ON MEDITATION

"We don't practice to feel good, we practice to feel more." 

— adrienne maree brown, quoting some of her community in Emergent Strategy

"To sit and be fully aware of the air going in and out of your nose, and nothing else, this sounds really stupid. If you haven't tried it yet, try it. It is really stupid. Nothing your intellect can do to help you do it. This must be why so many people for so long have used it as a way towards wisdom."

— Ursula K. Le Guin, quoted by adrienne maree brown in Emergent Strategy

SOMEBODIES/NOBODIES

"As Detroit movement ancestor Jimmy Boggs taught, 'It is only in relation to other bodies and many somebodies that anybody is somebody. Don't get it into your cotton-picking mind that you are somebody in yourself.'

"We are all learning what it means to be somebodies who shape the future, to operate at the scale of transformation." 

—adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy

FOR THE HATERS

"Get into an experiment or two, feel how messy it is to unlearn the supremacy and repurpose your life for liberation. Critique as a participant who is shaping the work. Be willing to do whatever task is required of you, whatever you are capable of, feed people, spread the word, write pieces, make art, listen, take action, etc. Be able to say: 'I invest my energy in what I want to see grow. I belong to efforts I deeply believe in and help shape those.'"

—adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy

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