June 10, 2020:
Reflecting as I see white people justifying murder, excusing harm against folks exercising their constitutional rights, and ultimately fulfilling the narrative that white supremacy REQUIRES to survive. Looking around me, I see white people assenting and consenting to brutality and violence. I see y'all saying this is too political to address. I see y'all ignoring the pattern of violence, its deeply racist and colonial roots. I see y'all trying to maintain the neat boxes that keep you apart from the trauma, the grief, the rage, the injustice that you don't want to see.
Y'all, take a deep look at ourselves; this is some sick, twisted ugliness that we need to address. Deflecting and shifting blame does not remove your responsibility or role in racial and systemic violence. It's a lie that you and your loved ones haven't been touched by police brutality because you're a law abiding citizen. It's a lie that the violence we've seen continue for decades and centuries are not connected. It's a lie that the blood of all the folks, Black, Indigenous and People of Color is not on your hands too if you're not challenging institutions that exact racial violence time and time again.
Do y'all really value your comfort more than life and wellness and justice for folks you don't identify with?
November 5, 2023:
What does it feel like to pray
with our feet?
What does it look like to turn & face
with our whole selves?
What is our collective “yes,”
& how will we know we’ve found it?
I found my breath to be an anchor.
An anchor in connection,
& weight in a grief spell.
Yet again, I find my feet on asphalt;
They’re moved by longing for a world in which
Violence is transformed toward peace
& the reckoning doesn’t sound like silence.
My toes dream of original peoples in
infinite connection with their intergenerational
trees teeming with ancestral olives.
My heels root toward aquafers
Held forever more sacred than oil & lithium.
My arches imagine bridges rather than
Borders & solidarity beyond polarity.
My left yearns for the reminder that other
Feet feel bound to liberation at all costs.
My right craves assurance that justice is in fact
Possible.
So my feet & I, we pray;
We pray for joy for Indigenous people,
We pray for healing for every body shaped by
Genocide, shaped by
Brutality, shaped by
Threat to safety, dignity, & belonging.
We pray for our love of land to squash love of
Capital &
Love of each other & those with wings & four legs.
A reverence for the air in our lungs, & a commitment to
A world run by abundance over profit.
My feet & I will continue on the road of the struggle,
In search of hope, justice, & a globe drenched in love.
May the colonizer’s nightmare burn & compost
So a new world may be born.
