#9 - forever goals
Editors N.B:
I wrote this post earlier this week before we all witnessed fascism performed live at Capitol Hill in Washington, DC yesterday, a rampage incited by Donald Trump and then later condemned by him as yet another instance of maddening gaslighting of the American public, and the world. So there are two parts to this newsletter, and they are admittingly disconnected.
I have nothing insightful to say about the events. I desperately want to make sense of it all, get into the inner workings of a person who subscribes to white supremacy, but the intergenerational trauma and rage from centuries of colonialism that have constructed clear divisions of power, privilege, and access, oppresses us all in different ways, from the false narrative of white exceptionalism being a marker of true freedom and inner safety, something I believe we all need, and from the growing poverty in a culture where if you don’t have money, you had your whiteness and ‘eventual riches,’, but if you don’t have whiteness or money, you are effectively ‘worthless’ - is not something you make sense of. You resist, grieve, heal, write, and practice new ways of being, seeing, and relating.
If the human experience is simply fractals, meaning who we are in the micro of our lives is who we are at the macro of our lives, and the personal is political, reflecting how our identities and values are reflected in material structures and reality, our families and communities are places of revolution too. When we care for each other in non-transactional ways, when we prioritize humanity over labor, the frequency of love and reciprocity reverberate across the ecosystem.
Systems change work is not glamorous, it is sacred and devotional, as shown by Stacey Abrams, AOC, Ilhan Omar, and thousands of community organizers working door by door, email by email, call by call, conversation by conversation, listening to people’s stories, what’s at stake for them, and what does it mean to them to thrive in a sometimes cruel world, while ruthlessly mobilizing to stand face to face with power, the rich. Empathy is not an end unto itself; it has to be actively and strategically translated into cultural and systems change that materially shifts how people experience daily life. Otherwise, we’re simply just telling stories, not living them.
Community organizers are holding the torch through this shadowed tunnel, and if you have race, gender, age, class, language, appearance, etc. privilege - it is your responsibility, and mine, to seek out ways to meaningfully participate to not only reform the branches, repackaging oppression in new ways, but dig up the roots, rejuvenate the soil, and plant seeds of liberation.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again - if your soul chose to be in a human body at this time in history, this is the work we chose to participate in.
Four principles to live by
There was almost a sense of renewed optimism until January 2nd hit and the reality of being indoors during the coldest, greyest and shortest days of the year was inescapable. Within 24 hours, two planner-friends wanted to book cottages for the family day weekend in February, cementing ‘something to look forward to’ as a worthwhile coping strategy.
While I absolutely buy into end of year theatre and need the structure for the romance of reflection and dreaming (shout out to YearCompass), it can also be a trap in perpetuating a linear, short-term view of our own lives and the world we inhabit. We are always asynchronously realizing seeds sown across generations, cultural eras, and dimensions in ways that are impossible to disentangle; its ethereality can feel a bit like magic.
Last year was certainly a tipping point of centuries of opposing ideas, stories, and actions, intersecting into a complex reality that amplified disharmony and solidarity and affirming the paradox of spiritual work. As we look towards shaping liberated futures, it can often feel like something in a time-bound distance. It’s often hard to see that it is already in existence - in the imagination of children, artists, and activists, in the energy fields of mystics and astrologers, in the living rooms where families, friends, and micro-communities meet in surrendered, non-transactional and joyful ways, and within the ancestral histories held with equanimity inside the mycelium of oaks, cedars, and fungi.
The biggest challenge we are up against in maintaining the momentum of dismantling systems and realizing new realities is genuine fatigue and the mirage of a vaccine, which is absolutely a solution to our immediate public health crisis, but a bandaid to deeper ones that necessitate sustainable ways of resisting, imagining and realizing.
In my own practice of futuring, I mix and match between goal-setting and vision-boarding, to paying discounted annual membership fees to inspire new habits and identifying words, feelings, states and internal freedoms to define my year - all of which are tremendously powerful in shaping a life of both intention and emergence. But this past year, four principles landed that feel timeless; a compass for the rest of the years to come from which all goals, states, words, and ways of being will flow from.
Living in progress, but here they are.
1. Good sleep
is the keystone species of my inner ecology. All wellness decisions are a derivative of good sleep - the entire ecosystem unravels without it. I know this because I haven’t slept well since I was 4 when I would crawl out of bed, softly seat myself on the micro-staircase between the 2nd-floor family room and third-floor bedrooms and listen to my parents watch TV until caught. It has been pure torture to live without good sleep. My lived experience makes it even more egregious and offensive to live in a culture that lauds little sleep as a measure of success.
My affliction for nights could be a symptom of ADHD, where folks suffer from Delayed Sleep Disorder arising from a hyperactive mind, it could be taking Eagle Eye Cherry’s suggestion to ‘save the night to fight the break of dawn’ too literally, the product of coming from a family of self-professed night owls or the desperation for a quiet solitude that is so savory at night.
Either way, I am done with chronic exhaustion.
2. Non-transactional relationships
that are nourishing, reciprocal, and life-giving expressions of platonic love is how I practice anti-capitalism. It’s the only way I want to ‘work.’ I’m less specific about what I do because I know my energy and values will draw in alignment, but I am more specific about who I do it with; having moments of shared intimacy as a hard metric of personal and collective success. I trust that relationships with a shared politic, mutual respect, a commitment to the unfolding of the creative process, and the capacity to interrogate power, disagree and share needs/feelings will kindle and generate alchemy. With this, creativity and creation for me are more processes and less output.
Currently, the two collaborative creative projects I am part of have so many of these elements and I feel so fulfilled and grateful to participate, contribute, shape, lead, learn and witness our temporary shared universe.
3. Spaces to practice the future
I want to live in the future - not just think, read, write, or dream about it. I want to exist in spaces that practice aspirational and liberated ways of being and relating by subverting and countering structures and narratives of otherness. Spaces that are willing to fail, be wrong, and make hard mistakes in the messy process of untangling and unlearning. I have made so many mistakes, lost relationships (and I’m sure respect) in the process, and in some cases, reproduced the very harm that I was trying to mitigate. It was confronting and shattering and no one owes me a second chance. But, I’ve realized that my mistakes will not stop me from practicing the work of liberation, and I will lose and likely hurt people on the way, in the same way, people will lose and hurt me on their way. The hurt is inevitable; the change of behavior, the understanding of power, the broadening of perspective, the deepening of empathy, is a choice.
On a project, we experimented with a process where we allocated a pot of money for fees and shared how much this pot was. We then asked everyone to name how much of the $ pot they needed to participate in the project while meeting their needs and caring for themselves. In Zoom circle, everyone transparently shared what was materially real for them and asked for what they needed. We didn’t talk about roles, years of experience, or how much time someone could commit; at that moment, we were equals, committed to a creative journey and mission that transcended labor, while honoring our needs and the realities of the systems that currently govern our shared world. Some didn’t need any $, comfortable with other sources of income, and some needed more. We not only forged new threads of trust and honesty but to me, we practiced the future.
4. Emergence as magic
We all seek magic in our lives, and truly it is available everywhere. Every time the sun peeks into our living room, casting a transient halo over the stack of books and rug on our living room floor, my partner is smitten. ‘The light,’ he says, with very few words to describe the magic of a burning life-force in the middle of the universe. This is magical to me too, but my version of magic is the creative process; starting with a flash of insight, and having no idea what will be on the other side.
Most ideas start at a vague place, no one really knows exactly what it is, but they are pulled, inexplicably; moved by an energetic alignment, a message from the gods, or a hazy vision of what it could be. The edges of possibility are thin; agile enough to be pushed and prodded in different ways as everyone’s stories - their lived experiences, passions, interests, needs, and wounds - pour into the center of the idea, a formless lump, emerging into a shape from sculpting and massaging, that would have been impossible to accurately predict. Magic emerges - but only if you surrender to the process and follow the flow of energy that transcends ‘my idea,’ and ‘my vision,’ which as ego-beings, is no easy feat.
As the edges stabilize, and the idea begins to translate into well-laid plans, the essences of all those involved in the creative process have alchemized, a chemical reaction that will only happen once in the history of the universe, at that time, with those people, creating a small piece of reality. Pure magic.