Ching-In risked their safety and comfort in a conservative institution in East Texas to be out as a nonbinary professor so that they could open space for LGBTQIA* students to explore and express their own identities. A poem Ching-In wrote for these students is included in my latest project: Poetry as Spellcasting: Poems, Essays, and Prompts for Manifesting Liberation and Reclaiming Power, edited with Destiny Hemphill and Lisbeth White. 

In today’s political environment where anti-trans hostility threatens the lives and wellbeing of trans and nonbinary people around the country, and most especially BIPOC folks, I find this poem a necessary intervention and powerful spellcasting. (In Poetry as Spellcasting we define “spellcasting” as: a direction of intention and energy to call in forces beyond ourselves: spiritual, ancestral, and earthly allies. We conceive of spellcasting as a concentration and alignment of energy and language in a ritual.”) I’m so pleased to be able to share this poem and Ching-In’s reflections with you here today. 

~~~

Spell for Safety

Ching-In Chen

for my trans and nonbinary students crossing the stage at Lavender Graduation 

Maybe it was you learning to walk home

cross-wise, your own safety valve.

You, who trained a tongue

chosen name, listening for reflection to speak

back. You, I’m calling you,

grew yourself at argument’s end,

slept borrowed and burned. Who

filled in space of the wisecrack, who

emptied the sidewalk, who

cleared the toxic table.

You breathed down your own street, rose tall, stitched. Built your own table, lit candles for the living who couldn’t make it back. The invitations, the city, the hauntings and the hatchets, the you, the you, the you walking home safe, opening the door, setting the table for company.

Spell for Safety: Survival and Protection

Ching-In Chen

I wrote the poem “Spell for Safety” in 2018 when I lived in Texas and taught at a regional comprehensive university in East Texas. I wrote this spell for the trans and nonbinary students who were crossing the stage at Lavender Graduation.

There was no Lavender Graduation when I graduated from college. By attending this Lavender Graduation for my students and LGBTQI* staff and faculty colleagues, I learned about the history of this ritual, created by Dr. Ronni Sanlo in 1995 at the University of Michigan. Sanlo was denied the opportunity to attend her children’s graduation ceremonies because of her sexual orientation and created this ritual to honor and celebrate lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual and queer students in their own special ceremony.

For the students in East Texas, crossing the stage at that university, in that deadly city which had an electric chair as its major tourist attraction, was a conjuring of survival. Though I had crossed the stage as a student several times, I didn’t fully understand what it meant to be in my nonbinary and nonwhite body as a professor, didn’t understand what it meant to take up a space not meant for you until I sat in the audience for the institution’s first Lavender Graduation in 2016. I watched as graduating students told their stories – of almost not making it, naming those who were lost and who wouldn’t walk across that stage. They also lifted up and thanked their support systems – sometimes blood family, but more often than not, their own chosen kin when their families would not or could not support them. My partner Cassie was one of those students whose own blood family would not be present to cheer her on as she finally finished her undergraduate degree and walked across the stage at Lavender Graduation.

As the only professor of color on the tenure track in my department and the only non-binary/trans professor who was out at my institution, I felt both hypervisible and invisible. When I first started my job, I had students, who I did not know,walk up to me and ask me if I was nonbinary or trans, as if they needed to just confirm my identity, and then walk away. It didn’t feel malicious, but made me feel like a zoo animal, especially since the students didn’t say anything else to me, not even small talk. When I first began teaching there, some religious students immediately dropped my class after I asked them to let us know what their gender pronouns were so that we could address everyone as they wanted to be addressed. The only thing I knew about them was that they listed the Bible as their favorite poem, their favorite book, and the last writing that they read in the Getting to Know You in-class writing I asked students to complete on the first day of class.

Though some of my colleagues and a greater number of students respected my gender pronouns, I was misgendered daily and oftentimes by well-meaning colleagues who I considered otherwise to be allies. In those moments, I felt not only invisible, but disappeared – as if I were a problem to be swept away. The classroom and university campus felt polarized, with little support for dialogue around issues of race, gender, sexuality, and disability across the institution. 

It did not feel safe to openly identify as non-binary and trans. Though I worried sometimes about my own and my partner’s safety, I chose to openly identify as queer and trans because my LGBTQIA* students saw it as support. I also realized that anyone who Googled my unusual name would have discovered my writing on the subject so I wouldn’t have been able to go back in the closet even if I didn’t want that part of my identity to show up at work.

I co-taught a Black Lives Matter! Honors course which was criticized by right-wing media, falsely, as forcing students to take the course in exchange for scholarship money. I and the other LGBTQIA* faculty teaching the course were singled out to receive harassing emails which threatened to have our (non-existent) funding revoked. 

I chose to collaborate with the student poetry slam club on campus to organize a Black History Month creative showcase featuring trans poet Cameron Awkward-Rich, and to later collaborate on organizing my university’s first-ever LGBTQIA* poetry slam featuring intersex and trans performer Koomah. This work sometimes brought me into direct conflict with transmisic and homomisic students (one of whom protested Cam’s reading by bringing rosary beads to the reading and praying as he touched each bead while Cam was reading) as well as veiled and direct comments on student evaluations of the course material being “too political.” However, I noticed that more students in my classes began to identify as LGBTQIA*, both in their writing and some openly. I got calls from colleagues seeking advice (for instance, wanting to know how best to write a letter of recommendation for a student who had since transitioned after taking their class), even after I no longer worked there. 

When I was invited to write a poem by Lavender Graduation organizers, I didn’t realize I would end up reading the poem every year during the ceremony and invoking it whenever I felt a ritual of protection was needed. In these last few years of increasing anti-trans rhetoric and legislation, I have often invoked it as companion, as wish, as desire, even though I no longer teach at that institution and have stopped attending that Lavender Graduation.

Recently, in the new city where I live, I met a queer student of color who currently attends my old institution. This student told me that they had gone to the institution hoping to work with me, not realizing that I had left for a different job. Almost as if I had left a ghostly trail where my body used to be, where I wished for more ease for my students, my trans family and those who would try to follow our paths. In that moment, I invoked my poem and offered them a wish of protection. 

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Starlight

A prompt 

Writing a spell for safety

• First consider: To whom do you want to write a spell for safety? Yourself? Your community? Your loved ones? Who are you connected to, who are you in solidarity with, who would gladly receive protection and fortification from you? Bring that person or people to mind. (Again, this could be yourself.) Imagine them in their full, glorious selves. 

  • If you can, call to mind a moment when you witnessed them in a space of joy, power, or determination. What were their facial expressions, body language, quality of their voice, words, and actions? If you are writing a spell for yourself, call to mind a moment where you felt fully in your power, when you felt strong emotions of joy, clarity, rage, etc. What did it feel like in your body? What did it feel like to breathe? What did you do or say?

  • Stay with that imagery for a few moments. Then, when you are ready, freewrite for five to ten minutes.

• Now imagine a space or spaces of safety for you or the person/people you are writing for. This could be indoor or outdoor, real or imagined. Freewrite for five to ten minutes about this space: what it looks like, smells like, feels like. How you or the person/people move through the space, what you/they do in it.

• Next, consider: What are the powers and resources available to you and/or the person/people you are writing for? These might be material resources, inner resources and power, spiritual resources. Be as expansive as you can. List them out for five to ten minutes.

• And finally: How can you or they access these powers and resources? Get as imaginative as you can. Write for five to ten minutes. 

• At this point, you might want to close your notebook or laptop and go for a walk, take a nap, or otherwise resource yourself. 

• Whenever you wish, come back to this exercise and read through your freewrites and list. Circle the phrases that stand out to you. Look for words, phrases, and sentences that are full of muscle and song, that evoke the senses, stir emotion, and feel good on the tongue.

  • Take what you’ve circled or underlined and write them out on a fresh sheet of paper or document. (If you are using a computer or phone, try typing them out again, rather than copy/pasting.)

• This might inspire you to freewrite some more. Go for it! Or, you might feel you have enough material to start crafting the spell for safety. Do this in whatever way works best for you. Some suggestions are:

  • Like in Ching-In’s poem, write to the person, people directly, using the pronoun “you.” Do this even if you are writing a spell for yourself.

  • Describe the “you” doing specific actions that evoke a sense of safety and power. 

  • Look at your list of powers and resources available for safety, and the ways to access them. Evoke one or two (or as many as you like), through descriptions of actions and or through the senses (particularly sound, smell, or taste).

  • Experiment with repetition (you might want to revisit Hyejung Kook’s prompt for guidance on using words like “may” “let” or “will”)

  • Close the poem with a specific image of the “you” in a safe space, embodying a sense of power.

• Once you have finished the poem, after as many revisions as you need, consider how you might release it into the world. This might be as simple as clearing your desk, lighting a candle, and reading it out loud. You might want to send it or read it to the person for whom it is meant. Or, you could organize an event that centers safety and liberation and read the poem there—and/or also lead participants in a similar exercise to write their own spells for safety. 

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Stargaze

What I’m reading and listening to

• How to Survive the End of the World Show: Witch School! I’m sure I’ve recommended adrienne maree and Autumn Brown’s podcast here many times. But I have to share how excited I am for season 7, Witch School, where adrienne will be interviewing all sorts of witchy people. So far, I’ve only listened to the intro episode, and I’m excited to listen soon to the next one featuring another Starlight & Strategy favorite, Omisade Burney-Scott, curator of the Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause.

• Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield. I couldn’t put down this short, strange, and haunting novel. Among many things, I appreciated all the subtle ways it embodied queerness, from exploring the depths of a long-term lesbian relationship to imagining the unknowable queerness of the deep ocean.

• What AI means for writers. I’ve been trying to find my way into the conversations about AI writing, and this is exactly the thoughtful and well-considered opening I was looking for: “Our participation as artists in both existential and practical conversations around AI is essential to shaping whatever comes next.”

Starshine

Announcements from the Starlight & Strategy community

• Ching-In Chen is curating a special issue on “Breathing in a Time of Disaster” for Full Stop Quarterly. They are looking for BIPOC and trans contributors from Houston and Seattle to write critical essays on artists involved in the project. Learn more here.

• Ching-In is also the judge for Kelsey Street Press’ 2023 QTBIPOC Prize, a no-fee book contest open to QTBIPOC-identified, feminist, innovative writers/poets. Learn more and submit here.

• Filmmaker, artist, and poet Jess X. Snow (whose work is featured on the cover of my poetry collection, Last Days) is fundraising so they can finish their film, Roots That Reach Toward The Sky, about queer intimacy, mental health, mutual aid, traditional Chinese medicine and intergenerational healing. Learn more and donate here. The fundraiser ends on June 5!

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for the last few months, you know that my most recent project, Poetry as Spellcasting is now out in the world. Many thanks and love to all of you who have bought the book and shared it with your networks! It’s available wherever you can buy books, and if you want to pick up a copy, I hope you support your local independent bookstore.

Events:

In-person event hosted by the Brookline Booksmith in Boston & live-streamed on YouTube

• Thursday, June 8, 7 pm EDT

• Featuring contributor Joan Naviyuk Kane and me

• Get your free tickets here

• If you are not in Boston and want to tune in, here’s the live-stream link

In-person event at Finnriver Farm and Cidery in Chimacum, WA

Join us for a reading and ritual during Finnriver’s Solstice Salmon Days

• Featuring all three editors, and maybe a special guest!

• Thursday, June 22

• 4:30pm PDT

• 124 Center Road
  Chimacum, WA, 98325

Virtual event hosted by Left Bank Books in St. Louis

• Thursday, July 13, 5pm PDT / 6pm MDT / 7pm CDT/ 8pm EDT

• Featuring all three editors and contributor Hyejung Kook

• More info to come

Do you have an event, a book, an album, a gallery showing, a theater production, an action, a rally, a retreat, a podcast or other artistic/spiritual/activist announcement you’d like to share with this community? Send it my way!

Thank you for reading all this way! We’re going to skip July’s full moon, but I’ll be back in your inboxes on August 1. Until then, I’m sending you my spells for safety and summer joy.

Story

I closed my eyes as Lisbeth White led us in a ritual for Poetry as Spellcasting.

She invited us—Destiny Hemphill, me, and herself—to visualize the book we were working on together. What did it want to become? How would we manifest it into the world?

The three of us breathed together, went inward, and connected with the energies around this project. We then shared aloud our hopes and intentions.

And that’s when we realized that each of us had been visited by visions of serpents or sea-dragons during the ritual.

We grinned, delighted. This synchronicity affirmed our connection in virtual and psychic space. The book and all our loving labor had just been blessed by powerful creatures who symbolize mystery and spiritual power, shedding and renewal, and cycles of birth-death-rebirth.

~~~

In the following months, as we co-wrote sections of the book, the serpents entered into the essays representing the nature and material of the text. For example, in the introduction:

With its capacity to both build and break through, language in these pages moves like the serpent, embodying qualities of innovation and resurgence. It is in this innovation that possibility toward liberation is activated. In naming the world with imagination and creativity, we come to understand that the harmful structures of society must change. This naming and understanding pose both a great threat to the status quo and a great invitation to transformation.

And in the closing essay:

What this means, dear readers, dear writers, dear workers of words and magic and change, is this book is a living book. Much like the serpentine nature of language, the essays, poems, and rituals that have found their way to this book are shifting and pulsing with mystery. They are ready to show one skin, wind around one meaning, and shed into a new interpretation with each read. They are welcoming of revisitation and revised practice. They encourage and lean toward, “What if?” They like for us to skirt the edges of our knowing. To play there. Sometimes, to pray there.

And now, in just a few days—dear reader, dear writer, dear worker of words and magic and change—this book will slide into the world as its full serpentine self: Poetry as Spellcasting: Poems, Essays, and Prompts for Manifesting Liberation and Reclaiming Power.

~~~

The book is the physical embodiment of the visions the three of us shared. It is a dreaming made possible by the words, energy, and magic of the writers whose work fills the pages. After years of preparation, it is ready to be held in its physical being—paper and ink (with gratitude and blessing to the trees) or sound waves. Ready to be blessed with fingers and pencil marks, graced with smoke, water, wine. Ready to be read and argued with, played and prayed with, ready to be a catalyst for further thinking, feeling, and transformation in all of its power and all of its flaws.

I’ve never been part of a project quite like this—a deeply collaborative work created over years, completely virtually. It was a learning experience for each of us, and looking back, there are some things we would have done differently, for sure. But I am so proud of both the process and the product of our work together. We unraveled time and space, bringing ideas into being in ways that felt profoundly magical.

By and for BIPOC poets, spellcasters, ritualists, and social justice witches, this book enters into spaces dominated by and capitalized upon by white, cisgender, and straight folks. Early in the book, Kenji C. Liu offers one way to think about poetry as spellcasting, through the lens of Japanese and Shinto:

Kotodama (言霊, word spirit), the Shinto belief in the mystical power of words and names. Word and thing, inseparable. A word does not call to a thing, it is the thing itself.

言 = word = koto

事 = thing = koto

If sign and signifier are not a relationship but a single thing, then to use a word is to actually conjure and activate what it refers to. To write poetry is to cast a spell.

—From “Text of Bliss: Heaping Disruption at the Level of Language”

The essays range in style and approach, but all of them are concerned in some way with the intersection of poetry and ritual toward liberation and justice. As Sun Yung Shin writes in her essay “A Korean Orphan Undergoes Catholic Training for Future Poets”:

All of my poems are in some ways prayers for and to the missing and lost children of this world.

Those orphaned, abandoned, neglected, and murdered.

The missing girls, future women, of the world who were never born because of sex-selective abortions and infanticide in favor of boys, future men.

My strongest poem would be a spell to find them and heal them—and myself. My most powerful spell to cast would be to find my Korean family and stitch us back together with magic, some amalgam of English and Korean, but more, a spirit language that transcends space and time and holds the seeds of transformation.

In so many ways, these essays seek to connect to “spirit language,” to make claim to ancestral legacies and lineages that have been violently discounted and ignored.

Lou Florez writes, for example, of decolonization through liberation magic:

The practice of liberation magic is a magic of transgression, a magic that divests itself from the spiritual narrative of the colonizer by saying that my relationship to spirit, my relationship to my body, and my relationship to the world is outside of the gaze of consumption. I am talking about a politics of emancipation.

—From “Poetry as Praxis for Spellworking”

And in “Iniġluu—perpetually,” Joan Naviyuk Kane weaves a story of survival in the face of colonization, made possible by the poetry of her homeland and its flora:

Somehow, in the muggy swelter of my first-floor apartment, just down an embankment that ran downslope from a West Side highway ramp, nearly tranquilized by the fragrance of a massive linden tree that grew from the crest of the embankment, I found my subject: the images and symbols, the minute facticity, the ars poetica of tundra verdure. … These plants, and the images of them fixed in my mind, sustained me, figuratively and literally. I found my voice to be alive through living memories of plants.

Throughout the book, the essays deftly weave embodied experiences with language and ritual to ask questions that have many answers and offer openings into a multitude of paths. In “Revision as Mutability,” for example, Amir Rabiyah contemplates the spiritual and embodied experience of revising poetry:

I know now that just as healing isn’t linear, writing and revision isn’t either. It’s messy, and tricky, and sometimes exhausting. But to revise is a gift and an opportunity to go deeper and to decolonize. It’s a reminder that we don’t have to be perfect in order to be loved, or even to survive under white supremacy. In fact, we thrive when we embrace our imperfections.

There are many more beautiful essays, poems, and prompts in this book to explore. If you’ve been subscribed to Starlight & Strategy for a while, you know that I’ve been featuring the co-editors and contributors in recent issues. (And if you are new to this space, I invite you to browse past issues featuring Lisbeth White, Destiny Hemphill, Hyejung Kook, and excerpts from Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Dominique Matti’s essays). I’m excited to keep featuring the voices and perspectives of these amazing writers and more in the coming months.

For now, we are celebrating the serpentine spirit of this book, and I hope you can join us! See below for information on upcoming events.

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Starlight

A prompt

Some of the prompts in Poetry as Spellcasting began as prompts here, in Starlight & Strategy. Here is a prompt from the book, expanded from when it first appeared in this newsletter in November 2020, after the U.S. presidential election.

Both, and

In poetry and in spellcasting (as well as in life!), holding two or more apparently contradictory ideas at once can be generative and illuminating. This prompt uses Tarot or oracle cards to help you tap into that truth. You can also do this prompt by finding images that speak to you.

If you are using a Tarot deck, pull out the Wheel of Fortune, the Tower, the Sun, and the World. If you are using an oracle or other kind of deck, pull out two cards that speak to you in any way about change, transformation, or loss, and two cards that speak to you of stability, personal power, or completion. If you are not using any deck, gather four images that represent these concepts to you.

Arrange the cards or images in an order or formation that makes sense to you.

Spend a few minutes meditating on what the cards or images bring individually and in relationship to each other.

Now, write a poem that holds two contradictory ideas simultaneously, but doesn’t name the ideas. You can use the following structure to get started:

Line 1: Describe a sound without naming the source.

Line 2: Bring in an animal.

Line 3: Write a line of internal dialog.

Line 4: Present an object in its entirety.

Line 5: Describe or refer to a death.

Line 6: Describe texture of a surface.

Line 7: Write a line of dialog that comes from a being not human.

Line 8: Evoke a gap, a leap, or a hole.

Line 9: Write breath into the line.

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Stargaze

What I’m reading and listening to

I hope that readers of Poetry as Spellcasting go on to explore the other work of the authors who contributed to it. Some of my favorite new-ish books from contributors include:

• Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. I’m such a fan of Alexis’ brilliant writing—so full of heart, integrity, intellect, and love. This book accompanies our household almost every morning and during our most important moments.

• Sun Yung Shin’s newest collection, The Wet Hex, is truly astounding. It’s a cauldron of magic, language, visioning, art, collaboration, resistance, and reclamation. “A tiger is a poet,” she writes—and this book holds all the fierceness and dexterity you’d expect from a tiger poet.

• I recently had the opportunity to read Joan Naviyuk Kane’s forthcoming chapbook, Ex-Machina, and write a blurb for it: “The poems in Ex Machina are their own beings. Full of muscle, grief, and rage, they speak of and for themselves. … Inside violent loss, these poems are less interested in mere survival as they are in embodied, languaged sovereignty—language that ‘reminds us / to create a story and to become part of it, / to stay alive until we come back.’” Looks like it’s not yet available for order; I’ll link in here when it is!

Other important materials I’m engaging with that I want to share with y’all:

• Organizing against the police and prison industrial complex:

  • A Week of Writing: #StopCopCity, Scalawag Magazine

  • Building Together: On Black & Asian Organizing in LA, from 18MR

• COVID-19:

  • In Defense of Extending the U.S. Pandemic Response, Anti-Racism Daily

  • Long Covid, The Herbal Highway

• Healing justice and the medical industrial complex:

  • Healing Justice Lineages, by Cara Page and Erica Woodland

  • Stories of Care and Control: A Timeline of the Medical Industrial Complex, from Healing Histories Project 

Starshine

Announcements from the Starlight & Strategy community

Cute notebook alert!

I’m very excited about this giveaway from our publisher, North Atlantic Books. Pre-order Poetry as Spellcasting before May 16, then submit your receipt here to receive a free, matching notebook. You can use it for all the prompts in the book!

Events!

You are invited to the virtual launch party for Poetry as Spellcasting: an evening of poems, readings, a collective ritual, and celebration! We’re gathering as many of the contributors as we can, including: Amir Rabiyah, Ching-In Chen, Hyejung Kook, Lou Florez, Sun Yung Shin, and Tatiana Figueroa Ramirez.

• Wednesday, May 24

• 5pm PDT / 6pm MDT / 7pm CDT / 8pm EDT

• RSVP and more information here

~~~

Live event hosted by the Brookline Booksmith in Boston & livestreamed on YouTube

• Thursday, June 8, 7 pm EDT

• Featuring contributor Joan Naviyuk Kane and me

• Get your free tickets here

• If you are not in Boston and want to tune in, here’s the livestream link

  

~~~

Save the date:

Live event in Seattle on Thursday, June 22. Stay tuned for more details!

Virtual event hosted by Left Bank Books in St. Louis

• Thursday, July 13, 5pm PDT / 6pm MDT / 7pm CDT/ 8pm EDT

• Featuring all three editors and contributor Hyejung Kook

• More info to come

Do you have an event, a book, an album, a gallery showing, a theater production, an action, a rally, a retreat, a podcast or other artistic/spiritual/activist announcement you’d like to share with this community? Send it my way!

Thank you for reading to the end. That’s it for this month. I’m excited to feature poet and contributor to Poetry as Spellcasting, Ching-In Chen in next month’s Pride issue. Look for it in your inbox on the full moon on Saturday, June 3.

Story 

The day Barley died, the crows were everywhere.

In the morning, I witnessed a flock flying east toward the water. 

Some hours after the kind and gentle vet came to help Barley transition to the spirit world, Patti and I went out for a walk in the nor’easter with its pouring, blustery rain. Exactly the kind of weather Barley loved. 

We walked to the river where Patti and Barley had gone every morning for his almost-18 years, until he could no longer walk that far. On our way home, we passed several dozen crows swooping in and out under the eves of an old brick building. We had never seen crows there before. “Maybe they’re holding a wake for Barley,” Patti said. 

Later that day we watched more crows, or the same crows, from our kitchen window. They played in the wind and rested in the two spindly Eastern White Pines next to the pet store. 

And that evening, when I went out to pick up dinner that a kind colleague had ordered for us, the crows were across the street, cawing and settling into the trees for the night. 

I couldn’t help but feel that these birds knew Barley had died. That they were keeping us company on one of the saddest days of our lives.

~~~

I recently learned that ravens mate for life. They find a partner they like and they stick together until the end. Even if most humans can’t distinguish one bird from other, they know each other. And they know us. Crows recognize human faces; they know individuals. 

Once, I found a crow’s body, recently dead, on the path I often walk. The next day, I returned with some offerings and prayers. And when I passed that spot again a few days later, I heard a crow in a nearby tree, cawing and cawing and cawing. In grief, I imagined.  

~~~

Patti often said that she never knew she could love a dog as much as she loved Barley. They had been loving each other for almost a decade when I came into the picture. At the time, I liked dogs fine, but I had always been a cat person. But once I came to know Barley, that all changed. 

I fell in love with this being who was a clear and direct communicator, with opinions and preferences. He was full of mischief and love, and expressed both often and enthusiastically. He was stubborn as all get out. 

Getting to know and love Barley—and later Hazel, another Wheaten Terrier who joined our pack—I was gifted with the opportunity to deeply experience the personhood of beings who are not human. Barley showed me that we could communicate in ways beyond human language. Observing how Patti and Barley interacted and took care of each other, I saw what human and more-than-human relationships could look like beyond domination and exploitation. And in our little family of four, I had the embodied experience of what it looks like to prioritize all of our well-being, not just the humans’. 

This became especially true in his later years, as he passed his thirteenth, then fifteenth, then seventeenth birthday, each year a miracle and a blessing. His spirit was just as vivacious and strong as it had ever been, even as his body got weaker each year. 

As he became less and less independent, we accommodated, shifting our routines and daily lives. At first, it was in small ways: shorter walks, then separate walks when he couldn’t go as far or as quickly as Hazel. Carrying him up and down the stairs, and getting rugs to put on the hardwood floor so he could get up more easily. Then, in larger ways: finding vacation spots where we could bring the dogs, timing our outings to his schedule and needs, waking up in the middle of the night to settle him down or take him outside. 

In his last years, we couldn’t easily leave him with dog sitters. And it was challenging for just one of the humans to take care of both dogs for more than a few days at a time. So, I postponed applying to writing residencies, and we postponed trips. In his last months, we always had an ear out for where he was and what he needed, ready to drop what we were doing to take him outside or help him get up. 

At first, I felt some resentment as our lives changed and we couldn’t do everything we wanted to do. He was, after all, a dog, and I was a human. 

I had lived my whole life indoctrinated into the belief that human lives are intrinsically more valuable than animal lives. Surely there were ways we could be kind and humane while still living our lives exactly how we wished. 

But slowly, I came to understand that Barley and Patti—who was the most attentive to him, who always thought of him as we made plans—were teaching me how to live in a way that de-centers the human and prioritizes the welfare of all of us. I imagine this isn’t too dissimilar to how parents of human children learn how to de-center themselves and their needs as they care for their infants.

But unlike parents, we weren’t taking care of a creature who wasn’t on his way to becoming more independent; rather, increasingly less so. 

In his final year, Barley also taught me what the process of dying looks like, and how one cares for a creature who is leaving this corporeal world. 

I worked beside him as he slept for hours at a time, his legs kicking as he dreamed of running in a way he no longer could during his waking hours. I walked so slowly with him down the street as he sniffed every inch of the sidewalk and, through to the very end, brought smiles and joy to those who stopped to pet him. I witnessed his determination to climb up the little hill in the backyard. When I carried him, he would wriggle in my arms as if to say, “Put me down! I’ve got this!” 

As we cared for him and cleaned up after him, I learned how to be my most attentive self, my most caring self, my most humorous self. 

And I gained a deeper understanding of how we can live differently on this planet, in relationship to all the creatures on it. Barley taught me—in his living and his dying— how to imagine a way of existing as humans where we are in reciprocal relationship with all living beings. This is a way of living in the world that is embedded in Indigenous culture and knowledge, one that colonization and white supremacy has tried to obliterate—to our profound detriment. 

If we are to survive the Anthroporcene, I believe it will be, in part, because the overculture will come to accept that humans are one small part of the world we inhabit. And if we are to thrive beyond this age, it will be, in part, because we learn how to live in right relationship with all our kin. 

~~~

I don’t know for sure why the crows stuck close to our house the day that Barley’s spirit finally left his body. 

But I can imagine they somehow knew that a remarkable creature had passed on from this world. That they were paying their respects and celebrating his life. 

And maybe, even, it was because they recognized our love for him and were keeping us company on a day our hearts broke wide apart. Wide enough to take in the whole of this world in all its pain and beauty. Wide enough to know that we were not alone.

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Starlight

The poet Hyejung Kook has a marvelous essay, “Poetry as Prayer,” in our forthcoming Poetry as Spellcasting. I’m thrilled to share with you here a powerful prompt she has created for writing a prayer toward transformation. 

Sailing through this to that: a prayer for transformation

A prompt by Hyejung Kook

I’m so grateful to Tamiko for the invitation to contribute work to Poetry as Spellcasting as well as to share a prompt for Starlight & Strategy. Re-reading my essay “Poetry as Prayer,” I realized how much I personally need to reconnect to the inner self and create again, and so the act of creating this prompt has been not only for others, but also for me.

Before beginning, find the space and time where you can sit quietly, think, and write for at least 20-30 minutes.

*

Listen. What do you hear in your stillness? In a moment of deep feeling, what have you heard from your innermost self? Who did you turn to?

*

1) “Listen.” Find a comfortable seated position in a chair or on the floor, then close your eyes. Place one hand on your heart and one hand on your belly. Bring intention to your breathing, inhaling through your nostrils and exhaling through your mouth. Listen to the sound your breath makes. Feel how your chest and belly move with each inhalation and each exhalation. Shift your body a little as you breathe, settling deeper into your seat and rooting down as you inhale. From that rootedness, allow your head to rise upward, lengthening your body as you exhale. 

2) “What do you hear in your stillness?” Once you have settled into an expansive body and breath, say to yourself “I am” as you inhale, and then be open to whatever comes to your mind as you exhale. 

Breathe in “I am” and perhaps breathe out “at peace.” Or perhaps “hurting” or “the red ochre of earth.” Let each exhale finish the “I am” in a different way. When you feel you have finished this litany of “I am” statements, finish with “I am listening. I am here.”

3) Take one to two minutes to write down some of the “I am” statements that came to mind. Take another couple minutes to freewrite a list of answers to the questions, “What do you hear in your stillness?” and “In a moment of deep feeling, what have you heard from your innermost self?” If you feel yourself getting stuck, return to your meditative breathing.

4) “Who did you turn to?” Poetry and prayer both involve addressing an Other with the hope of being heard. Spend one to two minutes jotting down entities whom you might invoke and address in your poem. Include in your possibilities a person, an animal, a plant, a physical space, an aspect of yourself (physical or spiritual), and an abstract noun.

5) In my essay, I spend some time with Lucille Clifton's beautiful poem “blessing the boats.” Here it is:

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back     may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

The repetition of the word “may” is especially charged with intention. Other verbs that have a sense of performative power include “wish,” “let,” and “will.”

6) Take a look at your writing so far and circle the following:

• At least one “I am” statement

• At least one phrase written in response to “What do you hear in your stillness?” and “In a moment of deep feeling, what have you heard from your innermost self?” 

• At least one entity from your list

7) Draft a poem! The first draft should: 1) Include all your circled phrases. If it feels better to change the “I am” statement from first person into second or third person, please do so. 2) Name and address at least one entity from your list. The entity does not need to be the chief focus of the poem. 3) Repeat “may,” “wish,” “let,” “will,” or some other similarly performative verb at least three times. 

As you write, try to determine what transformation your poem is seeking. Good luck and happy writing!

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Stargaze

What I’m reading and listening to

• I have been recommending Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H to many people in my life. There are so many things I appreciate about this powerful memoir, not the least is how Lamya H structures it around stories in the Quran as she explores her queer identity in the context of her religion and the societies she navigates.
  

• Babel: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution is like Harry Potter with grown-ups, which grapples with the harm of British imperialism, capitalism, and the industrial revolution. The magic here is language, specifically the gaps in meaning that occur when translating from one language to another. I adored this novel.

• “The Great Ungrieving” came out just about a year ago, but as I grieve Barley’s death, I’ve been thinking about the lack of structures, rituals, and support for grieving in this society. And this article came to mind, about how the U.S.’s inability to collectively grieve for those who have died in the COVID-19 pandemic is indicative of individualistic and privatized way that this society operates—and how the power of grief could be a pathway toward a more collective and caring society. 

Starshine

Announcements from the Starlight & Strategy community

• Review of Lisbeth White’s American Sycamore. If you haven’t already checked out Lisbeth’s stunning book, I offer this review, recently published at the Georgia Review, in which I share how her book helped me see the trees.
  

• Poetry As Spellcasting events

  Mark your calendars! Join me, my co-editors, and contributors—including Hyejung Kook—at the following events for our forthcoming book, Poetry As Spellcasting! More details and links coming soon.

  • Poetry as Spellcasting virtual workshop: Writing toward the liberatory gift of wonder

    Saturday, April 22 at 7:00 PM EDT

    Part of the Mass Poetry Festival lead-up

    Led by Lisbeth White and me

    More info and registration here
    

  • Virtual launch party
    Wednesday, May 24, time TBD
    Featuring all three editors and as many contributors we can gather!
    Registration info to come
    

  • Live event hosted by the Brookline Booksmith in Boston & live streamed on YouTube
    Thursday, June 8, 7 pm EDT
    Featuring contributor Joan Naviyuk Kane and me
    More info to come
    

  • Virtual event hosted by Left Bank Books in St. Louis
    Thursday, July 13, 8 pm EDT
    Featuring all three editors and contributor Hyejung Kook
    More info to come

Do you have an event, a book, an album, a gallery showing, a theater production, an action, a rally, a retreat, a podcast or other artistic/spiritual/activist announcement you’d like to share with this community? Send it my way!

Thank you, dear one, for holding this issue with your heart and reading to the end. If you are grieving a loved one—human or another of your kin—I am holding you, too. I invite you to send me your story, or share your thoughts in the comments if you feel so moved. 

Starlight & Strategy will be back on the next full moon, May 5. Until then, I hope you are held in the community of kin who surround you.

Story 

I met Destiny Hemphill in 2019 over a bowl of noodles in Seattle’s International District. The next day, Destiny, Lisbeth White, Tatiana Figueroa Ramirez, and I were to present a panel we called “Poetry As Spellcasting.” As the four of us ordered dumplings and shared stories, we had no idea that in the coming years, Destiny, Lisbeth, and I would spend hundreds of hours together on video—dreaming, thinking, making agendas and spreadsheets, writing, editing, laughing, commiserating, strategizing, and doing spellwork—to turn that panel into a book.  

But I did know, as that first dinner proceeded and as we spent time together over the conference weekend, that Destiny had a visionary spirit and brilliant mind. I knew I wanted to continue to be in community with her. When she told me about her MFA thesis, which would become motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life, I couldn’t wait to read it. She described it as a Black futurism project, an invocation of another world that might lie on the other side of the collapse of this world. At the time, I was a few years into my own exploratory thinking and writing about apocalypse as both a necessary end and a possible path to a different kind of future. I was excited to hear how Destiny was exploring these themes in the lineage of Black feminists and futurists. 

Over the years, as I read some of the poems in the book, like this one featured at Split This Rock, I was dazzled by Destiny’s skill in making language sing, shout, invoke spirit, and birth possibility:

we’ve always already been molding & shaping

                  spinning & folding, birthing & sharing

can you feel it? in our breath & in our hands. between us, we’ve got

                  the motherworld, the whole motherworld in our breath & in our hands.

Now, as motherworld launches, I’m honored to feature a reflection from Destiny about her experience of writing this incredible book. I hope you find it meaningful, and that it inspires you to order a copy or two of motherworld.

While I’m On This Journey, Hold My Hand

by Destiny Hemphill

In the tarot, the Hermit card is the ninth card of the Major Arcana, the suite of cards that delve into the larger collective (un)consciousness of what it means for a soul to inhabit the earthen vessel that we call a “body.” The Hermit walks with a head bowed as though in prayer. The Hermit walks in the dark. They walk alone, or so they think: it’s so dark that they might not see who else walks with them. That’s why they hold only a small lamplight to illuminate their path, just enough light to see their next step but no more than that. On this journey, the Hermit does not actually have to see to know. Despite what an ableist Western epistemological preoccupation might try to tell us—sight is not the only site of knowing. In fact, this site, this journey invites the Hermit to know differently. To sense breath, to feel the reverberating echoes of steps along their path, to startle at a touch grazing their fingers and wonder who is trying to hold their hand.

***

I began writing motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life in earnest when I moved to Columbia, South Carolina to begin my MFA program. I made my journey to South Carolina during the Total Eclipse in Leo in August 2017. Astrologically speaking, the eclipse fell in my ninth house of long-distance travels, moving, and higher education. The Hermit, as the ninth card of the Major Arcana, seemed to be the appropriate guide for my ninth house transit. Splintered and frayed from community organizing in 2016 (a 9-year in numerology), I came to South Carolina often with my head down in an attempt to watch my step. Sometimes with my head down because of the immense weight in my heart that concaved my shoulders and bowed my neck.

I often felt alone. And more than felt alone, often felt lonely. And more than felt, just was. And yet…What was coming out on the page oftentimes gently, insistently, and persistently—after crying myself to sleep or burning down candles or marveling at a red spider lily on my walk to campus or leaving white roses and lilies on crossroads—was a we-voice. Even when a speaker had an “i-voice” in a poem, so often—there was a you also explicitly invoked. Thus, there again appearing a we. Although I had some sense, I didn’t always know who i was or who you were or who we were.

Yet, there you were. There, we were. Present. Seeking a “place […] that sustains life like ours, sustains black life.”* There you were, reaching for my hand to hold on this journey. There we were, building a world-to-come with fragments of lush possibility lodged in the now/here. Remembering that the apocalypse was only the end of a world. And speculating that if this world did in fact end, if the colonial structures that upheld it collapsed, maybe we could usher in structures of care. There you and i and we were in the spell and as the spell, in the prayer and as the prayer, in the ritual and as the ritual, in the poems and as the poems. In and as and of some other world. Another world. Motherworld.

***

Now on the other side of having written motherworld, more and more, there is so much I do not know. Still don’t know what exactly lies on the other side of this portal, what lies outside of this alchemizing cauldron, nor to what new devotions this potion will lead me. But this is what I do know: I know that I am distilling my commitments to community more clearly. I know that I am shedding. I know that I am changing shapes out of something and into the shape of something else. And I know that whatever tenuous knowledge I have of who I am is granted to me by knowing whose I am: I am my mama’s, my daddy’s, my siblings’, my kindred’s, my ancestors’, this earth’s. I am not this world’s. This world is not my home. I am all that I have chosen and that has also graciously chosen me.

In my solitude, I have often thought that I was walking alone—but only, again, because it was so dark and my eyes were not always able to adjust and I­­ could not always see who and what moved around me, with me. Yet, if I was still enough (still, not running idle in exhaustion), I could hear the echoes of steps, feel the heat of breath of my kindred—my dead and my living. I think this (un)knowing has been the pulse behind my impulse of writing in the we voice. Writing with a we and towards a we. Writing towards the end of this world.

* this quote comes from “dispatches from the now/here” in motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life by Destiny Hemphill.

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Starlight

A prompt 

Opening in the dark

This prompt may be particularly useful to do when you feel alone and/or lonely, when you are working toward a completion of a project or phase of life, and/or if you are looking for some guidance in any kind of transformative work or project, especially those focused on dismantling harmful systems and building new worlds.

Take out the Hermit card and any/all of the 9s in the Minor Arcana that are speaking to you. If you don’t have a deck, you can look at the images below, or do an image search of the Hermit card. 

Meditate on the imagery, colors, textures, emotions, and associations that arise for you. Try not to lean too heavily on what you already know about these cards; let them speak to you in the moment. Write down any images, words, phrases, instructions, or offerings that come to you.

Keep the cards that you’ve pulled out (Hermit and any/all of the 9s). Draw five new cards as you ask the following questions, and arrange them in a circle around the Hermit and 9(s):

1. What other ways of knowing are available to me in the darkness?

2. How might I best tap into these other ways of knowing? 

3. Who is trying to hold my hand?

4. What support is available for me to rest and be still?

5. What is waiting for me on the other side of this moment?

   

If you don’t have a deck, use the questions above as journaling prompts. Try to free write—don’t stop and think, just write and see what comes through. If you have an oracle deck, you can also pull cards for each of the questions. 

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Stargaze

What I’m reading and listening to

• Two essays from Emergence Magazine reflect the themes offered here this month and last month: Myrtle’s Medicine by Kinitra Brooks on rootwork and Black women’s cosmologies and epistemic agency, and Prophecies of Possibility by Jamie Figueroa on Indigenous women’s reflection on intuition, sovereignty, and power.

• Embracing rage to “fuel a transformation toward awakening,” by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel.

• Practicing Inclusion in the Time of COVID. I’ve been wondering with confusion: Is the pandemic over? What about Long COVID? What about immunocompromised people and those with disabilities and chronic illnesses? Even as the federal government and too many organizations are operating as if the pandemic is over, this guide and accompanying links provide clear guidance to anyone who is planning an event, large or small, on how to be inclusive of everyone in this time when the pandemic is not, in fact, over.

Starshine

Announcements from the Starlight & Strategy community

Bianca, by Eugenia Leigh is launching on March 15. This powerful collection of poetry delves with raw honesty into deep trauma, mental health, survival, and commitment to life and love. It’s devastating, and it’s poetic storytelling at its finest. I highly recommend getting your hands on a copy!

Advance reading copies are available for Poetry As Spellcasting: Poems, Essays, and Prompts for Manifesting Liberation and Reclaiming Power, edited by me, Destiny Hemphill, and Lisbeth White. If you are a reviewer, podcaster, witchy influencer, etc. and would like a copy, let me know! And everyone can pre-order a copy here or through your favorite independent bookstore.

I’m excited to check out the virtual opera Fractured Mosaics, which asks what it means to be Asian American, from White Snakes Project. Live online March 30, April 1, and April 3. 

Do you have an event, a book, an album, a gallery showing, a theater production, an action, a rally, a retreat, a podcast or other artistic/spiritual/activist announcement you’d like to share with this community? Send it my way!

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Thank you for reading to the end! I’ll be back in your inbox at the start of National Poetry Month, on April 6, with reflections and prompts on poetry as prayer. Until then, I send you many blessings as you walk in the dark and in the light. 

Story 

On hot, August nights in Tokyo I knew that ancestors were all around us traveling from the spirit world. I could see the horses they rode: thin cucumbers balanced on four chopstick legs, which people had placed in front of their houses. Once the Obon festival was over, full of food and laden with gifts, the ancestors would ride home on the sturdy eggplant cows, standing ready next to the cucumber horses. 

In the deep of winter as I walked to the bus stop in the gray dawn, I knew I was protected by the three Jizo statues at the corner. The stone figures, tucked in an alcove, looked warm in their red hats knitted by the neighborhood obasan (aunties). I was comforted by the peaceful expressions on their faces, knowing they stood guard over children both in the spirit and material worlds.

I’ve written before of how I absorbed the animism of Shintoism through my childhood in Japan. Recognizing, interacting with, and communicating with beings other than humans was just part of life—not often talked about, but simply another thread in the weft and weave of daily life. And intuition—knowing something in my hara (gut/belly)—was a perfectly acceptable way to understand my experience. 

These days, accessing my intuition and communicating with unseen spirits and energies often feels very hard. Sitting in meditation, I find I’m desperately grasping, struggling to listen. My monkey-mind shows off with backflips and acrobatics. And if I feel I’ve received a message, image, or communication from plants or ancestors, my well-trained rational mind tells me that the only “real” information comes from my five senses. Whatever else I perceive, it says, is just my own brain working, my own imagination. 

But sometimes, I can access my intuition and receive messages with a little more ease. Ritual and letting go help. Patience and practice, too. 

I’ve started lighting a candle before I write. I breathe into my hara and let my ancestors and creative energies know that I’m open to what comes through. I started this essay having forgotten to do this ritual, and I struggled through some false starts. Then I remembered and performed the ritual. That’s when the words flowed more easily. This too, is a kind of intuition, an exchange of communication between myself and the creative forces I call on when I sit down to write.

Sometimes, the ease comes from knowing I’m not alone. I am just one of many poets and writers seeking to re-learn and practice these ways of knowing and creating. 

One of my current projects, Poetry as Spellcasting, features an essay by co-editor Lisbeth White, who writes about how, as a young child, she communed with trees outside the window. She describes the ways in which so many of us as adults must re-learn how to “engage with the subtle energies of the world.”

“Some of us, like myself, felt it in our bodies as children, matriculated through a human- and commerce-centered ‘growing up,’ and needed to recover the knowledge again later in life, as we began to reclaim our original wholeness.”

In the same book, the essay by writer and plant worker Dominique Matti explores how a summer of profound loss brought her closer into communication with both plants and ancestors. She writes:

“I first began speaking deliberately to natural and ancestral spirits because I wanted to share what I could not otherwise share and know what I could not otherwise know. …  All around me I could sense an environment populated by infinite latent witnesses and onlookers, and I desired to be in conversation with them. So I set about becoming fluid in their language, assisted by the ways in which energy transmission had become second nature through writing.”

And Black feminist scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs describes what she calls “survival radio”:

I am trying to learn how to receive the longing of an expanding universe. Since domination, extraction, and consumption are what keep us speeding toward our own disappearance, I am desperate for another form of reception. Could I listen deeper, tune into another possibility beyond the sad apocalyptic jingle that is swift becoming the legacy of our species?

This practice where I pull what I need out of the air and hope to vibrate differently.  Breathe back frequencies that hold, that slow us down, that move us through, beyond the bounce of feedback.

As I light my candle and invoke my ancestors and creative guides, I feel, too, all around me, the murmurs of these writers and so many others—herbalists and healers, organizers and astrologists, so many BIPOC, women, trans, and nonbinary folks, queer folks, disabled folks, witches, artists, musicians—all of us sensing into the magic and power that will pull us through to the other side of this time, society, and culture not made for us. I feel how we are tapping into ancient and ever-present forces guiding us on our way.

~~~

It’s been a disturbingly warm winter in New England, with not enough cold and snow for trees and plants to gradually go dormant as they should. Meanwhile and elsewhere, an atmospheric river flooded California. The city of Buffalo was buried under a historic blizzard. Human, animal, and plant lives threatened and destroyed by the manifestations of the climate crisis.

Earth is communicating. The Earth is making abundantly clear that the dominance of human systems that ignore and deny our connections with each other and with all beings must end. That we must uplift and practice systems of listening to and understanding the world in much more complex, subtle, and profound ways than the rational and scientific world-view that too many of us have been indoctrinated into for generations upon generations.  

~~~

There’s a particular tree that dances with grace next to the path I often walk next to the Neponset river. This tree caught my attention months ago and I have visited them regularly. I am doing my best to listen to what they want me to know. Sometimes I can sense fragments of messages. Sometimes we simply lean into each other for a moment.

I don’t know if we will survive the many crises we are living into. Me, the tree, those I love, and those I am afraid of.

But if we do survive, it will be in part, because many more of us reclaim and reconnect with our intuition, with other ways of knowing and being, with our ancestors and with the Earth. It will be because many more of us have learned to follow what we know in our bodies, what we hear in our guts and our hearts. It will be because we have successfully centered systems that acknowledge and honor how humans are just one part of a vast and interconnected web of life. It will be because we know profoundly, deep in our bones, with every heartbeat and every belly breath, that we are part of everything and everything is a part of us. 

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Starlight

A prompt for listening

Find a place where you can be comfortable and undisturbed for 10 to 30 minutes. You might want to set a timer for the length of time you want to allot for this practice. Have a notebook and pen or other writing tools at the ready.

Light a candle or otherwise mark the start of this session. You could call in loving ancestors, spirits, elements, or energies to be with you. You might say “I am open to what wants to come through.” 

Start by taking in your surroundings and feeling your body in the environment you are in. Notice what you see, hear, smell, taste and feel.

Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. See where your breath takes you in your body. Are there parts that are tense, gripping, numb, or uncomfortable? If it feels right, breathe into those places. Are there parts of your body that feel relaxed, happy, comfortable? Breathe into those places, too. Notice what your breath is communicating to you

Follow your in breath and out breath. 

If it feels right, put your hands on your belly and breath into your hands. Do this for five breaths or more. See if any image, sensation, sound, or idea arises. Don’t second guess yourself. Write down anything that comes up. If nothing comes up, that’s okay, too.

Now do the same with your hands on your heart. See what arises, if anything, and write it down. 

If it’s comfortable in your body, place your forehead on the ground. You might do this in child’s pose, or simply lay your full body face-down on the ground and rest your forehead on your hands. Take five breaths, and imagine with each inhale you are breathing into your third eye. See what comes up, and write it down.

Now, take the rest of the time to freewrite. If you wrote down any phrases in the previous steps, reread them before you start writing. Otherwise, just start writing. Freewriting means you write without stopping, without crossing anything out or deleting anything. You keep the pen moving or your fingers typing until the time is up. Let whatever wants to come through, come. If you can’t think of anything to write, begin by describing every action you took since you started the prompt. See where that takes you. 

At the end of the time you have, thank any beings or energies you want to thank, and blow the candle out if you lit one.

Revisit your writing one day, one week, or one month later. Circle the words and phrases that feel strong, powerful, and true to you. Use those to write a new poem.

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Stargaze

What I’m reading and listening to

• Destiny Hemphill’s poem “our own names” showed up in my inbox a few weeks ago, and I have returned again and again to this love poem for its music and its lessons. Destiny writes: “I wanted to write towards a commitment to operations of Black care, which necessarily push beyond and against the state.” Stay tuned for more next month from Destiny, who I’m lucky to work with as co-editor of Poetry As Spellcasting.

• This poem by Maya Pindyck on The Slowdown, and host Ada Limon’s reflection, captures beautifully what an expansive definition of “family” might look like—one that includes birds, and trees, and flowers.

• Alexis J. Cunningfolk provides instruction on using the major arcana of the Tarot to provide simple self-care guidance. I adore the practicality and love behind this practice.

• In December, I took a month-long “Reiki for beginners class,” with Marika Hamahata Clymer, which introduced me to an approach that seeks to reclaim this healing practice from all the ways it has been appropriated and removed from its Japanese roots. 

Starshine

Announcements from the Starlight & Strategy community

“Trees give life. Cops take it.” If you are not familiar with the organizing to stop the building of “Cop City” in Atlanta, please visit this solidarity site. There are actions all of us can take around the world to pressure corporations and government institutions to stop the construction of this massive police training facility in the Weelaunee Forest.

I’m really excited to let you all know about Tarot for Writers: Unlocking Creative Pathways Through Intuitive Tools, a new class offered by my friend An Xiao (Ana) Mina, along with fellow authors Xiaowei R. Wang, Dorothy R. Santos. It looks like a really fun and inspiring journey that will help you tap into the power of the tarot to spur creative processes. Starlight & Strategy subscribers (that’s you!) can get 10% off the course price with the discount code TAROT. Also, the three instructors are hosts of Five and Nine, a podcast about magic, work and economic justice, which I highly recommend!

I’m currently in the middle of reading an advance copy of Nancy Lynée Woo’s debut poetry collection, I’d Rather Be Lightning, and it’s fantastic. Clear-eyed about the climate crisis while brimming with love for humans and more-than-humans, this debut collection is a powerful force of language and hope. You can pre-order your copy here.

And, of course, Poetry as Spellcasting: Poems, Essays, and Prompts for Manifesting Liberation and Reclaiming Power, edited by me, Destiny Hemphill, and Lisbeth White is available for pre-order as well!

Do you have an event, a book, an album, a gallery showing, a theater production, an action, a rally, a retreat, a podcast or other artistic/spiritual/activist announcement you’d like to share with this community? Send it my way!

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Thank you for reading to the end! I’ll be back with another missive on the next full moon, March 7. Until then, may you be held in loving community and may the ancestors bless your path.

I heard a story that comes to mind almost every time I look in the mirror these days. Community care practitioner and ritual leader Dori Midnight recounted it on a recent episode of For the Wild. It’s a classic piece of Jewish folklore, she said, told to her by her mother. I think you should listen to the episode, because Dori is an amazing being and storyteller. But for my purposes here, I will paraphrase it very briefly: In the womb, we knew everything—“all the wisdom of the universe.” Before we were born, an angel came, blessed us, and put their finger on our upper lip, right under our nose, where that groove is. And we forgot everything.

Dori has a beautiful take on this story. This means learning is really remembering, she says, and through learning (about plants, in this instance) we get to remember what our ancestors knew. This act of remembering, in the context of Empire and white supremacy, is an act of resistance and healing. I love this interpretation.

And also, when I look in the mirror at that indentation between my nose and my lip, I think about how it was the first wound. How I was once a celestial being, and becoming human meant that everything that I knew about the universe had to be taken away by the touch of an angel’s finger.

~~~

The first wound, but not the last. Being born into a society built on white supremacy and patriarchy means that most of us continue to be wounded. Our divine, messy, outrageous beings are forced into narrow expectations of what is acceptable behavior and what is not. What a good girl does/doesn’t do, or how a strong boy acts—with little room for existing beyond these binaries. How to make yourself smaller and quieter to protect yourself from white supremacy and patriarchal violence, or how behave to protect your white/male/heterosexual privilege. 

In “Tarot for Change,” Jessica Dore puts it this way: “Each and every one of us experienced this rejection of who we truly are and came here to be in some form…. This old rejection wound is like a beast we lug around.”

But at some point, if we are lucky, or privileged in a multitude of ways, we have opportunities to start to heal from these rejection wounds. Which I see as not only a matter of self-care and self-love, but also about collective healing toward societal transformation. If I can learn how to love myself exactly as I am, I will be more able to see and love you exactly as you are. And then we might be able to move together toward creating a society that honors and celebrates our divine wholeness from birth, rather than one that wrenches, slashes, chips, and sands it away. 

~~~

This is work that feels impossible to do alone. And so I am always grateful to find others engaging similarly, working through these tangles of trauma and healing, whether in person or through literature, music, art, and dance. 

I’m excited to share with you this month two new books by dear friends and co-conspirators that provide stories, roadmaps, and flashes of insight on how to engage in this loving, healing, radical work. 

Bushra Rehman has written a powerful coming-of-age novel, set in the tightknit Pakistani community of Corona, Queens in the 1980s. The protagonist of Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion, Razia Mirza, goes through both a series of early woundings and a series of experiences that ground her in the strength of who she is and where she comes from. She spends much of the novel trying to understand herself in the context of her family, her community, and her divine, messy, true self. At the end of the novel, in a moment of deep crisis, Razia is astounded by this self that emerges: “It was as if I always knew this day was going to come. Like there was another voice, an older voice, telling me what to do.”

American Sycamore, Lisbeth White’s debut poetry collection, also resonates with inner voices of knowledge and truth, ancestral recognition, and origins of trauma and healing. Deeply grounded in the natural world and ritual, these poems offer paths through swamps and redwood forests back to source and wholeness. “You are born knowing how to make the sounds of your heart,” she writes in “Awakening of Stones: Hypothesis / Central Argument.” “You are born knowing how to make your hands into wings.”

I found both these works welcome companions in my own journey toward wholeness. And I’m thrilled that they both agreed to share a little bit of their perspectives and writing with you here! 

Below, Lisbeth offers a tender prompt that connects us to how we might imagine ourselves before the original woundings. And Bushra offers recommendations of novels and songs that form her main character’s sense of self, among and amidst the woundings and the love.

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Prompting

by Lisbeth White

American Sycamore features a series of poems entitled "Awakening of Stones" which are written and organized following the format of a research paper, including an outline, abstract, hypothesis, methodology, and results. This series was born during a period of seeking out healing and repair. A central question came into my mind: what if I myself, and honestly most of us born into socially oppressive structures, started our lives feeling safe and beloved by the world? How might we move about in our lives, and with each other, if this was our baseline?

While the question took the poetic form of research in this instance, I am struck by the possibilities in reimagining a sense of origin, or a new mythology, for ourselves. This is a somewhat tender prompt, so I encourage setting up an intentional space to write—light a candle, do a grounding exercise, invite in beloved ancestors or guides, get a cozy blanket, or anything else that helps you feel safe and loved.

Writing a New Mythology

• Begin by taking a few centering breaths, letting each inhale connect you into your inner world, your intuition, and your wisdom.

• As you continue to breathe into your center, take a few moments to bring into your mind people, beings, communities, and places you care about and feel connected to. Jot down a quick list of these folks, perhaps five to 10. See if you can add in at least one aspect or version of yourself in this list.

• After you have a list, choose one being or place to start with, and take a moment to let yourself sense, feel, and imagine that being or place at its most whole, happy, and well.

• Write down how that place or being appears or looks, what they may sound like, how they may engage with you or others in this most whole, happy, and well state.

• While you are writing and sensing into this being or place in this state, ask or notice: what is one thing this being or place knows about themselves in this moment of wholeness, happiness, and wellness? There may be a very clear statement or maybe a just subtle shift in what you are envisioning or feeling in your own body. Write down whatever arises! It's all information.

• Now, complete the phrase "In the new mythology," (or "In the beginning,") with whatever information you received in response to the above question.

• Continue to free write from there...

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Engaging

by Bushra Rehman

Razia is a character I’ve always wanted to see in literature: a young Muslim woman experiencing both her Muslim spirituality and her queer desires. I found inspiration for Razia in my own life story and in the life stories of all of my queer South Asian American friends. In the ‘90s, in NYC and in cities all over the United States, there was a burst of queer South Asian American arts and activism. We didn’t have to choose between our cultures and our gay lives. We moved within overlapping circles of queer BIPOC artists and activists. Razia is one of us, and her character is written in honor of these queer communities.

Like many queer people before her, Razia is faced with a difficult choice: to stay in her childhood world and integrate or to strike out on her own. This isn’t something specific to Muslim communities. It’s important for me to say this because this book isn’t meant to fuel Islamophobia. There are many fictionalized and, to be honest, terrifying portraits of us in American culture. In Roses, I wanted to share a loving and complicated portrait of Muslim American families and communities. I’ve rarely seen three-dimensional portrayals of our families: our love, resilience, and humor.

Razia’s culture and religion form her being. She can no more reject them than reject her physical body. In Roses, I wanted to write of the early wound of breaking away from a religious, loving family and community and how difficult this decision can be.

Roses is also a love letter to New York City and ‘80s Bollywood and the novels I loved. Punctuated by both joy and loss, full of ‘80s music and beloved novels, Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion is a new classic: a fiercely compassionate coming-of-age story of a girl reconciling her heritage and faith with her queer desires.

Books

When I was asked to share a list of the novels the young Razia reads, I knew I needed to make a parallel list, because children’s literature—all literature—severely lacked diversity in the ‘80s. So the list below contains a book Razia reads in Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion alongside a recommendation for a book to read alongside or instead of the “classic.” Air quotes emphasized!

• The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, paired with Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

• From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E. L. Konigsburg, paired with The Temperature of This Water, by Ishle Yi Park

• The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, paired with The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas

• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith, paired with The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez

In one scene, towards the end of the book, Razia and her friend are at the Strand Bookstore in NYC, looking for a copy of Even Cowgirls Get The Blues. The bookseller Ben, inspired by the iconic Ben McFall, helps Razia and suggests a few other books. We'd love to share Ben's recommendations with you!

• Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison 

• Bastard Out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison 

• Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,  by Tom Robbins

• Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, by David Wojnarowicz 

~~~

Playlist

Some of these songs are mentioned in the book, others are inside jokes for people who love Bollywood and some are just me being dramatic…. The order of the playlist follows the trajectory of the book. With the Bollywood movie songs, I highly recommend watching the videos! Many are queer anthems or have been repurposed as such, including the song from Mughal-E-Azam: Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya. Impossible to translate, but I offer this: If I have loved, what do I have to be afraid of?

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Community/Announcements

• If you are reading this when I’m sending it, it’s Election Day morning. You probably don’t need me to tell you this, but please go vote if you haven’t already! And, if it’s helpful, here’s a post about when we can expect to know the outcomes of some key elections.

• You are invited to the following events to hear directly from Lisbeth and Bushra!

  • Virtual book launch for American Sycamore on December 8, 2022 @ 4pm PST/7pm EST, featuring Amber Flora Thomas, Tamiko Beyer, and Lisbeth White. Free; registration required.

  • Conversation & celebration of the launch of Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion on December 9 @ 6:30pm EST, at the Strand Bookstore in NYC with Bushra Rehman and Rajiv Mohabir, Music by DJ Rekha. $7.71; registration required.

  • Conversation with Bushra Rehman and Dulani on December 15 @ 7pm EST, at Odyssey Bookstore in South Hadley, MA. Free.

• Another beloved friend, poet, and co-conspirator, Franny Choi also has a brand-new book out this month: The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. And she is giving away 50 copies to organizers and movement workers! It’s an amazing book, and I highly recommend it! Sign up here to get a free copy: bit.ly/worldgiveaway

Thank you for reading to the end! I’m taking December and January off, so I’ll be back in your inbox for February’s full moon (which, fun fact, will be a micromoon) on the 5th! Until then, read some good books, listen to some good music, and know that you are celestial, exactly as you are!

What would have happened if Indigenous resistance fighters and Black revolutionaries came together in the late 1790s in the U.S.? What alternative universe would have been created from their joined forces?

These are the questions that Kung Li Sun’s Begin the World Over seeks to answer. I read it on retreat, one of about a dozen books that I brought along for company and inspiration as I started work on my own novel. It turned out to be the perfect choice in both regards. 

Kung Li (who uses all pronouns) imagines a history of this land, Turtle Island, where freedom and democracy are victorious. In this deeply researched book, they looked at the historical moment of global revolution and rebellion of the 1790s and ask “What if things had turned out differently? Given all the conditions and realities, what else could have happened?”

To play out this “what if,” Kung Li created some rules of engagement in which to write what they call a “counterfactual” novel. Anything supported by documentary evidence pre-1793 was not contradicted. But anywhere there was a blank space in the historic record pre-1793, he filled in with what was most likely, given what we do know.

Using these rules of engagement, Kung Li imagines the lives of people whose lives we know very little about, including real-life Black revolutionary leaders Denmark Vesey and Romaine the Prophetess; James Hemings, a remarkable cook enslaved by Thomas Jefferson; and Muskogee leader Red Eagle. Kung Li used the scraps of facts he uncovered to write into the “historically blank spaces” of their lives. One of the things that delighted me most was how he imagines all of these leaders of the revolution to be queer and trans (of course!).

When I finished the novel, I immediately wanted to know how Kung Li—a lawyer by training and whom I know as the convener of Queer Fit (a gathering for queer BIPOC folks to work out together)—managed to create a work that is at once adamantly political and a damn good, beautifully written story.

She answers some of the questions I had in this delightful conversation with organizer Mary Hooks. But I still wanted to know more, so I invited her to an interview, which we conducted over email and google docs. I hope you enjoy it, and that you go get Begin the World Over from your favorite indie bookstore. I think it will be good company and bright inspiration for you, wherever you are.

Tamiko Beyer: Writing a counterfactual novel, as you call it, and bringing to life stories of people who have been all but erased from history requires a kind of imaginative thinking that I believe we need in our movements today. We need to be doing this counterfactual thinking so that we can imagine—and then do—that “other thing” that might change the course of history. Can you talk about how you accessed what I am thinking of as revolutionary imagination to write this book, and if there are practices, approaches, or even rituals that you use to cultivate this kind of imagination?

Kung Li Sun: Great question. Three things helped open up space for this story. There was research, then clearing the deck, then typing what showed up.

For the research part, I had good habits from suing prisons at Southern Center for Human Rights, a public interest law office in Atlanta, where our investigators had to dig hard—through obfuscations, layers of secrecy, and straight up lies—to find the real story under the official story. I had an old stack of Smead pressboard folders (‘70’s light green, heavy duty, two prong) from those days and filled them with memos, family trees, court filings, maps, sketches, testimony. That was the first, familiar step. 

The second step, clearing the decks, was the weirdest part of the process for me. It wasn’t just clearing a block of time every morning, but also clearing mindspace and heartspace. In curling, you know those two people out in front of the stone, frantically sweeping the ice with their little brooms? That’s what this second step felt like. Really silly and a little desperate. Eventually, sweeping the ice became a bit more deliberate—meditation really helps; heavy deadlifts and handstands help too—and at some point I understood oh, sweeping the ice is the whole thing. It’s what needs to happen so who/what wants to show up has the space to show up. 

Which then got me to step three: making sure my hands were on the keyboard at the same time every morning, ready to type out whoever shows up, doing whatever they’re doing.    

I’m laughing because writing it out like that makes it seem like I knew what I was doing—I didn’t at all! Writing fiction is new to me, so it’s taken a lot of trial and error, heavy on the error. 

Tamiko: Well, that trial and error resulted in a pretty remarkable story!

You shared with me that AK Press committed to donate a book to a prison library for every preorder, so this revolutionary book is now in hundreds of prison libraries. I’m thinking about what possibilities this story might open up for folks on the inside as well as those on the outside working toward abolition. I see so much potential for this book to spark all sorts of conversations that might help organizers be more imaginative, more expansive in our approaches, strategies and tactics. At the same time, it’s just a really good, compelling story that kept me turning the pages. How do you think you were able to achieve both things? What was the writing and editing process like?

Kung Li: The only reason there’s a story in there is because I have a real hard ass of a writing coach, Karen Pittelman, who insisted on a story. The first draft I sent her was a litany of details about how the sails were rigged and long meditations on strategy. She sent it back with a note saying, essentially, sorry this is terrible, try again. So I tried, twice more, start to finish, before I found the right historical moment for the story to come together.

Once I pulled together a group of people who in real life had been intentionally and violently kept apart (Black revolutionaries and Indigenous resistance fighters), my job was to get out of the way and let them do their thing. I was repeatedly surprised by what came up, and by how things moved forward. Turns out, it’s a good story because it’s a story of victory.  

Tamiko: For sure. Knowing that the revolution was coming—but not knowing how it would come together—was part of what had me turning the pages. But there also were many sensual, pleasurable moments throughout, including tantalizing descriptions of food and cooking, which were a delight to read. 

In this novel, food—and embodied pleasure and joy in general—are posited as necessary components of organizing and revolution. And I was thinking about how I know you as the person who encourages me to do deeper pushups. Which makes me wonder how you think about embodiment—the pleasures and rigors of being in our human bodies—as it relates to revolutionary imagination and organizing.

Kung Li: As a matter of daily material conditions, I understand embodiment as an invitation to do the thing, rather than just think the thing. As a writer, that meant trying out recipes from 18th century cookbooks, walking around as many of the places as I could get to, spending time on ships and in the woods, that sort of thing. As an organizer, an embodied attempt to change our material conditions means running campaigns that are in the muck of the current political reality. So, after the hashtags and memes on Instagram, sitting your embodied butt down across the table from somebody with the power to change material conditions and negotiating that change.      

As a spiritual matter, I understand embodiment as the attempt to get this human body into the flow of the universe. It’s connecting self to non-self, as Buddhists might say, which may be more about enlightenment than embodiment, but it seems there’s no harm in overshooting the target a bit here.  

Tamiko: Yes! I really appreciate this articulation of embodiment as a way of materially being in the flow of the universe. It really resonates—I’m going to be sitting with that for a while. 

Another thing that I’ve been sitting with is what we can learn about solidarity from this novel. There’s the core alliance between the Muskogee people and enslaved and formerly enslaved people. There’s also a secondary character, Captain Mai, who supports this alliance in key moments. She’s a bad-ass Chinese merchant who leverages the mechanisms of capitalism to support Denmark Vesey in his preparation for revolution, as well as for her own wealth. How did you discover this person in your research, and why did you decide to include her? And also, what we might learn from your counterfactual imaginings about Black, Indigenous, and Asian American solidarity in this moment?

Kung Li: Oh Captain Mai! She was built up from the wispiest, most tantalizing of documentary evidence. Mai turns up when you take a close look at Denmark Vesey’s manumission papers. In this universe (the one you and I are occupying), Denmark famously won the lottery in 1800 and bought his own freedom from Captain Joseph Vesey. Or so we’ve been told. Turns out, the signature on Denmark’s manumission papers is not Joseph Vesey, but rather a woman named Mary Clodner. The only bits of information about Clodner is a description of her as a free East Indian woman, and property records of her owning Lowndes Grove on the Ashley River. 

Trying to figure out where in “East India” (meaning all of Asia) she was from, and how she had enough wealth to buy a riverfront mansion, led me down the rabbit hole of US-China trade. The rules of engagement in writing this book was I could fill in any blank spaces in the historical record. So Mai’s backstory as a Chinese merchant is all fictional.     

As for Black, Indigenous, and Asian American solidarity at our current moment, I was chastened by what I learned writing out Mai as a character and really trying to understand her (deeply capitalistic) motivations. In the book, the relationship between Romaine the Prophetess and Sehoy is one of true solidarity. Their interests match up on a spiritual level. The relationship between Mai and Denmark, by contrast, is not one of solidarity. Mai’s interests are, for a short while, aligned with Denmark’s, but for the sake of profit and personal gain. These are very different relationships. The lesson I’ve taken for our current moment is that Asian Americans should not mistake a shared interest in rights-based racial justice for true solidarity.               

Tamiko: Thank you for that. This is asking me to think about solidarity as spiritual work, not just political, and how the struggle for liberation is both material and spiritual. What does it look like to align politically and spiritually in doing the deep work of liberation? How does that inform my own actions, relationships, and alliances, and how I think about accountability? 

It also reminds me of something you said in your conversation with Mary Hooks: “the universe wants liberation … on some level we are all already free”—and what we need to do is to remove what’s in the way of that freedom. Part of what we need to remove, I think, is our attachment to the comforts and privileges that come with living inside empire—comforts that are hard to imagine doing away with. You said that writing this novel helped you imagine how you could live outside of capitalism. Can you talk more about that?

Kung Li: The United States in its current form was not inevitable—writing this book convinced me it wasn’t even all that probable. And so there was nothing inevitable about extractive capitalism taking root and flourishing on this land. Just that. But that’s everything, I suppose.   

Tamiko: Yes. It is everything. 

I have one last question: is there anything else you want readers to know that I didn’t ask about?

Kung Li: Just this: writing the sequel—imagining how things would have played out if the universe had turned left rather than right at this juncture in 1794—has me appreciating just how important Sehoy is to this better path forward. So…don’t sleep on Sehoy.   

Tamiko: Oooh, I’m so excited that there is a sequel coming! Well, now that you’ve brought up Sehoy, I have to ask you about the Red Eagle/Sehoy character! I looked him up on Wikipedia, and I’m interested in how you imagined this character and his gender from the historical info.

Kung Li: ​​There’s no documentary evidence that Red Eagle was trans or intersex, but there was also no documentary evidence saying he wasn’t. (I took that liberty with Denmark as well—there’s no evidence saying he had male lovers, but in the 20-year gap where the record is silent, if Denmark had been a sailor, it’s just as likely as not that he would have had male lovers).

In this time period, a deep split was developing between Muskogee-Creeks on how to deal with American encroachment. The book oversimplifies the conflict as being between the young men (recruited through official U.S. policy to embrace slaver and individual farming/land ownership) and the grandmothers (holding firm to traditional communitarian and matriarchal society).

The historical Red Eagle was a complicated person, pulled in both directions and trying to bridge the two, all the way through the Red Stick Muskogee-Creek civil war when these two positions broke out into open, armed conflict. The historical Red Eagle went the “civilized” route of accepting slavery and land ownership after the Red Sticks were destroyed by Andrew Jackson in 1814.

In Begin the World Over, by sharp contrast, Red Eagle’s mother Sehoy’s alliance with Romaine the Prophetess allows Red Eagle to choose a different route. Having Red Eagle/Sehoy be intersex/trans allows this conflict between the young men and the grandmothers to be resolved and integrated into one body.

Tamiko: That’s brilliant. I’m so glad I asked. Thank you, Kung Li, so much for being in conversation with me about all of these things, and for writing this deeply important book for our times. 

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Prompting

Ritual for embodiment, solidarity, and liberation
Inspired by the conversation above, with a high-five to Queer Fit

• Begin with five shoulder rolls to the front, and five to the back.

• Do five, 10, or 15 squats.

• Do five, 10, or 15 jumping jacks.

• Do five, 10, or 15 crunches.

• Do five, 10, or 15 pushups.

• Sit in meditation for five, 10, or 15 minutes. Perhaps you meditate on entering the flow of the universe. Perhaps you simply follow your breath, which might be the same thing.

• If you have a Tarot or oracle deck, pull cards to answer any of all of the following questions. If you don’t use a deck, you can journal on the questions that call most to you.

  • To whom am I most accountable?

  • What does solidarity feel like in my body?

  • What does liberation feel like in my body?

  • What is in the way of my own liberation?

  • What is in the way of the liberation of the people I am in solidarity with?

  • What support do I have to clear what’s in the way of my own liberation?

  • How can I support and take part in the liberation of those I am in solidarity with?

• Journal, write a poem, dance, or speak out loud what the flow of the universe brings to you.

Engaging

• I’m deeply curious about how to exercise the kind of imagination needed to live differently from how capitalism and white supremacy tell us we need to live. This thoughtful and tender conversation between Prentis Hemphill and Sonya Renee Taylor on Hemphill’s Finding Our Way podcast gave me some ideas and ways to practice exactly that kind of imagination.

• Another novel that kept me good company on my retreat last month was the An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon. It also engages with a reimagining of the U.S. culture of slavery and oppression, and how revolution can emerge from queerness in its broadest form. 

• I shared this song by local Boston artist Oompa with some of my colleagues, and it was a big hit. So I thought y’all might want to check it out as well. The whole album is great. I saw Oompa perform a few years ago, and I very much admire both her artistry and work in the community.

Community/Announcements

• You’ll hear much more about this book in the coming months, but for now, I’m excited to let you know that Poetry as Spellcasting: Poems, Essays, and Prompts for Manifesting Liberation and Reclaiming Power is available for preorder. I’ve been working on this book, which is part anthology, part spellbook, part writing guide, for more than two years with fellow poets Destiny Hemphill and Lisbeth White, and I’m so proud of it! It’s coming out in May 2023 and I’m excited to share more about it with you in the coming months. In the meantime, we’ll be looking for reviewers, events to be part of, etc., so let me know if you have any ideas or want to collaborate!

• I’m also excited about this anthology-in-the-works about menopause by and for queer BIPOC people. Check out their call for submissions! 

  

• In August, I did my first in-person reading at the Brookline Booksmith, and they put it up on YouTube.

Thank you for reading to the end! I’ll be back in your inbox on the next full moon—November 8! 🌕

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This morning, my dog and I walked the route that we’ve taken for years. We crossed the bridge over the Neponset River where mud-caked rocks rose from the drought-slowed waters. And as the trucks and cars barreled by us, I thought, as I often have lately, about the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, two years and some months ago. The street was so quiet during lockdown; the silence, profound. In that silence, amid the suffering, fear, and death, there also grew some wild hope—in me, in my partner, in our friends and comrades, in the people whose words we read and listened to. Hope that all of this pain and uncertainty would spark revolution, transformation, change. That, in Arundhati Roy’s words, the pandemic would become a portal. That things had become so bad that there was nowhere to go except toward a radically different, better, more just world.

I felt that hope surge again during the uprisings following George Floyd’s murder. So many people across the country seemed to unite under the call to defund the police. So many people were finally naming white supremacy and anti-Black racism as root causes of the conditions of our society, and communities of color were coming together across differences, in solidarity and power.

I think I naïvely imagined—or perhaps more accurately, I hoped against hope—that change would come swiftly and smoothly. That the radical transformation of society would take place without resistance. That white supremacy would go down without a fight and the capitalist economy would easily make way for cooperative, sustainable economies. That we would emerge from the pandemic’s portal unscathed, shining, and glorious in our new-found, or newly recovered, wisdom and love for one another and all beings on this planet.

Of course I was wrong. These last few months in particular have felt terribly brutal, perhaps even more so because of these dreams and hopes. From the slew of regressive, reactive Supreme Court decisions, to the economic pain of inflation and price-gouging, to the violent and frightening actions of white supremacist and anti-LGBTQIA+ groups in my community and around the U.S., and more…there have been so many threats to us, the people and communities I hold dear. So many blows to the hope of a future where the climate crisis is abated, to the dream of a just and loving society.

And when I say I was wrong, I don’t mean that the pandemic was not a portal. I don’t mean to say that we are not on our way to a world we all deserve. I think this is still true. What I mean is that those hopes I harbored of a fast and easy transformation were utterly false. All the forces of power under threat are fighting back. On some level, despite my hopes, I always knew this would be true, and I’m not surprised by all that is unfolding.

But that doesn’t make it any less hard. Living through times of dissolution, of the crumbling and tearing down of harmful, violent systems, is painful in so many ways. It’s hard on my psyche, my body, my heart. I’m witnessing the same in others.

So I thought perhaps it might be useful to share some of what I’m learning, thinking, and leaning into right now about how to move through these times we live in. Not surprisingly, I’m finding that the wisdom that most resonates with me are largely shared by queer Black and Indigenous women, trans people, and nonbinary folks. I’m deeply grateful to these teachers, thinkers, and models, and I’m supporting them financially and through amplifying their work. I hope that if what I share below is useful to you, you will do the same as you are able.

I recently listened to Prentis Hemphill’s podcast, Finding Our Way (more on the specific episode below) where they talked about the space that’s created when we feel discomfort. How staying with discomfort and asking questions in that space leads to growth and maturity. I’ve been carrying that with me, trying to learn from the medicine of discomfort. To be okay with not being okay. To not try to fix anything or find ways to make myself feel better when I feel hard things, but rather to ask what the discomfort or pain is showing me, what information I’m gaining from it, and how I can grow from this space.

This doesn’t mean being okay with societal conditions that are not okay. And in this realm, I’m finding adrienne maree brown’s reminders—on Instagram, in her and her sister’s podcast How to Survive the End of the World, and the episode of On Being featuring her—very helpful. She often evokes the many people who have been preparing for these times. She has helped me see clearly how movements for reproductive justice, racial justice, economic justice, climate justice, queer and trans liberation today are vibrant and powerful, with more tools now than we ever had before.

I see in the portal manifesting in these movements. The work of so many organizers over decades (centuries) have grown and amplified, reaching many more people and deepening our learning. I see how, in our movements, more of us have more connections to each other, more access to our own and each other’s wisdom, more understanding of our position among ourselves and in relationship to white supremacy, capitalism, colonialism, etc., and more clarity about what we can do in our positions. This is power; this is balm.

I also find balm in grounding into the immensity, abundance, and vastness of time. To remember that this moment is just the tiniest blip in the vast history of this earth and the history of humans on this earth. Indigenous people have lived on, loved, and stewarded the earth for millennia. The Indigenous hosts and guests on podcast All My Relations often reference the long history of Indigenous people, as host Adrienne Keene did recently when reading from the introduction of her new book, Notable Native People: 50 Indigenous Leaders, Dreamers, and Changemakers from Past and Present:

As the first people of their respective lands, American Indian people, Alaska Native people, and Kānaka Maoli have expertly stewarded and cared for the land, built vast cities and societies, utilized democratic governance, and carried and shaped cultural practices and traditions for centuries.

This colonial project, this society ruled by white supremacy and capitalism, did not exist for a long time. And we know it cannot continue forever—or even much longer. In an episode of “For the Wild,” Kānaka Maoli scholar and poet Dr. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio connected the deep past of Indigenous communities to the future we can create:

In fact, in the grand scheme of things when you look at the age of our Indigenous communities, some of us have been here, our stories go back to darkness. We are much, much older, much much more sophisticated than the strange society we live in. And the only way we get to live in that beauty again is if we have the courage to see beyond now, if we have the faith in the teachings of our ancestors, to see beyond and create beyond now.

And in the episode of Finding Our Way I referenced earlier, Osorio talked also about how the land, ʻāina, will outlive us. The earth in its abundance will heal from the trauma and damage caused by the destruction of colonialism and extraction.

Being reminded of the connections between the deep past and far future rooted in the land and Indigenous sovereignty is immensely comforting. When I am able to see this moment in this perspective, I am reminded that that the work I do, as small as it may feel, is part of a much larger course of history. It re-grounds me in accountability and responsibility, while forcing my ego to take a back seat. I can remember that I am carrying the wisdom and love of my ancestors who experienced their own apocalypses, endings, and beginnings. I can imagine that my work and how I live my life will resonate in some way across the generations that follow, though I will never know exactly how. Which means I must be rigorous, loving, and accountable while also letting go of the things I actually have no control of. Somehow, zooming so far out helps me live more in intensely in the present moment, knowing that all I am responsible for is doing my part really well, in community and on this larger, longer path toward liberation.

These are some of the ways that I am making it through these times. Other ways are: leaning into community, deepening my relationships with plants and seeds, communing with oceans.

How are you doing it? What strategies are you using to take care of your heart and those around you? What wisdom and medicine are you holding?

If you want to share the answers to any of these questions, I would love to hear them. You can share them in the comments, by email, or by tagging me on social media, and, with your permission, I’ll include them in next the newsletter, which will come out in October.

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Prompting

Sit or lay on the ground. Take some deep breaths and let your body settle.

Feel how you are held by gravity to the earth.

The earth beneath you has been around for a very, very, very, long time. See if you can feel into a scope of time far vaster than a human lifetime. Imagine the length of each inhale is five hundred years, each exhale, five hundred years. Count three inhales and three exhales into the future or into the past. Where are you? What is the world like?

Listen to what the earth might have to say to you three thousand years in the future or past. When you are ready, write what you heard or experienced.

Engaging

Links to all the podcasts and people I mentioned above, as well as others that have informed my thinking recently, and ways to support them.

• Finding Our Way, with Prentis Hemphill.

  • Recent favorite episode: Aloha ‘Āina with Dr. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio

  • Become a patron

• All My Relations.

  • Recent favorite episode: Black & Native Futures: Liberation and Sovereignty

  • Become a patron

  • Buy Notable Native People: 50 Indigenous Leaders, Dreamers, and Changemakers from Past and Present, by Adrienne Keene

• Favorite recent For the Wild podcast episodes:

  • Dr. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio on Reclaiming Aloha

  • Kyle Whyte on the Colonial Genesis of Climate Change

  • Rowen M White on Seed Rematriation and Fertile Resistance

• How to Survive the End of the World, with adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown.

  • Current favorite episode: It’s Our Revival.

  • Become a patron.

• Seeds and their People Radio Show

  • Favorite recent episode: Kai Delgado Pfeifer and Filipinx ancestral food and plant medicine

  • Become a patron.

• Buy Remembering our Intimacies: Moʻolelo, Aloha ʻĀina, and Ea by Dr. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio

Community/announcements

For those of you in the Boston area, I have two upcoming, in-person readings in the following days:

New Narratives Series: Present and Future
Featuring live performances by Boston-area spoken artists and performers who draw upon a wide range of artistic styles, cultural traditions, and languages from AAPI communities and beyond, the event series activates artist Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong’s YEAR OF THE TIGER installation in Mary Soo Hoo Park.
Sat, August 13
3:00 - 6:00 pm
Mary Soo Hoo Park, Beach Street, Boston

Third Thursdays Poetry: Niki Tulk, Joshua Nguyen, Chen Chen, & Tamiko Beyer
Thurs, Aug 18
7:00 pm
Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street, Brookline

And also, happy birthday, Dad!

Thank you for reading to the end! I’m taking September off, and I’ll be back in your inbox on October’s full moon, 10/9/22. Until then, be well—and share with me how you are staying as well as you can!

As another June roars into Pride, I’m witnessing queerness again refracted into a million rainbow pieces of LGBTQIA+ commodity. And I find myself reaching again for what queerness is to me. For me. Asking myself what I mean when I claim queerness as one of my primary political and embodied identities.

What does it mean to be queer, to claim and wield the jagged edge of queerness in this political moment? How do I want to live into my queerness in this moment of so much disconnection and devastation? In this nation-state of death? I recently learned the term necropolitics from Cathy Park Hong, and so much about what we are going through right now fell into place for me.

I’m thinking about all the transformation that needs to happen to move away from this moment into a different, better moment. Away from necropolitics into a politics that first and foremost affirms and upholds life. Into a way of relating to each other and all beings with love and compassion.

I’ve always believed that we have what we need to make such a transformation. But in the recent onslaught of violence in so many forms, it’s been hard for me to connect to that belief. To feel it truly.

And then I was reading a new anthology, Queer Nature, in which I am grateful to have poem. I found myself drawn in by the many poems where the queer human blurs into landscape or animal. Where borders and boundaries blur in the queerest of ways. It makes sense—that blurring of boundaries is often where my own poems go.

There’s Natalie Diaz describing a beloved’s body as “atlas of bone, fields of muscle / one breast a fig tree, the other a nightingale.” Or Rachel Eliza Griffith describing the speaker’s own body transformed by queer love: “Look how I have become, as a valley, shadowed with clouds / My thighs, pulling and rocking / The last light from my center. I am changing…”

In Oliver Baez Bendorf’s, “Outing, Iowa,” the land where the speaker was born is both literal landscape and metaphor for his trans body—past, present, continuous. “If you’ve ever doubted that a body can transform completely, take the highway north from town,” he instructs.

The land where I was born was born an ocean, and that ocean born of ice. Researchers and floodplains have undressed its chipped-up secret: plates shifted, glaciers melted into river, into rows of corn that flipbook past your car. Park anywhere and follow the trail back in time toward the effigy mounds, the sacred piles of earth we’ve managed to preserve, and all that’s buried underneath. I still bleed, still weep, what we used to be matters.

And Deborah Miranda’s poem, “Eating a Mountain,” invites us into the most elemental cycle where the humans are eating a deer that had eaten of the mountain that will eventually eat the human. Most of the poem is simply a glorious list of the plants on the mountain the deer has nibbled on, which in turn the human is eating:

…witch hazel, pine,
lichens, mushrooms, wild grape,
fiddleheads, honeysuckle
poison ivy, crown vetch,
clover…

With this listing, Miranda evokes ritual, chanting a recitation of what sustains us and what we will return to. She evokes an endless spiral in which the queer human is just one part of the “wild, sacred sustenance” of life.

These poems, different as they are from each other, all remind me of one of the things I find most powerful about queerness as I experience it, and that is the intrinsic blurring of boundaries and borders. We are nature. Nature is us. The demarcations blur. The queer body, particularly but not exclusively the trans and nonbinary body, defies boundaries. Queer migrants challenge the legitimacy of borders. Queerness as an embodied experience, political construct, and identity refuses to be—cannot be—contained, defined.

Just try to give us an acronym—we’ll keep adding letters to it. Watch us make space for ourselves in the English language with the slow yet inevitable insistence of a moving glacial field.

And watch each generation blossom further into queer being, with today’s trans and asexual youth teaching us more and more about the transcendent power of queerness.

~~~

We are living through reactionary times here in the U.S. and around the world. The powers that think they are keep doubling down on control and repression. It’s a reaction to all of the ways that queer folk, BIPOC, disabled people, working class people, and poor people have been asserting our power and lifting up our own and others experiences, needs, perspectives, and demands over the past few years—all of it built, of course, on decades and decades of organizing and cultural work.

To the status quo, to the powers that think they are, radical queers are frightening in our beauty and our love. In our disregard for borders and boundaries. In our fierce insistence on care. We are life-giving, pleasureful, intimate, questioning, questing, and abolitionist. We break assumptions apart and put together new norms. We demand ever more care and ever more love; we choose connections, family, relationships based on equity and respect. We prioritize space for growth, space for rest, space for care of self and the collective.

We refuse—with our bodies and words, in our art and dance, with our organizing and our votes, in our loving and living—necropolitics and the racial capitalism it’s built on. That’s why those in power seek to outlaw our names, to deny our right to live fully into the bodies we were meant to live in, to scare us back into hiding.

But, like the dandelions pushing up from every nook and cranny of concrete right now on Massachusett land where I live and maybe where you live too, we will keep rising. Cut us down and a dozen more of us are back the next day, brilliant in our golden manes.

This is not to say we are not suffering, not traumatized, not despairing. We are, and we are, and we are.

But just maybe, ways that we are queer and brilliant are the ways that we will find the strength in each other and in our communities. Just maybe our bone-deep familiarity with transformation will be part of what unfurls and grows the revolution into a world is queer and trans and pro-BIPOC and feminist—a society that loves life and knows that as we eat the mountain, the mountain also eats us.

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Prompting

Tarot spread for transformation and power

This spread can also be used with oracle decks, or you can use the questions as journal prompts.

1. What power is emerging inside of me?

2. How do I know?

3. What power is latent inside of me?

4. What do I need to do to nourish and nurture this power?

5. How is the earth supporting and feeding my nature?

6. What does transformation feel like in my body?

Poem/essay/story prompt

• Go out into the world. This can be a “natural” setting, or human-made environment. Choose a place where you can move about, then sit quietly and write comfortably for a time.

• Choose one feature of this landscape to observe. This might be a tree, a cluster of moss, a concrete wall, a splash of graffiti…whatever calls to you.

• Spend time with it. Look at it closely, touch it if you can, smell it perhaps, listen to it.

• Close your eyes if you are comfortable and sit near or on this feature. What is it saying to you? What would it like you to know?

• Free-write about what you have discovered about the feature and/or you during the time you have spent with it.

• If you can, repeat this process over several days or weeks, visiting the same landscape and feature.

• At the end of this time, go back through your free-writes and circle or underline words or phrases that feel like they have heat or power. Begin your poem, essay, or story with these lines or phrases. See how they connect. See what they have to tell you.

Engaging

• Fire Island. No coming out stories, no straight people. Just a group of Asian American & other POC gay friends loving up on each other, looking for romance, and partying it up in their underwear. I’m 100% here for Margaret Cho, for Asian American gay men portrayed as hot and lovable, for the subtle commentary of racism and classism within the gay community.

• The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon. I’m about two-thirds of the way through this tome (the paperback it clocks in at 830 pages), and I’m loving this feminist, queer love story in a world where queerness is unremarkable, dragons and other fantastical creatures can speak human languages, and trees hold the secret to immortality.

• On Saturday, I had the honor of being part of the Lambda Literary Awards. I’m thrilled (and shocked!) that Last Days won, and I’m particularly excited to check these other winners:

  • Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da’Shaun L. Harrison

  • Gumbo Ya Ya by Aurielle Marie

  • Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought
    edited by Briona Simone Jones

  • Stone Fruit by Lee Lai
    

Community/Announcements

As you all know, I’m in the midst of helping to organize Brew & Forge’s Witches & Warriors retreat for poets and organizers. The retreat will culminate in an in-person public reading on Saturday, July 23, featuring faculty Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Cynthia Dewi Oka, at the Watershed Center in Millerton New York.

Details to be announced—follow Brew & Forge on Instagram or Twitter to get the latest updates.

As always, I’m grateful to you for reading and sharing this newsletter. I will be taking next month off but will be back in your inbox on the full moon of August 11! Until then, I hope you have moments to glory in the sun, be refreshed by water, and rest in the dark.

Dearests. I usually write this newsletter a week or so ahead of time and schedule it to send on the exact moment of the full moon. On Friday, I finalized this post on the leaked SCOTUS decision. But when I learned of the anti-Black massacre in Buffalo—one of several shootings over the weekend, including an anti-Asian shooting in Dallas—I decided to pause on sending it. To breathe. To mourn. To feel. I considered not publishing this at all, but in the end, I am doing so because it is all connected. This weekend’s violence is linked to the banning of abortion. I write below of how the desire control people’s bodies is inextricably linked to white supremacy. And in fact, the anti-abortion movement has joined forces with white supremacists in many ways, including those who believe in “replacement theory.”

I am holding all of us in rage and sorrow and also with great tenderness and love in this moment. This post from poet Chen Chen on gentleness and generosity, and “Meditations in and Emergency” by Cameron Awkward-Rich say some things on this better than I can. I honor the ways that each of us survives and moves toward compassion, accountability, and love.

Thank you for being here.

In Tending the Soil, Lessons for Organizing, artist and organizer Ricardo Levins Morales shares a teaching from Chinese martial arts: the enemy will advertise their vulnerabilities. This lesson has us looking at where “the powers that think they are” are protecting themselves. (I’m borrowing this phrase from artist brontë velez as I did in March’s post. Here, I mean wealthy white men in judicial and political power in the U.S. and those helping to advance their agenda) It asks us to see where are they pouring their resources and examine what they are frantically trying to distract attention away from. Where they are most aggressively trying to suppress stories, weaken organizing, siphon off the heat of transformation?

It’s not hard to find those hot spots. From the right’s rabid scapegoating of what they erroneously call “CRT,” to the slew of anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, to the leaked Supreme Court draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, we see how “the powers that think they are” are advertising their vulnerabilities.

Over the last few years, all sorts of people—not just organizers, not just radicals—have been talking about reckoning with the colonialism, genocide and slavery that are the founding systems of the U.S. All sorts of people are invested in the liberation and freedom of trans and nonbinary people, Black folks, immigrants, and women. Despite the strong backlash following the 2020 summer of uprisings, people are still organizing around abolition, still calling for de-funding the police and putting those resources into Black communities. As the economy continues to harm more and more people, folks are thinking about what we can do to transform capitalism. And more and more people are recognizing that gender is fluid and that there’s a whole universe of sexualities.

These movements and trends are vulnerabilities for those who hold on to power right now. How would the mega wealthy wield their economic and political might in a society whose economy is based on care, mutual aid, and cooperation? How would white folks’ power shift in a society where we’ve grappled with the racial harms of the past, made reparations, and acted every day toward accountability, racial justice, and equity? How would cisgender men keep their grasp on control in a society where gender is recognized as fluid and where loving relationships are expansive and diverse? In such a society, wealthy white cisgender men would only have a fraction of the power that they have had since, well, before the constitution was written in this country.

And so they are holding on, scrabbling to keep their power by all means possible. The leaked draft decision by Justice Samuel Alito is very much a part of this attempt. It is an assertion of power by the land’s highest court to advance abortion bans when the majority of people in this country—across religious beliefs—think abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

Author Sherronda J. Brown, in an brilliant essay titled, “Criminalizing abortion isn’t just about controlling ‘women’s bodies,’” examines why and how abortion bans are part of a much larger attempt to keep white supremacy and capitalism in place:

Abortion is a means of freedom that a white supremacist, capitalist state cannot allow, because controlling reproduction is key to controlling so much more. Abortion bans are meant to keep poor people trapped in poverty for generations. More births means more workers, more productivity, more cogs in the capitalist machine. More people living in poverty means more people to fight wars, more people to help maintain colonial and imperial rule. But criminalizing abortion is first and foremost about obedience, about creating docile people and bodies, and enshrining the ability to control people’s bodies as property of the state. For the state to have total power, it must control the production of state subjects. It’s physiological and psychological warfare, intended to hit the already most marginalized the hardest. The wealthy will always have access to safe abortions, just like they will have access to clean water, and healthy food, and safe neighborhoods, and healthcare, and ways to lessen the blow of climate change on their lives. Abortion bans are about maintaining that kind of power.

~~~

In the days following the leak of Alito’s draft decision, I fluctuated between outrage and grief, between feeling powerless and feeling vengeful, between anger and sorrow. When I read analysis of the leaked decision, I was particularly upset by the far-reaching possibilities of it—how Alito’s spurious reasoning could be applied to other decisions, including Loving v. Virginia and Lawrence v. Texas: decisions that have a direct bearing on my existence today. My parent’s interracial marriage would have been illegal before the Loving decision. My ability to live freely and fully as an out queer person is contingent in part on Lawrence. I felt the weight of oppression heavy in my multiracial, queer, female body.

I meditated, went for walks, danced in the kitchen with my love, Patti, as I sought ways to connect and hold on to compassion and hope. But more often than not, anger and fear crept back in.

Then, slowly and quite surely, I started to encounter reflections and wisdom from mostly women of color who offered perspectives I desperately needed. It began with this episode of The Slowdown, which featured Brionne Janae’s poem “Against Mastery.”

Poet Ada Limon’s reading of the poem and her meditation on power and mastery helped me begin thinking about this leaked decision as a desperate power play. Janae’s poem re-oriented me from feeling powerless to feeling out how I might move through these times from a place of integrity. She writes:

"… let me face 

the ones I harm with open palms and let love 
be the method and measure of my worth 

keep my heart with my people 
and the coal glowing beneath my feet"

Yes, I thought. I want to live without mastery, I want to move with curiosity and love. I commit to and want to be held accountable to break laws, break norms, to burn the house down.

I also read an essay in Sarah Faith Gottesdiener’s Many Moons Lunar Planner on owning our worth: “Many of the people who can make revolutionary change—the sensitives, the sweethearts, activists, and witches—must own their own worth,” by which she means “inherent worth: that which cannot be bought and sold, only cherished and shared.” It helped me reconnect with my own essence, my own power, inherent in me no matter what the over-culture or the law says.

And finally, Patti tipped me off to this post by adrienne maree brown, who prompts us to not “let terror take our time.” brown reminds us that we have what we need in our kitchens and gardens to take care of each other. She recalls for us that Black feminists have been preparing a long time for this moment. And there are people across the country who, for decades, have been doing the work to make abortion available, even as access to this medical procedure has been steadily encroached upon.

All these reminders settled into my body. Their messages helped me lift the heaviness I felt in my limbs. They gently re-opened my eyes and heart to the movements upon movements of people committed to struggling together toward freedom in the form of abolition, reparations, trans and queer liberation, building communities of care and equity. These wise folks asked me to stand in my own power. Helped me remember no court decision can take away my innate worth, my right to exist, to love who and how I want to, to have ownership of my body. 

This is where my power lies, and it is where our power lies collectively. If we—the swirling, angry, loving masses of queers and trans folks, BIPOC folks, poor folks, women, disabled folks, all people committed to a different society, a different future—if we reside in our power without grabbing or hording that power, if we take care of each other, if we commit and hold ourselves to burning the house down—what a blaze we can make!

And what a garden we can grow from the ashes.

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Prompting

Before you start this prompt, you may want to go back to the March prompt to do a Tarot drawing or journaling on your power. Then:

• Read and/or listen to “Against Mastery” by Brionne Janae, in The Slow Down

• Choose one or two values that resonate for you from this list

• Choose one or two values that you feel strongly opposed to from the same list

• Freewrite (write without stopping) for five or ten minutes on each value

• Read through your freewrite and circle or underline words and phrases that have the most heat for you

• Write a poem, essay, or story that examines a value that you want to live into and a value that you want to live away from. If you’re not sure where to begin, start with a phrase that you circled in your freewrite. You may want to follow Janae’s structure, using repetition of the negation of the phrase “let” to illustrate how you don’t want to live (i.e.: “let me lord over no one and nothing”), and “let me” to illustrate how you do want to live (i.e.: “let me learn from the babies”).

Engaging

• Here’s a beautiful shared document on many ways to take action to show up for abortion access.

• A deep dive into what we mean when we say Black women have been leading th on this issue for decades, this reproductive justice syllabus from the Black and Asian Feminist Solidarity project is 🔥 .

• In addition to the articles and posts that helped me reconnect with my power and purpose, linked above, this song also showed up:

Community/Announcements

I asked my friend (and friend of the newsletter) who works at National Abortion Access Fund (NAAF) where folks should donate if they are looking to do so. She encourages people to check out their local abortion fund and donate there (especially if you are outside the Northeast or West coast). NAAF is also also having a general Fund-a-Thon, which closes at the end of this month. You can which funds need the most love and chip in as you wish!

Thanks for reading all the way to the end! I’ll be back in your inbox on June’s super moon on the 14th! Until then, sending many blessings and support for residing in your power.

I was talking with a friend, face to face, in person, at an annual writers’ conference. The last time I had seen him was over pizza at the same conference in March 2020. We had hugged goodbye then, not knowing two years of pandemic and turbulence would go by before we saw each other again. Now, we stood in a sunny, airy space catching up. Groups of people came and went, other friends and acquaintances stopping to say hi, staying a while, then moving on, the way it is at conferences like that. Waves of connections merging and flowing, nodes in a network activating and spreading.

It felt joyful, familiar, and also strange after all this time of so many video conference screens and chat box connections. I was happy to be there, albeit masked and continuing to negotiate all the boundaries and questions of hug-or-not, do-I want-to-eat-at-a-restaurant-with-you, is-this-panel-too-crowded-to-stay, etc. It felt right to be in my body, sharing the same space with other bodies, friends and acquaintances, people I have known in all the decades of my adulthood, and people I have only recently met. This is a community I belong to, my people, a network and web of relationships I am part of, and it felt significant to re-affirm those connections in person, even in fleeting moments in the halls of the Philadelphia Convention Center.

~~~

I was there in Philadelphia with my partner, Patti, who was born and raised in the city. We spent hours walking across Philly’s grid, to the squares and the circle, past sculptures and murals. We stopped for a drink at a dive bar and ate at an oyster house. She showed me the house her dad grew up in—a tiny row house in a now extremely gentrified neighborhood. I felt the energy of the city pulsing, felt welcomed and embraced by the spirit of the place. Walking through neighborhoods of tightly packed houses, past hole-in-the-wall restaurants and grand buildings, I thought, I could live here. This could be my home; these could be my people.

On our way out of Philly, we stopped in Kensington, a neighborhood hit hard by the opioid epidemic. The streets were mostly deserted on a Sunday morning, and there was a whole flock of chickens fenced in an empty lot. We were there to see the mural painted by Jess X Snow that I chose for the cover of my most recent book, Last Days.

When we found it, we just stood on the sidewalk and stared. I have looked at and lived with that image for so long, it has felt like it’s become a part of me, somehow. And now, here it was, larger than life, painted on an entire side of a three-story building. A brightly colored fence enclosed what looked like a restaurant patio at the back of the building, so we couldn’t see the whole thing, but I could still feel its magic pulsing in the cold wind that skittered trash along the sidewalk.

Just then, a man came out of his car. “That’s a great restaurant,” he said.

I realized he was talking about the Mexican restaurant on the ground floor of the building. “The food is amazing. They just opened up, and I don’t know if they’re going to do OK here. You should definitely check it out. I was just there last night for dinner—here, take a look.” He pulled out his phone to show us pictures of the dinner he had eaten there last night. “Man, it was good! I’m Rico, by the way.” We shook his hands and introduced ourselves. “Yeah, highly recommend this place. Their bar is great, too. Tina’s the bartender. They’re all good people. Tell them Rico sent you.” Then he waved goodbye and carried on.

Patti and I grinned at each other. Emboldened by Rico’s friendliness and enthusiasm, we ventured into the restaurant. We explained we hoped to see the full mural, and could we perhaps go into the patio? A kind server led us to the back, allowing us to spend a few minutes taking in the full power of the mural.

~~~

On the drive home we listened to an episode of Truthout’s podcast, Movement Memo, featuring author and activist Dean Spade. He and host Kelly Hayes talked about mutual aid, conflict and burnout, organizing for systems change, and community. Spade, like many others, believes that mutual aid will be the way that we survive the collapse of racial capitalism and reduce the suffering this collapse entails. As things get harder, no entity, organization, or political party is going to swoop in and fix everything. As June Jordan wrote, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Disabled people have known this for a long time. People taking care of each other, neighbors looking out for each other, communities coming together to try to meet the needs of each person in the community—that’s how any of us will survive.

Which means we have to learn how to work with each other through conflict and how to shift our attention from ourselves as individuals to ourselves as collectives. At one point in the interview, Spade wonders why doing mutual aid and other unpaid social change work feels impossible to so many people, why they get “burnt out” so easily. Historically, he notes, organizing for change has always come from the people who lived in the worst conditions. With little to lose, they are the ones motivated to take the biggest, boldest risks. It’s not like the organizers for the 40-hour-work day had more time than we do now; it’s not like enslaved people organizing revolts for their freedom lived under easier conditions than we do today. What are the conditions today that make it so hard to sustain long-term resistance and organizing?

His conclusion is that we are more isolated than ever before. More people are living alone or in small groups, with no support systems—even before COVID, under racial capitalism. We turn to scrolling or streaming to numb out. Most people don’t have the kinds of relationships that would make it possible to drop off their kids at the neighbors while they go to an organizing meeting. Too many of us are individuals in our own little spaces, spinning in misery, unable to connect. Or, when we do connect but then find ourselves in conflict with each other, most of us lack the skills to work through the interpersonal challenges in ways that deepen rather than sever community ties.

~~~

Yesterday, I finished N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. (So good! I want to re-read it immediately.) I was struck by how the main character, Essun, survives apocalypse in community, just like Lauren Olamina in Octavia Butler’s Parable series. Neither Castrima in Jemisin’s work nor Earthseed in Butler’s are utopias; the people in these communities have conflict, there’s mistrust, sometimes they even hate each other. But they know that to survive, they must share space, time, energy, and resources to take care of each other. Essun finds to her surprise that she ends up liking, even loving some of the people in her “comm.” They are, in the end, her chosen family.

When I think of my chosen family, I think of the poets and writers I connected with at the conference. I think of friends spread out across the country. Networks of care made possible by technology and airplanes. These communities are deeply important to me. And also, I feel a need for community rooted in place and grounded in proximity. A community that can help me break through the habits of isolation and bring me into physical and emotional closeness.

It's ironic, because I’ve lived in Boston now for about a decade, and it’s felt almost impenetrable to me, in contrast to the openness we found in Philly. Only in recent years, perhaps forced by the pandemic, have Patti and I started to find and build real community here. We are part of a network of people who take care of each other when the need arises. We practice mutual aid in a variety of ways, and are building relationships across all kinds of differences. It’s surprising to find ourselves in this kind of community in this city that has seemed for so long to me to be closed and isolating.

I’m not sure whether we’ll stay here or finally move to Philly as we’ve talked about for many years. But I know that wherever I am, I need to keep practicing being in the kind of community that will get us to a different kind of future. I need to keep actively practicing the skills we need to live together and take care of each other, as the world collapses around us. Not just how to grow tomatoes, but also how to be in loving relationship with people who annoy me or make me angry. How to work through conflict in ways that align with my values. How to listen and make sure I am heard. How to be vulnerable and ask for help. How to show up. How to keep showing up.

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Prompting

Below is a short list I came up with of things I need to practice to find my way back to community:

• Learning to ask for help, feeling vulnerable in that risk and doing it anyway. Trusting that when I ask for help, people will show up.

• Helping people who ask for help.

• Offering help in low-key ways.

• Getting to know my neighbors better.

• Attending neighborhood civic association meetings.

• Releasing my tight grip on the boundaries between mine and yours.

• Learning how to acknowledge conflict, not be afraid of it, and learn to work within and inside of it.

Write your own list, or add on to this one. Then take one item and think about how you can do one thing to practice it this week. Journal about how it feels, what’s scary, what’s easy, what surprised you. Next week, choose another item, or another way to practice the first item. Journal again. Keep practicing for a month. Know that practicing means you’ll make mistakes. That’s ok, it’s good. Keep practicing.

Engaging

• Building community among Amazon workers seems to have been pivotal to the historic, successful unionization at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island.

• Migrant workers, sex workers, and their allies recently released a report to serve as an organizing and policy tool.

• Using art and graffiti to organize and communicate subversive messages in Russia.

• Scalawag magazine celebrates national poetry month by pairing dope poets from the South with dope playlists by Black and Latinx musicians. I’m in love.

Community/announcements

Applications for the Witches and Warriors retreat close at the end of this month!  We’re looking for BIPOC poets and organizers who are interested in dreaming together. Apply or spread the word!

Last Days, along with many other fine books of poetry from Alice James Books, is on sale for just $10 during National Poetry Month.

That’s it for me this month! Thank you, as always, for reading and subscribing. I’ll be back in your inbox on May 16. It’ll be a full moon lunar eclipse, so let’s see what it will bring!

The events over the last few weeks have forced me to dig deep to access my resilience. Russia invades Ukraine and threatens nuclear war, U.S. government officials roll out hateful anti-trans and anti-queer policies, hate crimes continue to rise against Asian American women, and I’m wondering what can support me in the face of overwhelming sadness, outrage, anxiety? What are the core beliefs that can help me move through my days? What is available to me as grounding, nourishing forces?

I find myself humming this protest chant. And some days, I believe it. Some days, that’s what keeps me going.

Ain’t no power like the power of the people

‘cuz the power of the people don’t stop!

Say what?

Ain’t no power like the power of the people

‘cuz the power of the people don’t stop!

I believe these words when I read about the many nonviolent ways that people in the Ukraine resisted the invading Russian army—from changing highway signs in order to sow confusion to standing in front of tanks, to confronting Russian soldiers.

I believe it when I watch Rep. Michele Rayner standing on the floor of the Florida State house in her full, queer humanity telling all the young LGBTQ+ people watching that they matter and that they are loved.

I believe it when I see college students defying an anti-trans Texas House candidate who visited the University of North Texas. (h/t Chani Nicholas for this and the above link) (And for state-by-state list of anti-trans legislation and actions you can take, check out this post by Anti-Racism Daily.)

The power of the people don’t stop.

~~~

I listened to this For the Wild podcast episode in which Black-Latinx transdisciplinary artist brontë velez changes the phrase “the powers that be” to “the powers who think they are.” I love this reframing. It challenges the idea that state or corporate power is an uncontested and perpetual state of being. And it suggests that such power is delusional, a usurping by those who think they have the right to it, but actually don’t. It opens up a lot of room to question and challenge that power. To take it back.

The people of Ukraine’s resistance, queer and trans folks insistence of our worth and beauty, the ongoing resilience of the Asian American community. All this and more reminds me that even in the face of overwhelming oppression by “the powers who think they are,” people keep pushing for justice, autonomy, and dignity. For the right to be seen and loved for our full selves. For the power to control our own destiny.

There will always be more of us—people who want to live our lives fully, in beauty and love, dignity and respect—than those who seek to amass power and control through violent and oppressive means.

We don’t have their guns, tanks, or weapons. But we have our bodies and our breath, our brains and our hands, our senses of humor and our voices. And we’ll keep using them until we can’t. To protest, to make art, to organize, to subvert, to love each other, to feed each other, to nourish each other. In dignity and justice, with equity and love.

What else is there to do in this lifetime?

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Prompting

I’m writing postcard poems this month, as I do every year, to other Kundiman poets, as part of the Poetry Coalition. One poem a day, written on a postcard and sent out into the world. The theme this year is “The future lives in our bodies: Poetry & Disability Justice,” drawn from the poem “Femme Futures” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

Writing a short, postcard-sized poem to send out every day is a powerful exercise in letting go. I can’t be too precious about the process, nor can I be perfectionist about the product. I write and send, write and send, write and send, for thirty one days. This month, I am writing from my body toward the future, into what I know and what I don’t. Listening and learning from people with disabilities about what it means to make space and thrive in an ableist world.

This, too, is how I can practice what it means to manifest the power of the people—my power. It’s not an intellectual exercise. It’s somatic, it’s heart-centered, and I have to show up for it day after day after day.

So here’s your prompt:

• Draw Tarot or oracle cards for these questions and/or journal about them.

  • Where is my power located?

  • How can I access it and tap into it in a consistent and sustainable way?

  • What does it look like to step into my power?

• Do one thing every day that taps into that power.

Maybe this one thing is writing a poem. Maybe it’s telling someone you love them. Maybe it’s speaking out against an injustice, however slight. Don’t think too hard about it, and don’t be afraid if it’s not perfect. Just do your version of write and send, write and send, write and send. (And if the thought of accessing your power brings up feelings of discomfort or fear, you might want to check out Typewriter Tarot’s new, beautiful offering on exploring your personal power, available to patrons.)

If you want to actually write and send a postcard poem a day, it’s easy to do.

1. Organize a group of friends to participate

2. Make a spreadsheet with people’s names and addresses

3. Get (or make) 31 postcards and postcard stamps

4. Start at the beginning of the month (or whenever!) and write and send one poem a day. You’ll send the first postcard to the person listed below your name, and then just go down the list, cycling through the names until the end of the month.

This project is especially dear to my heart because I love snail mail and the USPS. So, here’s a special Starlight and Strategy offering for subscribers (paid or free). If you send a postcard poem to me with your return address and the email address that you use to subscribe to this newsletter included, I will send one postcard poem back. I can’t promise when I will get to it, but I promise to do it. Send it to P.O. Box 260250, Mattapan, MA 02126.

Write and send, write and send.

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Engaging

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you probably know that one of my favorite teachings of adrienne maree brown is “what you pay attention to grows.” Right now, it’s easy to pay attention to news that feels terrifying and crushing. I think it’s crucial to know what’s happening in the world and our communities. But what I’m trying to pay the most attention to is the news that’s not always readily available in mainstream news sources. I’m looking for reporting and evidence of what has been and will always be the counterforce to injustice, political aggression, and oppression: the power of the people.

If you, too, are looking for news, analysis, and poems that’s not readily carried by mainstream outlets, I’m linking to a few more things that are giving me hope, that are helping me witness and be part of the unstoppable power of the people.

• The successes of the anti-nuclear weapon movement, and how it can once again become a powerful force: “The anti-nuclear movement was big, broad and diverse. It won, again and again and again.”

• The close connection between authoritarianism and misogyny—and why and how women and queer folks are critical to successful anti-authoritarian movements: “It turns out that frontline participation by women is a significant advantage, both in terms of a movement’s immediate success and in terms of securing longer-term democratic change.”

• A feminist, intersectional analysis of the war in Ukraine: “From Eastern Europe’s historical experience of second-class citizenship, of non-Western whiteness, and of poverty under neoliberal capitalism, a new form of solidarity should emerge, one that connects with impoverished people and people of color everywhere, from the First World to the Third.”

• Reparations for Black Americans, starting at the grassroots. “Until federal reparations are actualized, grassroots organizations across the country are heeding the call to right these wrongs.”

• Starbucks workers are unionizing, despite corporate attempts to shut down union drives. “These election outcomes show Starbucks’ efforts to keep workers from unionizing are failing, according to labor experts.” (h/t Anti-Racism Daily)

• Poems by Serhiy Zhadan, contemporary Ukrainian-language poet and novelist. “It will go like this: a bird’s lightness and rage / people, who forestall the evening chill by singing, / will start to remember winter like a forgotten language, / they’ll read it, re-read it, recognize it.”

What are you reading/watching/listening to outside of mainstream sources? What is giving you hope or helping you tap into resilience? Let us know in the comments.

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Community/Announcements

Witches and Warriors

I’m so excited to let you all know that applications are open for the inaugural Witches & Warriors Retreat for BIPOC poets and social justice organizers/activists!

It will be an opportunity for BIPOC poets and activists to gather, rest, dream, scheme, collaborate, share skills, and build relationships. Bringing together the radical creativity of poets with the audacity and expertise of activists, Witches & Warriors will create space for participants to envision together a more liberated future. Activities will include workshops, discussions, writing sessions with faculty mentors, rest and play time, and a public reading/celebration.

And I couldn’t be more pleased that Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Cynthia Dewi Oka will be our faculty this year. 

I hope you check it out and apply and/or help us spread the word.

And, if you want to financially support the retreat—which is free for participants—you can make a tax-deductible, online donation here via our fiscal sponsor, the Peace Development Fund.

~~~

Headed to Philly and AWP

And on the subject of poetry and organizing, I will be presenting on a panel titled “Whenever the Wounds of Injustice Are Salted We Will Gather: Poetry of Activism” at the AWP writer’s conference — in person in Philadelphia, on Saturday, March 26.

I’ll also be signing books at the Alice James Books table (#947) at the AWP bookfair, 10 -11 am on Friday, March 25.

If you are attending AWP please stop by if you can! (Saturday tickets are $25 if you are in the Philly area.)

~~~

My most recent poetry collection, Last Days, has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award!

~~~

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That’s it for me for this month! I’ll be back in your inbox for the next full moon, on April 16. Until then, I wish you love, power, and resilience.

A tiny June Jordan poem has been running through my head over the past few weeks. It often comes to me when I’m walking through our wintery neighborhood: crunching the thick, light snow—there is no chance—the sandy, salty sidewalks—that we will fall apart—gingerly across icy patches—there is no chance—and back in our warm home—there are no parts.

There is no chance that we will fall apart
There is no chance
There are no parts.

This very short poem that I have been walking with has a very long title: “Poem Number Two on Bell’s Theorem, or The New Physicality of Long Distance Love.” Jordan, the late Black, queer, feminist poet and activist, is, I think, one of the most important American poets of the 20th century, but she’s been consistently overlooked and dismissed for her politics, her Blackness, her queerness.

When I first heard this poem, I was delighted by how much it packed into just 17 words, how each line was a new twist, a deeper level. Metaphysics, quantum physics, love, and community—it’s all here in these three lines.

I looked up Bell’s Theorem as I was preparing to write this post. I won’t pretend that I understood all of what I read, but I gather that Bell’s Theorem is a set of quantum theories about how, when two atoms are “entangled,” they will affect each other instantly, no matter how far away they are. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.” The dearly beloved and recently passed Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh might have called it “interbeing.” June Jordan wrote, “there are no parts.”

Bell’s Theorem seems upsetting to some scientists because it implies/proves that the word is not as logical and orderly as they believe it is. It points to a universe that is, in the words of one MIT professor, “inescapably…bizarre”

But what is unsettling to some scientists feels resoundingly true for me and the way I experience the world: wondrous, surprising, and full of mysterious connections. There are no parts. We—humans, ducks, bears, mice, seals, herons, rivers, roses, stones, mountains, snow, rain, seeds, weeds, all of us—we are all interconnected. And we cannot fall apart because we are of the whole, always part of the whole. We are made of the stuff of stars; we are the galaxy.

I find this idea of entanglement and interconnection immensely comforting in this moment when it feels like so much is falling apart around and inside us.

There is no chance that we will fall apart. There is no chance, there are no parts.

If we are all of a whole, then that must mean we are moving toward societal dissolution together.

It’s hard to feel that most days. I find myself firmly on one side—the far left side—of pretty much all political and social divides. So it’s extremely challenging to me to think that I am of a whole with, say the Arkansas parents who find my and other queer and BIPOC women’s poems obscene and want them banned from their local library. But what if I am able to stretch myself—my ego, my imagination, my love—to find where and how I am part of them and they are part of me?

~~~

Sometimes things have to lose their shape for a new shape to emerge: the same stuff of the galaxy reconfigured in new ways. I am thinking here of this amazing video of an octopus dancing a beautiful, magical, morphing dance. How wondrously and gracefully this creature transforms.

On land, in human society, the moment of societal transformation I am experiencing feels something like the opposite of that. It feels violent, terrifying, burning, like walking through fire. Yet in this fiery pain, I believe we are being transformed. I don’t know what that transformation holds, but I hope we will emerge knowing the truth of our connection more deeply. To understand that we are a continuation, as Thich Naht Hanh says. To know we have always been here, connected.

There is no chance that we will fall apart.

~~~

There is no chance.  Here’s the other piece of Jordan’s poem, perhaps referencing the “free-will loophole” of Bell’s Theorem, which I won’t try to summarize here except to say the loophole was closed in 2018, “proving,” I guess, that there is free will. I read this line not so much to mean that everything is predetermined, but rather that everything we do matters. Because we are of a whole, all our thoughts, actions, and emotions have consequences—material or energetic. Perhaps it’s as tiny as a shiver of a breeze across a spider web, or as great as a tsunami rising out of the ocean.

I don’t think most of us, maybe any of us, can ever know what all of those effects are: who and what we affect, who and what affects us. But I find enormous comfort when I can think of myself not as an isolated being thinking my very own thoughts, carrying out my own limited actions, living in discreet body with clear boundaries between me and not me—but rather as a being who is affected by the wind and the rain, by someone’s anger and someone’s joy, who takes actions that are the culmination of lifetimes of decisions and actions of others, whose body is kept healthy and well by billions of microbes on my skin and in my guts who blur the distinction between me and not me. From this perspective, whether or not there is chance, is, in a way, meaningless. We are all connected, we all affect each other, we are all in this together.

You might not find this comforting, but for me, it helps me worry less about all the things I cannot control. It helps me focus on all the ways I can think of to take action, think thoughts, listen and relate to others (human and more than human), and feel emotions that I think will send out positive ripple effects. Which doesn’t mean bypassing hard emotions, negative thoughts, or difficult dynamics. It means being in them and working through them, healing and integrating them so I am more aware, more compassionate, more able to be vulnerable.

On the Lunar New Year, just weeks after Hanh’s passing, Plum Village, the monastery and practice center he founded, offered “parallel verses” for the coming year, as they do every year. This year’s couplet is: “Harmony at home. Peace all around.”

Ripple effect: when I can find a moment of harmony inside myself, I find also the peace that is waiting outside of myself.

Which, finally, makes me think about a beautiful conversation between Black feminist writer bell hooks and Hanh about love in the context of community. (This interview made the rounds on social media after hooks’ and Hanh’s deaths, within weeks of each other.) Decades ago, hooks’ new visions, all about love shaped my understanding of love as action. And in this 2017 conversation with Hanh, she says:

I think that we best realize love in community. This is something I have had to work with myself, because the intellectual tradition of the West is very individualistic. It’s not community-based. The intellectual is often thought of as a person who is alone and cut off from the world. So I have had to practice being willing to leave the space of my study to be in community, to work in community, and to be changed by community.

Hahn agrees, speaking of community as a place to practice love, to be reminded of what love-as-action can be. And he links community to self love: “Because loving ourselves means loving our community...Anything you do for yourself you do for the society at the same time.”

In other words, the loving actions I can take toward finding “harmony at home” becomes part of creating “peace all around.” Perhaps this is how we can shift and morph more gracefully, more like that octopus. Perhaps each loving action I take is part of the pulsing whole of this universe as we travel into new iterations of ourselves.

There is no chance that we will fall apart 
There is no chance 
There are no parts.

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Prompting

A writing prompt, inspired by Kayhan Irani

You’ll need a piece of paper that you can crumple up for this one.

• Perhaps you begin by sitting for a few minutes and meditating on “Harmony at home, peace all around.”

• Think of a time you felt deep connection to another being: a parent, a pet, a lover, a stranger, a tree, a bird—whatever comes to mind. Make a list of 3 tactile, sense-based details of that moment. What did you smell? What textures were under your feet or hands? Was there wind on your skin? Sun? What did you hear? Was there a taste to this moment?

• Think of a specific time when you felt disconnected, lonely, or at a loss. Make a list of 3 objects (nouns) that were present in that moment, or that you feel are connected to that moment somehow.

• Think back over the last 24 hours. Make a list of 3 actions (verbs) that you took during this time.

• Make a grid on your piece of paper by drawing three lines horizontally, and then three vertical lines over them—like a tic-tac-toe grid. You should have 9 squares.

• In each square, write one of the 9 words or phrases you came up with above. The order doesn’t matter.

• Now, crumple your paper, and then uncrumple it. See what lines were created between the boxes. What words or phrases are connected by these lines?

• Begin your poem, essay, or story with those connections or pairings. Discover what brings them together; learn how they are part of the whole.

Engaging

• Call back to December’s post on resting: Tricia Hershey of the Nap Ministry makes such a strong case for rest as a powerful way to counter capitalism, especially for Black folks whose ancestors were enslaved. This interview with her on For The Wild made me think about my ancestors who worked in the corporate sugar cane plantations in Hawai’i, and this has helped me in my commitment to resting.

• We’re emerging slowly out of winter, and I’m starting to think about the seeds I’ll plant this year. I loved Camille T. Dungy’s essay I recently came across, “From Dirt,” on “the legacy and journey, triumph and trauma, of seeds.”

• Anti Racism Daily recently sent out a post on the importance of Black poetry “as both a cornerstone of American culture and a mode of resistance against American cruelty”—paired with a call to invest in Black youth poetry projects, like MassLEAP in Boston.

• The rise of queer Black women country music artists. I am obsessed. Especially with this song, Persephone, by Allison Russel, which makes me cry every time.

Community/Announcements

I was honored to have my poem “February” featured in Poets.org’s Poem-A-Day, ushering in this month. I know many of you are newly here because of that. Thank you for joining the Starlight and Strategy community!

That’s it from me for this month. Thanks for reading down this far!

I’ll be back in your inbox for March’s full moon—just days before the Spring Equinox. Hurray!

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Here on Massachusett land on the cusp of the winter solstice, the sun sets just before 4:15 pm. As it heads toward the horizon, it paints the brick buildings and the bare tree branches in thick gold light. By 5 o’clock it’s dark and cold, and I have the urge to lie down on the couch for the rest of the evening. But instead, I work for another hour or so, squeeze in an exercise routine, make dinner, clean up, and then allow myself a few minutes on the couch—often in the form of watching TV with my sweetie (fun but more dissociating then restful) before we drag ourselves, yawning, to bed. 

Last year around this time, I had a brilliant idea. As a freelance writer, I’m in charge of my own schedule—and I decided I would plan my year so that I could take all of December off. Just as the land around me was going fallow—resting and going dormant—and the creatures around me were preparing to hibernate, I too would slow down, not work. It would be my way of celebrating and honoring this solstice time of darkness and rest.

It was a beautiful idea. And impossible. Project timelines got extended, my to-do list grew long, and the ups and downs of the pandemic led me to book a trip to see my family for Christmas. In short, this month is much fuller than I had planned.

As I scheduled and filled up the December days, I felt measures of sadness, regret, resentment, and most of all, shame that I failed to achieve my vision of a fallow December. It’s not that I don’t want to be doing the things I’ve filled my month with—I do. I love my work and my family. It’s that I set a goal of rest for myself, and I was unsuccessful.

Ironic, right? Inside capitalism, even the pursuit of rest is a thing I can fail at and feel inadequate about.

~~~

Of course, even to consider this kind of rest means I have enormous privilege. I have the flexibility and economic security to structure my work life and time in the way that I want. If I really wanted to, I could figure out how to keep four weeks of my life clear of most obligations.

But upon return, I would have been digging out of my inbox, battling with my to-do list, and scrambling to meet looming deadlines. How quickly would my nervous system have been ratcheted back up to the speed of a hectic life under relentless pandemic and late capitalism? In a recent edition of Culture Study, “How Our System Revenges Rest,” Anne Helen Peterson looks at how unforgiving capitalism is for anyone who tries to take a break:

Our days have accumulated tasks and responsibilities that behave like invasive plants: if you neglect their maintenance, even for a day, they threaten to pull the entire enterprise asunder. The less societal privilege you have, the more true this feels. People with good credit, power and seniority within their organizations, and an emergency fund can afford to (momentarily) fall behind. Their apologies for a delayed email, a late bill, a late kid will be accepted. For everyone else, drop one ball and risk catastrophe: lost hours, lost jobs, lost credit, lost cars, lost homes.

We can also ask this question: Who is applauded when they take time for themselves, and who is branded as lazy? Like everything else, rest is racialized and gendered. Black, Indigenous, and other people of color are deemed unworthy of rest inside the legacies of white supremacy, slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. Inside heteropatriarchy, so are women. And in the intersection, Black women are never supposed to rest. I’m thinking of this grieving tweet from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor last week, after the death of author and feminist bell hooks.

All of this seeps into my subconscious understanding of rest, production, and worth. How easily did I give up my vision of a restful December? What did I take on this month that I didn’t have to because some part of me was actually afraid of a stretch of time with no obligations?

In honestly answering these questions, I have to reckon with how much I have internalized the idea that my worth is measured by how much I produce, how successful I am. How actually going fallow, deep down, feels too frightening to actually manifest.

Is rest inside capitalism elusive by definition, then?

~~~

“Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” wrote theorist Fredric Jameson. In this newsletter, in my poetry, in my thinking, I try to do this harder thing: imagine what the end of capitalism might look like. And what might replace it.

If somehow, capitalism disappeared tomorrow, would I be able to rest? Would I know how to? Would any of us who have lived generations under capitalism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy know how to take up rest?

What would it look like, I’m wondering, to order our days so they feel full and nourishing? How might we structure our time where rest is part of the natural cycle, not something to strive for and achieve? Where rest is integrated into every day, not separate or apart from daily acts of living? Maybe that looks like following the agrarian cycles of planting, growing, harvesting, and resting. Or maybe it looks like something different, something new.

I’ve written before of my interest in creating little pockets of anti-capitalist life. When it comes to rest, I’m thinking about how I might find practices to help me move toward a time when I am no longer bound by capitalist expectations externally or internally. Where I can rest without shame or worry.

I am always learning from writer adrienne maree brown. Her poem, “not busy, focused; not busy, full” led me to think about flow and presence as practices in deprogramming myself from the constant forces of capitalism:

now my body aches to remember when I was busy
when I was so capitalist in my anti-capitalism, that is to say so productive in my revolutionary performance
but now I am not busy
I am breathing
I am moving at the pace my body allows, ever forward, mentored by a tortoise

…

I hope to never be busy again
I owe this quiet breath to my grandmother
I am creating at an astounding rate
and some of it I even write down
some moments I get so still
I can sense how it is all connected
and that the tissue is love
and I know my love could never be wasted
or too small a contribution

These lines are in praise of being present in the world and in her life. Being still and quiet and attentive to the moment. I also read them as a description of flow: those moments when you are entirely present and fully engaged in whatever you are doing; where you are so wrapped up in, yes—the work—that time, and everything else, falls away. (I like to think about this as Eight of Pentacles energy, too, the Tarot card I happened to draw this morning.)

Being in the flow is energizing and exciting. It’s not the same as resting, but it’s a way of engaging with work and life that fills my cup rather than drains it. It is a state of being that perhaps leads to deeper rest. Rather than the pursuit of checking things off my to-do list, it’s about being fully present in whatever I am doing, whether that’s writing, gardening, cooking, walking. It’s about not letting my mind race ahead to what’s next or analyzing the quality and value of the work, but simply giving my full mind-heart-body-spirit attention to the task at hand.

While this is not exactly rest, it can be a form of engagement with work that’s different from what capitalism demands of us. It’s a state of being that’s akin in some ways to meditation and perhaps a step toward true rest.

~~~

I’m also thinking about the practice of “snack-sized” rest, taught to me recently by herbalist Gina Badger in her Group Spells: Foundations. Rather than having us vow to take a 20-minute nap in the middle of the day or meditate for an hour, Badger asks us to think of tiny ways that we can disengage from work and rest for a few minutes. For me, that looks like knitting for 5 minutes midday, and taking a 10-minute walk in the late, often golden, afternoon—which I find I can stretch to 20 or even 30 minutes some days.

I recognize I can do this because, once again, I have the privilege of setting my own schedule as a freelance writer. I don’t need to clock in or out. But what if all workplaces allowed snack-sized rest?

That might sound unlikely to impossible in this day and age of late capitalism, but I’m thinking about smoke breaks. My first job at 14 was as a hostess at a small Italian restaurant in a suburban strip mall. Lois and Mary were the seasoned servers—a mother-daughter team with similarly raspy voices and an ability to stack a frightening number of plates on a single tray. Except during the busiest dinner rushes—when they were clearly in a flow—they would take a couple cigarette breaks during each shift. They’d invite me out as they gossiped about Frank, the grumpy owner and cook, or the most recent ridiculous customer.

Whether it was Big Tobacco’s lobbying or just a cultural norm (or Big Tobacco creating a cultural norm), I don’t know, but going out for a smoke break was just something people did in the 80s and 90s—and still do, though with more stigma attached now. I knew people in college and after who took up smoking just so they could go out for a break during shifts at their minimum wage jobs.

What if we transformed smoke breaks into knitting breaks, walking breaks, or simply staring-out-the-window breaks? Advocating for “snack-sized” breaks in the workplace—or just sneaking them in—could be one tiny step toward learning to rest inside capitalism, in preparation for a time beyond capitalism.

However I do it, or you do it, I think the key is to not treat it as a goal to strive for, and then feel bad if we fail to do it. Maybe it’s simply about practicing integrating different states of being into daily life: inviting flow, filling my cup with engagement and presence, taking small moments to rest and feeling neither shameful nor proud when I do. Just present, just alive, just still, and full.

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Prompting

Tarot spread

I associate the Eight of Pentacles with flow, and the Four of Swords with rest (following Lindsay Mack’s teachings that all of the Fours are about rest in some way). If that meaning resonates for you, pull those cards out. If not, choose one card each that most represents flow and rest for you.

Put them next to each other, side by side, and imagine they are the overlaps in a Venn diagram. In a semi-circle next to each, pull cards for the following questions:

1. What is the biggest barrier for me in accessing rest/flow?

2. What can support me in working with this obstruction?

3. What is available to support me in accessing rest/flow?

4. How can I best call upon this support?

Are there overlaps, echoes, key messages across both rest and flow? Is that the sweet spot for you?

Journaling

• Draw a Venn diagram, with one circle labeled “rest,” the other labeled “flow.”

• Journal about the questions above, including the final questions.

• Go back and fill in the Venn diagram with colors, symbols, words from your journaling.

• Keep it in a visible place for a month.

Engaging

• There’s so much wisdom in this month’s offering by Jessica Dore on “Poetry, rest, shame, forgiveness.” I’m particularly struck by her offering that rest is what makes creative work sacred.

• I can’t stop raving about “Pandemic Time with Fania and Angela Davis,” from the podcast by adrienne maree and Autumn Brown, How To Survive the End of the World. The conversation between the Brown sisters and the Davis sisters is funny, enlightening, and nourishing. And bonus for those of you who are fans of Black roots music, adrienne shares her playlist of Black roots singers in the show notes, which I now have on repeat.

• Robin Wall Kimmerer and her writings are some of my greatest teachers right now. I recently listened to her read her essay, “The Serviceberry, An Economy of Abundance.” It’s wonderful. (h/t Trina Stout)

• There are so many beautiful tributes to bell hooks appearing in my feed. I particularly love this pairing of bell hooks quotes and images of organizing, created several years ago by Mijente. It underscores how her writing—accessible, profound, and powerful—supports and informs the daily work of world-building and organizing for justice. Rest in power, bell hooks.

• Shout-out to friend and friend of this newsletter, Tate Williams, and his third annual list of organizations to donate to in his wonderful newsletter, Crisis Palace. I love his framing of philanthropy as reparative justice, and the awesome list he has compiled. 

• Y’all. I just learned that hopepunk is a thing, and I’m doing it! Reader Nancy Lynée Woo kindly reached out to me to tell me that she was writing her MFA thesis on hopepunk, climate change, and poetry, including my collection, Last Days. I am now obsessed with hopepunk, and am excited to engage with many of the works of literature, TV, movies, etc. on this list/hopepunk explainer.

  

Community/Announcements

For those of you in the Boston area, check out this fun, very Cantabrigian 2021 Harvard Square Poetry Stroll. (You can also stroll/scroll virtually, if you’re not in the area.) I’m honored and bemused to have my poem “Equinox” hanging from the fence of a house that T.S. Eliot lived in when he taught at Harvard. (Also amazed that this poem is one of the most read poems on Split This Rock’s website!)

That’s it for me for this month. I’m taking January off from this newsletter (yes, a kind of resting!), so I’ll be back in your inbox on February 16 with the full moon. Until then, I wish you flow, rest, and rejuvenation as we head into the winter solstice and a new year.

In September, my partner, Patti, turned 50. She didn’t want a big celebration, and so we marked this milestone birthday with a special dinner in a greenhouse (!) and a visit to the ocean with her sisters and family.

I reflected on the many experiences Patti has gathered in her life. An organizer through and through, she has been part of social justice movements and organizations all of her adult life. And in the past several years, I’ve seen her go through remarkable transformations. I’ve been inspired and moved by her willingness and ability to reexamine some of her core beliefs about organizing. And I’ve been inspired to see how she is shifting both her own approach and understanding as well as the approach and culture—including white supremacy culture—of the organization she now directs, Corporate Accountability.

I wondered if she’d be open to talking about how she sees organizing now with some of her comrades with whom she’s been in decades-long relationships with. Sarah Hodgdon and Bobby Ramakant share a birthday month and year with Patti; she often jokes that they are the “class of 71.” They also all work together on the board of directors at Corporate Accountability. The three of them kindly agreed to engage in a Starlight-and-Strategy-themed discussion.

It was a beautiful, rich, conversation about what they’ve learned, what they’re unlearning, and how personal transformation and spirituality is part of their organizing in this moment. I’ve captured some of the highlights below. There was much more that I wish I could have included, so I’m also making the full conversation available here. (Content note if you watch the video: there is brief mention of sexual assault and trafficking in minutes 28-30.)

Here’s just a little context about who they are, as related to the conversation that follows:

Bobby Ramakant lives in Lucknow, India. He is part of Citizen News Service (CNS) and Asha Parivar, a people’s organization. He is also on the board of directors of Corporate Accountability. He and Patti met in the early 2000s while they were both organizing on the World Health Organization’s global tobacco treaty. About 6 years ago, he sold his car and committed to bicycling as his primary mode of transportation.

Patti Lynn lives in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the executive director of Corporate Accountability, which stops transnational corporations from devastating democracy, trampling human rights, and destroying our planet. She and Sarah met in their mid-20s as young environmental organizers.

Sarah Hodgdon lives in the metro D.C. area. She is a partner at the Management Center and the chair of Corporate Accountabilty’s board of directors. For many years, she organized with the Sierra Club, most recently as the national program director.

~~~

Tamiko: What is your organizing lineage? This could be how you were trained, or the people and theories that influenced you as an organizer. How does this inform your organizing?

Patti Lynn: Spending a year and a half in Johannesburg in 1993 and ‘94 when Nelson Mandela was being elected left a really big imprint on me. Studying the South African liberation movement led me to pursue something where I felt like we really can achieve what seems impossible if we organize together. That's been a guiding light for me.

Also, there's a really strong lineage at Corporate Accountability of organizing coming out of the United Farmworkers movement. Early leaders in the organization were trained by Cesar Chavez, Fred Ross, and Delores Huerta. So the approach of person-to-person organizing, taking on big power, building relationships, and building power in that way influenced how I learned to organize. 

There's also an approach to organizing and a work ethic that I internalized that is actually something that I've had to really challenge within myself and some of the people I was trained with and work with, too. So with all of the lineage that I've absorbed, there’s real wisdom, and also some things that we carry forward that really haven’t strengthened our movements.

Sarah Hodgdon: My identity has changed so much. At 50, I find that the way I'm approaching it is so different. When I saw your questions, it stirred up a lot of emotions in me because my thinking has changed so much. 

When I was a young organizer, I believed that there was one way to do it. And that was the way that I would always do it, and I would do it perfectly, eventually, if I practiced and practiced. And now my approach to it is so different, and it is still evolving. And so as I was preparing for this conversation this morning, I thought that the conversation itself will be a source of discovery for me about who I am as an organizer at 50. And that the way for me to show up today is not with a clear set of answers that I already know, but to tell my truth. And that's what organizing is: organizing is telling the truth.

Bobby Ramaknat: In the early 90s, I was not thinking of being an organizer. I was just in the university, but I ended up getting involved with the tobacco control movement. It was led by a number of people who felt there was so much peer pressure to use tobacco products. But it was also about other things, for example, using abusive languages, being violent, etc., which was making us question ourselves about gender. And that is how I got more involved with bringing people together around issues and trying to find our own way. 

One of the most powerful things which happened in those very early years was the influence of Sandeep Pandey and Arundhati Dhuru. Arundhati came from the anti-dam movement (Narmada Bachao Andolan), which was one of the strongest people's movements after the independence struggle of the country. Their influence made me question what was going around in tobacco control and other spheres I was involved with, trying to see linkages. 

HIV activism also was growing at that time, and it was another contrast. It taught me a lot of lessons why it is so important for communities to take center stage, how they are experts in finding rights-based solutions to the problems which affect their own lives. 

And Corporate Accountability, or Infact as it was known at the time, was a major influence in helping me put the jigsaw puzzle together. Like, tobacco was not a health issue only; it is essentially a corporate accountability issue. 

And the last thing which I want to mention is the development justice framework, which was developed by a lot of activists in Asia-Pacific region, led by a feminist group, Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law, and Development, in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and also by lots of other groups from different countries. This framework connected different pieces together: if you want health justice, we also need to have gender justice, social justice, economic justice, redistributive justice, climate justice, and accountability to people. 

Sarah: I really resonated with what you said Patti. The way that I'm approaching organizing is unlearning so much of what I learned, so much of what I thought to be true about organizing, about being in the world, and about myself and the way that I need to show up. The invitation that I think we're getting from so many young organizers is to unlearn some of the ways that we’re part of the very power structures that were fighting. I’m really interested in that conversation right now in my organizing.

Patti: I am too. And in listening to Bobby, I was thinking that one of the greatest blessings of my organizing work has been connecting very early on with Bobby, Bode [Akinbode Oluwafemi] in Nigeria, and Yul [Francisco Dorado], based in Colombia and organizing across Latin America. I was able to integrate a global perspective by seeing and hearing firsthand the impact of transnational corporations and the U.S. government working with transnational corporations on people all around the world--and the different ways that organizing happens in response. I feel that’s part of my ongoing journey, too: to continue to figure out as an organizer based in the U.S. how best to align with and build power that’s truly global. Because that's the scale of the fight that we're in.

Tamiko: To have been an organizer and part of social justice movements for so long, there has to be something that drives us, right, even when it’s really hard? I would love to hear from you all what sustains you or gives you pleasure in organizing.

Bobby: Right now, I'm more excited to get involved with things which are not in silos. I think it is so important to connect the dots, and also to hit very cross-cutting issues, which often get missed in specific struggles. One of them definitely is corporate capture, corporate accountability, or holding abusive corporations to account. Gender is another, and so many other kinds of inequalities. I'm talking about inequalities right in the locality where I live in, or where you may be living in. We need to address those root causes because there is no way we can have a better, equitable world unless we challenge those. That is extremely motivating for me.

Sarah: The single most important thing to me about organizing, and what gives me pleasure and hope, is relationships. And in particular, the many people who lead different lives than I do, that I've been able to meet, have meaningful relationships with, and organize together. Here I am on this call with Bobby who’s half a world away. And we have shared purpose and shared values and goals that we're working toward together. 

The other thing is the last three years have been wildly different than the first 20 or 21 years. I'm no longer working myself to exhaustion. I'm no longer sick and in pain because I'm so stressed out. I’m really approaching the work in a way that's more focused. And ultimately, having more space gives me more time and opportunity to really build meaningful relationships. 

As I’m getting older I see organizing less and less as something that's linear, marching a straight path toward a goal. I see it as something that happens in big and small ways and in spurts and slides and leaps. So as I orient myself toward those places where I have shared purpose, I rest more deeply in the shared values and the relationships, and maybe am a little bit less results-oriented or activity based. 

Patti: I feel we are in this mode of transforming how we are moving forward together as organizers and movements in the world. There's a lot of forces that have come together to shape that. In this country the Movement for Black Lives has been tremendously powerful in shifting how organizing is conceived of by many of us. I brought my marked-up copy of Emergent Strategies by adrienne maree brown, because there’s this concept that kept coming to mind. She raises the question: what if the connections that we built were--rather than a mile wide and an inch deep--a mile deep and an inch wide? In this conversation, we are here in mile-deep connections. 

And part of what I find really challenging, and also most rewarding, is seeing the relationship between that and personal transformation. Over the last few years the work of my own personal transformation and how that relates to the transformation of how we work together in our organizations and our movements, is so much more clear to me. 

Tamiko: I feel the truth of that really deeply. And it actually brings me to the last question. I would love to hear anything you want to say about the intersection between your spiritual life and your organizing life, or how you think about it, if you do at all.

Sarah: I think they’re deeply connected. I could start with either one, activism or spirituality, to say the same thing, which is that we are all connected. Spirituality is one avenue in my life for understanding myself to be one with everything. And activism is another way that I understand that, and that I am trying to live a life that contributes to society by having a deeper understanding that we’re all connected and making decisions that benefit the collective.

Bobby: Yeah, I totally echo what Sarah said. And I think if you had asked this question 25 years back, I might have said, no, no, this is what we do, and this is less to do with spirituality. But now I see a greater connection between personal transformations and how it is influencing our organizing life. For example, using a bicycle as transport has helped me see a lot more. It helps me connect with the kind of work which we do, and also helps me be better and deeply rooted in situations, communities, realities that we need to understand and try to do our best to respond more effectively.

I'm trying to learn from Buddhism. I think about short term attractions or sensual pleasures which often distracts us from what we are trying to pursue for a longer goal. And we often see this in our organizing. There could be those moments which may give us more of a high or feel great organizationally, but may not necessarily be helping take us towards the longer vision or longer goal. 

Also Sandeep told me very early on about Gandhi’s Talisman. It has always been a guiding light whenever I needed it. It’s a great way to course correct, and have a better perspective, and so deeply spiritual.

Patti: Organizing grounded in spirituality and faith is one of the reasons that I feel like I can keep going. I’m looking forward to the next couple of decades and hope that I have the strength and wits about me to keep on learning and growing as an organizer. And my spiritual journey and my organizing journey are completely woven together. One of the beliefs that I hold most dear is that every person comes into this world with a light and a gift, and a spark. Part of our job is to create a world where everybody can thrive. And I think that’s grounded in a sense of faith and spirituality: a spark of the divine in each person. 

And the faith tradition that I come out of, the teachings that I internalized from Jesus early on and Catholic social teaching are actually pretty radical. If you actually believe that we need to lead with love in the world, then it really causes us to question structures that marginalize people and harm the planet. So love as a revolutionary force is part of my spirituality and part of what drives me forward.

Sarah: I’ve thought a lot about how part of my responsibility is healing my ancestral line, in particular from racism that has been part of my family’s history on both sides. But one of the most powerful spiritual experiences I’ve had in the last couple of years is also thinking that I can have a relationship with the people who are to come, for whom I will be an ancestor. And thinking about how the actions I take in the world right now are creating the world that they will live in. And so that’s the way that I see activism and spirituality connected: this ability to be in relationship with ancestors backwards and forwards and to think about how we contribute and heal through time and space.

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Prompting

Writer and healing justice practitioner Susan Raffo once summarized something an elder in her life said: “You spend your whole life filling your pockets up with experiences and then, at one point, you want to start taking the stories out. Emptying your pockets and giving what you’ve been carrying to someone else. Then maybe, if you’re lucky, when it’s time to go you know it because, when you reach down, your pockets are empty.”

Is there someone in your life who might have some stories they want to give to you? An hour or so of intentional conversation might reveal stories and perspectives you might not otherwise hear.

Storycorps has tips to guide rich conversations. And here are some questions you might ask:

• Who or what taught you what you know?

• What gives you pleasure right now? How is that different from what gave you pleasure in the past?

• What are you finding challenging in this moment?

• What do you know now that you wished you knew 5 years ago? 15 years ago? When you were very young?

• What perspective do you have that you want to share with folks? Who or what gave you this perspective?

• How does your spiritual life relate to the rest of your life? 

Engaging

A few things I’ve been reading lately, related to organizing and movement building:

• The power of the union of unhoused people

• Black organizing through an international perspective

• An interview with the always brilliant Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the future of the Left

That’s it from me this month! If you liked this issue and would like to see more interviews or conversations, let me know. And I’ll be back in your inbox on the next full moon, December 18, where I’ll be thinking about what it looks like to practice rest.

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We’re just about a week away from the holidays of Samhain, Halloween, Dia De Los Muertos, and All Souls Day. This is a time of year when many of us honor the thinning of the veil between this world and the next. It’s a time when it’s a little easier to communicate or feel the presence of those who have passed—our loved ones and ancestors.

In the spirit of this season, this post offers some thoughts about the end of the world and what we might learn from those ancestors who experienced the end of their worlds.*

~~~

Last month, on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I happened to catch one of the many retrospectives saturating the news that week. The NPR reporter cited a statistic—and I don’t recall the exact number, but he said something like 90% of Americans were in support of the bombing of Iraq. He was making the case that most people in the US were in the thralls of patriotism and fear right after the attacks on the Twin Towers, and it wasn’t until much later that they—we—realized how we had been lied to by the Bush administration.

This doesn’t resonate at all with my memories of that time. I had just moved to San Francisco that summer. In the days and weeks following 9/11, I sought out others who were similarly outraged by the U.S. government’s response. Suddenly, I found myself connected to a large and vibrant group of art-activists. I learned about street theater, how to make giant puppets, and how to harness the power of performance and art to inspire and activate people.

When I think about that time, I remember town hall meetings filled with people determined to stop the bombing of Iraq. I remember millions of people filling the streets of every major city in the U.S. and around the world protesting the Bush administration’s lies and warmongering—including hundreds of thousands of us shutting down the city of San Francisco through diffuse but coordinated actions.

Of course, there was also rabid patriotism. I do also remember my discomfort as American flags proliferated on porches and widows in the Sunset, the San Francisco neighborhood where I lived. I know there was significant support for the Bush administration and its actions. But the NPR story made it sound like we all followed without a peep of protest.

The dissonance between my memories and the story I heard got me thinking about memory—its construction, who it serves, and the role it plays in creative resistance. And that brought me to ancestral memory and how it might serve us in this current moment when so much must change—because so much is built on harmful, deadly foundations of white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and heteropatriarchy.

~~~

In the aftermath of 9/11, I began to understand how U.S. imperialism was harming, violating, and alienating people all over the world. I felt sure that the right response to a horrific terrorist attack was not to unleash deadly violence and war on a whole country and its people. I remember how determined my friends and I were to move as many people as we could to see the truth and take action to protest the U.S. government.

I remember how strongly I believed we would succeed.

I was wrong. We failed to stop Bush’s deadly aggression. And, several years later, I was aghast that the country elected him for a second term. That’s when it became more clear to me that the world I was living in functioned via the enormous and inhumane application of power by the few over the many. And over the course of the next two decades, I came to understand more deeply how racial capitalism functioned, how U.S. imperialism and military aggression was intertwined with capitalism, and how almost every aspect of my life was shaped by it. And I experienced again and again how the few will not give up their power easily, even if holding on to power means the complete destruction of our world as we know it.

Today, whether because of the election of Trump, the climate crisis, the uprisings for Black lives, the COVID-19 pandemic, or other conditions, it seems like many more people are talking about how racist, unjust, and unsustainable our societal structures are. These conversations are a world apart from the conversations I was having after 9/11.

Back then, we talked about how we could change the world. Today, I’m encountering more conversations about the end of the world. About how everything is falling apart or must change. Which I think is true. But sometimes, these conversations proceed as if no one has ever gone through the end of a world.

I’ve been thinking about how many of our ancestors—in the far and recent past—lived through the ends of their worlds. Europeans brought the end of a world to those living on this and many other lands. The people who were forced through the Middle Passage went through the end of their world. The Holocaust was the end of a world, so was the rein of the Khmer Rouge. The warring actions of the U.S.—from the bombing of Hiroshima to the bombing of Iraq—brought ends of worlds. Throughout history there is example after example of societal ruptures that shattered structures and norms and killed millions of people. Those who survived these disasters had to rebuild their lives from the ground up.

Perhaps the end of the world that we’re facing today is more comprehensive, more disastrous, than all the ends that came before. Or perhaps it only feels that way because we are living inside it. I don’t know.

I’m also thinking about how there are also examples of nonviolent—or less violent—yet similarly disruptive events that ended one world and began a new one. The suffragette, labor, and civil rights movements all in a sense upended expectations and forced new ways of being and relating to each other. These and other social revolutions brought an end to social structures that needed to be dismantled, and they sought to create new ones that were more just.

And so, I find I am able to access some strength and resolve when I think about how we are not the first ones to face the end of the world. And, I find myself wanting to learn from those who came before. Whether they perished, survived, or even thrived during their endings, these ancestors have lessons that they might pass on to me now.

The question is how do I best open myself to this wisdom? I don’t always know. But I believe one of my tasks as a poet and a person working toward a different future is to make myself available and open to the ancestral wisdom that can help. Some of these ancestors left writings or other artifacts that we can turn to to learn from their experience. These are important ways to access their wisdom.

But what about the ones who could not or did not publish or leave behind their writings? Those who spent their days tending to the practicalities of their families’ lives, those whose bodies toiled in fields as their minds and spirits engaged in other matters, those whose voices were suppressed, discounted, ignored? How might I access what they have to teach?

I’ve developed rituals over the years—setting up altars, making offerings, meditating. I ask these ancestors for support and guidance, wisdom and protection, and then opening myself up to what might come through.

On the best days, messages come through and my brain doesn’t overthink them. I’m able to let my body feel into the wisdom I’m being offered, and find ways to translate it into words, poems, essays. The messages are about survival and suffering, about letting go, about getting in alignment with my values, about opening up to new ways of thinking, and taking risks. They are about our interconnectedness and the power that can come from being in deep community with other humans and more-than-human beings.

Other days, my mind is too busy or my heart too overwhelmed to receive what comes. I’d say these days outnumber the best days. But I’m trying to accept where I am at any given time. I try to make space to rest, to feel into my feelings. I attend to my rituals, and I try again.

Because, as the world burns and floods, I believe poets, artists, mystics, witches, and healers have much to bring to this collapsing world. I believe we can provide entries into compassion and paradigm shifts. We can offer radical imaginings of what can be. And I think we can be channels for messages and memories of our ancestors who have been here before and want to guide us on our way forward. So I ask myself again and again, how can I become “quiet enough to listen to the ancestors”?

*This post is a revised and expanded version of a presentation I gave last month. I engaged with the poet Purvi Shah in a discussion titled “Ritual: Weaving Collective & Ancestral Memory,” during a virtual conference on the topic of "Memory and Memorial, hosted by the University of Washington, Bothell. Ten years ago, Purvi and I worked together on a poetry performance that marked the 10th anniversary of 9/11, bringing forward Asian American perspectives and experiences of that day and its aftermath. In our conversation last month, we reflected on the role of collective and ancestral memory in advancing social justice. And we led a collective writing ritual (see below).

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Prompting

“Ritual: Weaving Collective & Ancestral Memory,” developed in collaboration with Purvi Shah. You can follow Purvi on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

You can do this prompt alone or with a group.

• Clear your space and signal to yourself and whoever/whatever guides your writing that you are open to receiving inspiration and guidance. You might light a candle or incense, ring a bell, or burn some herbs.

• Begin with breath to create or share in physical and somatic collective grounding. Alone or together, take three deep breaths—easy inhales and easy exhales, perhaps lengthening your inhales and exhales with each breath.

• Bring to mind an ancestor or ancestors—related or chosen—whose experiences and memories might support your thriving right now.

• Invite these ancestor(s) into the space. You can name them out loud or silently.

• Bring to mind one ritual or experience (physical, spiritual, emotional, intangible, etc.) in relation to these ancestor(s).

  • Be open to a wide range of what this might be. It could be cooking soup with your grandfather, discovering an Audre Lorde poem in a dog-eared used book, going for a walk and seeing something that reminded you of an ancestor, etc.

  • Feel into that ritual or experience with all of your senses.

  • What was the taste, texture, heart-sense of this ritual/experience? 

• Ask yourself/your guide(s)/your muse: “What does this ritual/experience offer me at this moment? How can I weave it into my now?”

• Begin writing. We suggest starting with the phrase I remember _____________  and now I ____________. You may want this to be a litany poem, with every line using this structure. Or, this could be the first line that prompts the rest of the poem. Write for as much time as you have.

• If you are doing this with a group, you may want to go around and share one or two phrases I remember ___________  and now I ____________ to create an oral/aural litany.

• When you are finished, take three more mindful breaths. Thank your ancestors and guides.

• As you go about the rest of your day, week, month, you might be attentive to what experiences lend themselves to ritual and therefore to memory, individual and collective.

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Engaging

Three podcast recommendations on the themes of ancestral memory and the ends of worlds:

• Throughline: The Aftermath of Collapse: Bronze Age Edition. This episode launched me into thinking about the various ends of the world throughout human history.

• La Cura: Culture Memory and Healing Justice. I was nourished and inspired by this interview with Cara Page, described as a “Black Queer Feminist cultural/memory worker, curator, and organizer of 30 plus years.” She talked about her latest project of ancestral healing work, “Changing Frequencies,” which seeks to “confront, heal & transform the historical and contemporary harms and abuses of the Medical Industrial Complex.”

• Seeds and Their People: Fish Pepper. I loved this lengthy episode all about fish pepper, its history, its story, and its role in Black cuisine in the mid-Atlantic region. It was a beautiful deep dive into seeds as ancestors and ancestor seed keepers.

I’ve also been reading poems from Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry, edited by Sarah Shin and Rebecca Tamás and finding powerful ancestral wisdom and magic in them.

And finally, if you’ve been following the endless conversations spurred by the New York Times “Bad Art Friend” article, I wanted to lift up this analysis by Branko Marcetic in Jacobin, which explores some of the awful economic conditions of the profession of creative writing. I share it because Marcetic articulates some of the reasons why I am so keen on finding an anti-capitalist approach to getting my writing out in the world, whether through this newsletter or my “new kind of book launch,” or otherwise.

Community/Announcements

• Families for Justice As Healing, one of the organizations that paying subscribers to this newsletter support, is asking folks in Massachusetts to send letters to our legislators supporting a new bill that would put a halt to new jail and prison construction. Check it out and sign on!

• A million thanks and sparkles to everyone who came to Seeds Bursting Open in Fire: an evening of poetry, collective writing, dreaming, and activation for social justice. It was a truly magical and powerful event where artists and organizers of all kinds had a chance to learn from each other, inspire each other, and move and write together. If you missed it, you can watch the recording here.

Thanks for reading this month’s issue! I’ll be back in your inbox on the next full moon, 11/19, with a generative, inspiring conversation between long-time organizers.

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