lqb2weekly #194 (6 mar 2024)

Mar 07, 2024

hey,

it’s still pisces season and what that looks like for me right now is a LOT of big watery feelings. are you feeling it, too?

i am really feeling the devastation of palestine. in many ways. but one way in particular: for the last few weeks, every thursday during my solidarity fast, i have been sitting very intentionally in the parallelism of what’s happening there and what’s happening/happened here. i finished reading bury my heart at wounded knee recently (book review coming) and it’s just so the same. colonizers (as in, people who go to places they have never been and set up to live and work aka colonies) hunted and killed the buffalo and dug up shiny metal and killed and forced indigenous people onto smaller and smaller plots of land. and now i live there. like… why do i have a savings account on land where genocide happened? what the actual fuck?

in this moment, the best i feel like i’m doing is looking at it, doing my annual honor tax, and looking for ways over and over to honor and give resource to indigenous people on this soil. and it feels like not enough. =\

which makes me think of aaron bushell and his self-immolation. may his soul rest in power. may he be spiritual balm to us all.

it feels real weird to transition from that into all the other things so i’m just gonna share these things without a smooth transition. idk what else to do.

some things:

to close/d out black history/futures month, a colleague from UCS, keiosha, has this in her email signature footer and i read it and it’s great (a little scary, but great). so i’m sharing it here and i hope if you have 5 minutes, you can spend them on this. Reflections on Black History Month—and the Present for Black Scientists

soul of the movement fund:

The vision for Soul of the Movement (SOM) Fund Massachusetts is to magnify the work of healing and spiritual practitioners, moving spirituality and healing back into the fabric of community and movement ecosystems for liberation in Massachusetts.
The purpose for Soul of the Movement (SOM) Fund Massachusetts is to resource the power of healing in communities, organizing spaces, and larger movements. We center holding space for practitioners whose practices are grounded in nondominant spiritualities, who in turn resource communities most impacted by systemic oppression.

jon batiste concert coming up in boston! i can’t go but yall should. - march 15 & 16
my beloved, nisha, is offering coaching services and now is a GREAT time to get in!:

nisha purushotham is a certified leadership and life coach trained by Coaching for Healing, Justice, and Liberation (CHJL), a coaching school led by and for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color movement leaders. She works primarily but not exclusively with Women, Queer, and Trans Leaders of Color, specializing in support for leaders moving through transitions and transformations. nisha uses many modalities including: powerful questions that help you connect with your core needs and values, Parts Work, somatic experiencing, and attunement to the guidance of Spirit and/or ancestors. Coach partners choose which paths they want to explore in the service of nourishing their growth and aligning with their purpose. nisha offers different coach packages to meet your needs and goals as you define them. To learn more, check out this description and nisha's website.

gibran is offering 6 weeks of meditation starting march 10 and also hopefully offering another round of boost of your practice in sept:

Six Weeks of Meditation is a different program from BOOST, less intense commitment, and potentially transformational. Consider joining us. We start March 10. You can register here.
We are intending to BOOST again in September, as we get back from the summer. Make room in your schedules, think about making teams, and bring new folks into the fold!

my friend marlo has two upcoming men’s offerings. his words:

1. March 16th marks my first Spring Equinox men's retreat. We will share stories of the work we're doing to learn and grow, and gather strength for the work ahead. It will be a day of restoration, connection and celebration.
Registration closes on March 8th, but there's still room.
2. This will be my 4th year running men's groups. I've learned so much from the men in these groups and from the experience of holding space in this way for men. I'm inspired by their willingness to get real, go to the dark places and to show up for each other. This is what real courage is about.

on to the things!

(!!) pick of the pack

writing

some things i’ve written since the last newsletter:

Feb 23, 2024 | black history/futures: allying with earth
Feb 21, 2024 | coincidence or a strange pattern in couples: younger firstborns with older lastborns

quotes

there is nothing new under the sun. also, full transparency, many of these quotes come from james clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter (which i love).

Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself. — Glennon Doyle

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to do an awful lot of work.
All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case. — Chuck Close

“Whatever is of interest about my food, about my traditional ways of growing food, the things that I have to do with food, the rituals, the prayers, the whatever it is that is so fascinating in the mind, I want to know about that from your culture.”
A sincere effort to investigate one’s own culture makes a dive into another’s more authentic and palatable, he said.
“It’s frightening to walk into a room with white people who want to talk about Indigenous culture, and want to talk about your culture, and they have nothing to bring to the table,” said Bolden-Newsome, who is married to a white person (Truelove Seeds co-founder Taylor). “Because if you come to a potluck and you don’t have anything, you’re going to eat up all my stuff. That’s fine, I guess, at a potluck. But we’re talking about a spiritual potluck, you know?”
“My ancestors made a choice to be less Italian and to be less Irish, to be less Catholic, to be less ethnic … to send their kids to be around WASPy people,” Taylor said. “That was the process of becoming white. What does it mean to investigate who you were before that, in the context of a broader racial justice movement? That, I think, gets to the heart of … a big reason why we do this. This is a challenge to the dominant narrative. — Christopher Bolden-Newsome (quote from this article)

“this is the 21st century and we need to redefine r/evolution. this planet needs a people’s r/evolution. a humanist r/evolution. r/evolution is not about bloodshed or about going to the mountains and fighting. we will fight if we are forced to but the fundamental goal of r/evolution must be peace.

we need a r/evolution of the mind. we need a r/evolution of the heart. we need a r/evolution of the spirit. the power of the people is stronger than any weapon. a people’s r/evolution can’t be stopped. we need to be weapons of mass construction. weapons of mass love. it’s not enough just to change the system. we need to change ourselves. we have got to make this world user friendly. user friendly.

are you ready to sacrifice to end world hunger. to sacrifice to end colonialism. to end neo-colonialism. to end racism. to end sexism.

r/evolution means the end of exploitation. r/evolution means respecting people from other cultures. r/evolution is creative.

r/evolution means treating your mate as a friend and an equal. r/evolution is sexy.

r/evolution means respecting and learning from your children. r/evolution is beautiful.

r/evolution means protecting the people. the plants. the animals. the air. the water. r/evolution means saving this planet.

r/evolution is love.”
— assata shakur