EMERGENT STRATEGY

Small is good. Small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small.) 

Change is constant. (Be like water.)

There is always enough time for the right work. 

There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it. 

Never a failure, always a lesson. 

Trust the people. (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy.) 

Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass—build the resilience by building the relationships. 

Less prep, more presence. 

What you pay attention to grows. 

 

— adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy

RESISTANCE LIVES IN THE SOUTH 

"While the idea of resistance may be trending now, for many Southerners, the word resonates through centuries of struggle into our daily lives. Everywhere that oppression exists, so too does resistance. The South is not unique in this regard, but in the American experience, it stands apart. Conditions in the South have necessitated forms of resistance that are hidden in plain sight. In the food we eat—the vegetables grown from seeds that enslaved people surreptitiously brought from Africa. In the clubs we frequent—sometimes the only place where queer Southerners can comfortably be "out." In everyday spaces transformed into classrooms—where undocumented students, banned from universities, learn in the tradition of Freedom Schools. Resistance is in our dialects, accents, art, music, religious practices, and daily habits—many of which have persisted in defiance of forced assimilation. Resistance is the rhythm of life in the South. 

Here in the South, resistance is paired with backlash to liberatory change. That backlash rarely looks, in daily life, as many non-Southerners imagine it—attack dogs and fire hoses and angry, White mobs. Such eruptions do happen, but they are not as frequent as our constant contact with pedestrian, debilitating forms of backlash. Backlash is literally built into our physical environment, in cities and towns where public spaces have been abandoned or turned over to private development to thwart racial integration. It's written into criminal codes as "moral turpitude," an unefinable offense designed to turn Black people into felons and keep them from voting. It's calculated into our paltry paychecks because our White unions, when they existed, often refused solidarity with workers of color.

Resistance and backlash are like water. They always find a way to move, making new channels around obstacles. We've been in their flux for four centuries in the South."
 

— The Editors, "Resistance Lives in the South, Scalawag Spring 2017

 

 

MY CITY (I'm coming back soon) 

"A city is a machine with innumerable parts made by the accumulation of human gestures, a colossal organism forever dying and being born, an ongoing conflict between memory and erasure, a center for capital and for attacks on capital, a rapture, a misery, a mystery, a conspiracy, a destination and point of origin, a labyrinth in which some are lost and some find what they’re looking for, an argument about how to live, and evidence that differences don’t always have to be resolved, though they may grace and grind against each other for centuries."

— Rebecca Solnit, introduction to Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas

LOCAL/GLOBAL IN A QUANTUM UNIVERSE 

"I believe the evolving emphasis in our society to "think globally, act locally" expresses a quantum perception of reality. Acting locally is a sound strategy for changing large systems. Instead of trying to map an elaborate system, the advice is to work with the system that you know, one you can get your arms around. If we look at this strategy with Newtonian eyes, we would say that we are creating incremental change. Little by little, system by system, we develop enough momentum to affect the larger society.

A quantum view would explain the success of these efforts differently. Acting locally allows us to work with the movement and flow of simultaneous events within that small system. We are more likely to become synchronized with that system, and thus to have an impact. These changes in small places, however, create large-systems change, not because they build one upon the other, but because they share in the unbroken wholeness that has united them all along. Our activities in one part of the whole create non-local causes that emerge far from us. There is value in working with the system any place it manifests because unseen connections will create effects at a distance, in places we never thought. This model of change—of small starts, surprises, unseen connections, quantum leaps—matches our experience more closely than our favored models of incremental change." 

—Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science

 

DIFFERENT 

“English needs to learn to hear differently. And thus to speak differently, to think differently, to act differently. English as it functions in the normative political and social spheres is a language out of which we must translate all the time, refusing vigilantly, energetically, to be seduced or coddled or dulled or defeated by the willfully deceptive misnomers of an Orwellian system that frames not just our actions but our frames (language, thought, relation) themselves.”

— Jen Hofer, Suspension of Belief: Some Thoughts on Translation as Subversive Speech"

MIGRANT

"Language is migrant. Words move from language to language, from culture to culture, from mouth to mouth. Our bodies are migrants, cells and bacteria are migrants too. Even galaxies migrate.

What is then this talk against migrants? It can only be talk against ourselves, against life itself."

—Cecilia Vicuña, quoted by Jen Hofer here

EVERYDAY TASKS

"Just as one can’t prepare an all-purpose meal and dine once and then be done with the preparation and consumption of food forever, so one cannot come to the end of the fight for social justice and ecological safety, for example, forever. Victories are particular, local, and almost always temporary. To improve the world, one must be situated in it, attentive and active; one must be worldly. Indeed, worldliness is an essential feature of ethics. And, since the term poetics names not just a theory of techniques but also attentiveness to the political and ethical dimensions of language, worldliness is essential to a poetics.” 

—Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry

NOTES ON TRANSLATION 

“Translation studies—scrutinizes—the nature of knowing and the way in which any particular “knowing” is circumstantially embedded. Knowing, in this sense, is contextual and always shifting. Between subject and object, as between one language and another, there is a kind of resilient reciprocity, and knowing only exists in the embeddedness of that relationship.

[...] 

One must approach the task of translation without Enlightenment illusions of progress and expectation of ultimate clarification. To place a work in translation (and one could argue that every piece of writing is a work in translation) is to place it in transition and to leave it there, unsettled.” 

—Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry
 

LIVING BREATHING BOTH/ANDS

"We are fabulous and contradictory through and through, living breathing both/ands. We're products of our time and its ever more addictive toys and its alluring images of success and its terrifying chasms for failure. Yet there is room in our minds and hearts and lives—a space more and more of us are honoring and protecting and cultivating—for what is nourishing and aspirational and fun. Hope is an orientation, an insistence on wresting wisdom and joy from the endlessly fickle fabric of space and time."

— Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

STAND IN THE DARKNESS 

"I've always felt that one of the things that we do badly in our educational process, especially working with so-called marginalized young people, is that we educate them to figure out how quickly they can get out of the darkness and get into some much more pleasant situation, When what is needed, again and again, are more and more people who will stand in that darkness, who will not run away from those deeply hurt communities, and will open up possibilities that other people can't see in any other way except through human beings who care about them." 

— Vincent Harding, in Becoming Wise:
An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living by Krista Tippett

FEEL 

"There's a reason why, when my son who's six is crying, he needs a hug. It's not just that he needs my love. He needs a boundary around his experience. He needs to know that the pain is contained and can be housed and it won't be limiting his whole being. He gets a hug and he drops into his body. 

When it comes to healing, when it comes to aging, we admire that eighty-year-old guy who runs a marathon. We want to see that proof that mind can overcome matter because the body is going to be what ends up shutting down. And believe me, I didn't get this right away. But you need all kinds of strength. You need to be able to also—and it's an overused word—"surrender." Being more present, surrendering into the world, feeling more. I don't mean intellectually. I mean literally having your body as if you're getting hugged like my son. But your heart feels vulnerable when you let yourself be in the world like that. That's why we avoid it. Dominance over bodies is what human beings have done for thousands of years, whether over nature or over each other. That's one thing we want in our tool belt—to use well when you need to have it. But we are just on the beginning of realizing that there are many other ways to integrate with body. And, in fact, I believe our human survival over time is going to depend on getting much more subtly aware of bodies."

— Matthew Sanford in Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Art and Mystery of Living by Krista Tippett

SELF GOALS

"my body is a spell i’m casting towards everything i long for, towards being so absolutely free, towards being a divine and willing force of change that builds the absolute freedom of all beings – freedom from hatred, inferiority, violence, regression, stagnation and facism. freedom to cocreate a society worthy of a miraculous world, freedom to love and change the world always towards joy and interdependence. freedom to live days full of good news and togetherness. freedom to learn to be sentient and be an essential fragment of something so vast and glorious i can never conprehend it. freedom to be special and humble. freedom to move beyond paradigms of winning, losing, reforming and surviving — to move towards life and more life."

 

—adrienne maree brown,  "my body is a spell i am casting"

NARRATIVES

"perhaps the number one privilege of being an American is our narrative. we have a story that covers all of our wretched behavior, that makes us exceptional regardless of what we do. we’ve gotten lost in that story. we have believed that the beautiful princess wanted us for our virility, the apple was a nutritious offer from a frenemy, Oz was a magical city and that we are a benevolent, caring nation that really loves all of our differences, our democracy, our global nature. that we were almost there, to that place where we can know we are better than this.

as a nation we have quietly turned away from any numbers that seemed to make a counter argument about what we were up to – the suicide rates of trans people, the number of bodies along our southern border, the increasing rate of C-sections, sterilization and fibroids amongst women of color and poor women, the length of the existing wall, the number of people killed by our drones, the percentage of black people in prisons, the pace at which people of color are murdered by the state, the rising heat and ocean levels during this golden age of global warming. and so much more.

those of us who have shouted these numbers out, who have taken action in order to raise the attention of this country, have been called uncouth, negative, hyperbolic.

and we have been working in silos, each of us digging deep down into our own particular issues, our own particular numbers and making a case for why there’s a crisis.

so, what feels new is the unveiling; the heaviness is the increasing weight of the truth becoming undeniable as more people believe it.

right now, more and more of the truth of this country at this time is visible, left naked, made obvious. not only are each of us right about the particular crisis we have been holding, but others coming up out of their silos are right too – and the intersecting crises are massive.

now that it is plain to see that we are up against white supremacists whose plan for survival seems to be eliminating the majority of us, we no longer have the luxury of pretending we can change their minds with logic, or survive the pendulum swing of universal survival issues made partisan.

we have to be willing to engage in radical resistance and radical futuring.

because people are looking at us like, well, you were right, now what do we do?

we must increase our collective tolerance for truth. this means we must learn how to hold the full breadth of emotions we feel upon hearing the truth, and to keep listening, changing, taking action, learning. we must be willing to look at what actually needs to happen to address the truth.

we must deepen our connections to each other. there is no way the majority of us will survive this time if we continue working in isolation or in competition. we must meet at the intersections and lovingly figure out how to be in right relationship. we need the largest, and most authentic, collaborative efforts for justice and liberation that have ever been witnessed on this planet.

we must take the risk of leading. we must be willing to assert the solutions we believe in, to experiment with alternative ways of being human on this planet at this time. we must be willing to try out post-normative paths, we must be willing to say unpopular things.

...

not only are we the ones we have been waiting for, but this is the exact moment we have been shaped for. and even though it came so quickly, it has actually taken forever. but here we are, in this moment, the present moment, naked and messy and visible right down to our roots.

the veil never hid us from others, it only ever hid us from ourselves. now that more of us can see who we truly are, we must begin/continue to move towards who we truly want and need to be in order to sustain human life on this planet.

liberation is no small task – it is appropriately daunting for miraculous beings. it is a gift, to be given such undeniable purpose, such immense odds. hold each other tight, and let’s do this work."

—adrienne maree brown, "living through the unveiling"

TECHNOLOGY IS

"Here in the future we have no money. We have only the resources that we in our capitalist phase did not plunder to work with, but we have no scarcity. You can reassure Julia we have plenty technology; technology is the brilliance of making something out of anything, of making what we need out of what we had, of aligning our spirits so everyone is on point so much of the time that when one of us falls off, gets scared, or caught up, the harmony of yes yes yes, we are priceless brings them right back into tune with where they need to be. We have the world we deserve and we acknowledge everyday that we make it what it is." 

— Alexis Pauline Gumbs, "Evidence" in Octavia's Brood

THE UNVEILING

"not only are we the ones we have been waiting for, but this is the exact moment we have been shaped for. and even though it came so quickly, it has actually taken forever. but here we are, in this moment, the present moment, naked and messy and visible right down to our roots.

the veil never hid us from others, it only ever hid us from ourselves. now that more of us can see who we truly are, we must begin/continue to move towards who we truly want and need to be in order to sustain human life on this planet.

liberation is no small task – it is appropriately daunting for miraculous beings. it is a gift, to be given such undeniable purpose, such immense odds. hold each other tight, and let’s do this work."

  — adrienne maree brown, "living through the unveiling"