This beautiful piece was made by Radhika Singh…who attended the Cyberquilting Workshop at the 2009 Allied Media Conference. It is dedicated to amazing, gardener, forager, dancer, scholar, cyberquilter Zachari Curtis!

yes!

Let’s go!

Find out more about Singapore’s mobile library system (Molly) here.

I was really inspired by this this morning. Finally a male emcee that a black feminist can vibe to without qualms!

twenty one days

Introducing In Your Hands: A Letter Receiving Project

Since love is not scarce, our ancestors bathe us in it every moment that we dare to receive.

I have learned that there are sources of nurturing that are older than us and swifter than our bodies. I am noticing that those who are no longer here in physical form are teachers in the wind, showing us how we must relate to each other, if we want to survive longer than our bodies and longer than a system that denies us.

I have been writing urgent letters to my ancestors since before I knew they were watching and on the cusp of this new year they whispered a suggestion to me. “How about for this new year, as a gift to yourself, you receive some letters from us, the spirits of women that love you from eternity?”

As ever, my answer was yes. These daily letters from the most beloved of my known and chosen ancestors on behalf of all of the ancestors who have sent us love with their lives and dreams without us knowing came at exactly the right time. When I was afraid to trust myself, I was not afriad to trust their guidance for me. I re-learned a shifting methodology of loving myself firstly as their vessel and secondly as their recipient

Sister Warrior,

You called me up without knowing. Through repetition, through attraction. I saw people putting my name on your door. Saw you holding onto that old copy of the The Black Woman. Saw you mis-spelling “irresistable” everywhere you went.

What asha says about you and Audre is true for us. I would have loved you. And I do, through the sisters and daughters who I have sent into your life, who have carried me to you with love. Cheryll, Nikky, Kai and Aishah are the living doorways for our ongoing love. Of course we would love each other, and hear me when they tell you of their love, and I will be listening when you remember to tell them.

Now listen. The most urgent thing to tell you is that your health and the future of this world are caught up intimately. Center your wholeness. Start your day with feeding your spirit, feeding yourself before you get to everyone else you want to feed. And use our examples to truly understand what it means for this culture to be cancerous, and yet to still be the place we live. Grapple with that as you love yourself, as you love your community, as you make choices as to what and who your time and energy will embrace, and as you notice the limits of your body young one, remember your spirit, because we are all here, cheering, laughing, remembering and waiting for you to practice and fulfill being whole and at home.

With all the urgency of morning,

Toni Cade

And my ancestors are socialist, so of course they would ask me to share these intimate insights and gifts with you. Of course they would want me to bring their messages to your waiting ears, but more than that I want to share this practice and encourage that you engage it for yourself.

I don’t know what ancestors speak to you or why and when they do, but I have been asked to ask you to listen, lovingly for what the universe wants you to know.

Can you join me? Think of the people who have influenced you, while they were living or through their written, or retold legacies. Just think about them and let your mind relax, let their energy surround and fill you. Create quiet times in your days in case they have something to say.

I encourage you to add your insights here on the “your letters” page if your feel that what you have received could provide healing and wisdom for the rest of us. I encourage you keep your writings for yourself if you feel that they should remain private. The messages of our living dead are sacred. They transcend the norms of intellectual property, and they should be treasured by your best impulse.

My intention here is to share with you an abiding sustaining faith in presence of those who have gone before and their participation in our everyday.

I invite your observance or participation with love.

Always,

alexis

crossposted from www.thepeoplecouldfly.blogspot.com

I want to give a shout out to The Cunninghams and Lisa Cunningham.

They’re continuing on with a new church they just began in the Bronx.
It’s called NEW DAY CHURCH and it’s principles are threefold: connecting with god/spirit, crossing boundaries (of race, class, sexual orientation, age), and confronting injustice (in the community and beyond).

These folks are amazing. And they hosted me on one of The PCF trips to NYC.
And Lisa is one of my besties from Wesleyan.

If you have a chance stop by their monthly service.
This Sunday they’re showing some recent footage from the PCF’s travels.

And they are just all around great! So YES!

—
hey fam…

another invite! we’re having our second monthly worship service this sunday.

NEW DAY CHURCH
connecting with god ~ crossing boundaries ~ confronting injustice

the theme for this week’s service is “Big Dreams”
we’re starting it off with some People Could Fly footage (www.thepeoplecouldfly.blogspot.com)
of young people talking about their dreams
i’ll be doing some poetry that has yet to emerge
pastor Cunningham will be preaching on what it means to dream big…

you are invited ~

Sunday, November 16
11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Bronx Science High School (downstairs cafeteria — space will be marked off my some colorful rugs i believe)
75 W. 205th Street
2 blocks west of Jerome

and feel free to forward to anyone else you think may be interested!

and check Will.i.am’s new song, we’re thinking of making it one of our theme songs:
http://www.imeem.com/william/music/WmH_PXjO/william_its_a_new_day/

and here’s another mantra: http://www.imeem.com/hiphopmusic2/music/gcDrGOOX/knaan_in_the_beginning/
wait for the part where k’naan starts going “it’s better to light a candle than to curse the dark” … that’s the best part.

hope you all are happy and healthy and sane ;0)

love (andonandonandon),

lisaaaaa

I am writing these words as a route map
an artifact for survival…

History is not kind to us
we restitch it with living
past memory   forward
into desire
into the panic    articulation
of want   without having
or even the promise of getting.

And I dream of our coming together
encircled   driven
not only by love
but by lust for a working tomorrow
the flights of this journey
mapless   uncertain
and necessary as water.

-Audre Lorde

Check out the new Combahee Survival Project from BrokenBeautiful Press!

(dedicated to the radical beautiful warriors in Durham meeting today to revive, transform and uplift UBUNTU in our community. You know my spirit is in the room!)

We were never meant to survive. None of us. We were never meant to find each other, love each other, remember the warriors that came before. We were never meant to know these histories. We were never meant to turn our trauma into a map for transformation. We were never meant to survive. But we do it anyway.

Break it down. Sur viv al. Life underneath waiting to embrace all of us. Survival is a poem written in a corner, found waiting in a basement, forgotten. Survival is when the timeliness of your word is more important than the longevity of one body. Survival is spirit connected through and past physical containers. Survival is running for your life and then running for Albany city council without consenting to the State. Survival is shaping change while change shapes you. Survival means refusing to believe the obvious. Survival means remembering the illegal insights censored in the mouths of our mothers. Survival is quilt patterns, garden beds. Survival means growing, learning, working it out. Survival is a formerly enslaved black woman planning and leading a battle that freed 750 slaves from inside an institution called the United States Military. Survival is out black lesbians creating a publishing movement despite an interlocking system of silences. Survival is a group of black women recording their own voices, remembering a river, a battle, a warrior and creating a statement to unlock the world. Survival is like that.

We were never meant to survive. And we can do even more. This booklet moves survival to revival, like grounded growth, where seeds seek sun remembering how the people could fly. We are invoking the Combahee River Collective Statement and asking how it lives in our movement now. And the our and the we are key to this as individual gains mean nothing if others suffer.

We were never meant to survive but we will thrive. We want roundness and wholeness, where everyone eats and has time to be creative has time to just be, What tools does it give that are necessary to our survival? What gaps does it leave us to lean into? Black feminism lives, but the last of the originally organized black feminist organizations in the United States were defunct by 1981.

Here we offer and practice a model of survival that is spiritual and impossible and miraculous and everywhere, sometimes pronounced revival. Like it says on the yellow button that came included in the Kitchen Table Press pamphlet version of The Combahee River Collective Statement in 1986 “Black Feminism LIVES!” And therefore all those who were never meant to survive blaze open into a badass future anyway. Meaning something unpredictable and whole.

We were. Never meant. To Survive. And here we are.

And beyond survival, what of that? In 1977 the Combahee River Collective wrote “As Black women we see Black Feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneuos oppressions that all women of color face.” They also said “The inclusiveness of our politics makes us concerned with any situation that impinges on the lives of women, Third World and working people.” And they concluded: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”

Today we, a sisterhood of young black feminists, mentored in words and deeds by ancestors, elders, peers and babies, assert that by meditating on the survival and transformation of black feminism we can produce insight, strategy and vision for a holistic movement that includes ALL of us. So while this is a project instigated by self-proclaimed (and reclaimed) black feminists, our intention is that it can be shared and changed by everyone who is interested in freedom.

Check it out, form a study group, submit to the zine, do the radical poetic activities at www.combaheesurvival.wordpress.com

Reposted from www.thepeoplecouldfly.blogspot.com

About the PCF project:

5 sisters travel the world finding power and possibility in the stories, dreams, and lives of people-through a mYth foLktaLe rEAliTY about Africans who fly.

We are extraordinary people doing both regular and extraordinary things. Thus the journey, a process in action.

Check Virginia Hamilton’s book “The People Could Fly” as inspiration.

Phoenix and The Valley of the Sun

I’m in Phoenix.
Feeling a little tired. Been traveling or on my way to traveling or being in transit most of the day.
Here we are!
In Phoenix, or rather now Tucson, some miles south of Tucson.

And this is my first time in the Southwest and I love it. Maybe this state of being a little tired will not shelter the excitement and sheer pleasure and wonder at arriving at this place. Somehow I knew I would like it. It is amazing and quite different from the terrain and landscape of Memphis and the Mid-South, the Delta. Wide. Open. Sky. Clouds like one would not believe. And just this openness and this feeling.

And there is so much around you here.

Simply because there’s so little, there’s so much space. You are enfolded in that space, not like a pillowcase or smothering, but by the sheer awesomeness of the sky and the space reaching around, the sky, and reach-ing around you.

Setting yourself down in a place you have never been. And too with traveling, sometimes there are just places you will love, that speak to you, or that you speak of, or whatever conglomeration of speaking.
Oh shoot, and then you just feel so grateful to be there. Man, sometimes I’ll reach a place and just be so grateful to be there, it’ll just fill me. To physically be there, in this place, with this/these people/person, at this exaxt moment. To be there. And then when you are that grateful you just have to sit with it. Man, you know when something is so good, you just have to sit with it. Can’t do nothing else. You already got it.

That’s how I felt last week in Washington. Got to chill and take a space and some time with some extraordinary people and friends of mine. Jillian White (Wes 08), native of that area and my girl Kyja from Spelman daze ( we both began fall 04 and ending up trucking it out of Atlanta after the first year ( for all it gave us and the friends). My dude Austin Purnell (Wes 08), got to chill with him and his family for a bit. His awesome filmmaker sister Tara Purnell. Both of them doing amazing things ( More on that in a lil bit).

Oh and word of word got to reconnect with some old Spelman and Morehouse buddies Ashli and Hyon making themselves a life. And bringing themselves up a new life. Bringing up baby!

But Whoa. Flashback. Reconnection. Memory. So much love and appreciation. Knowledge that Spelman, that time, and the people, the people, the sights, the scenes were not an illusion, but that I was there and witnessed these beautiful people, these beautiful people doing their thing. All of our multi-faceted and multi-farious things. And all finding ourselves, coming to that process in so many ways. Creating together in time and space.

Days walking back and forth across spelman, over into Morehouse terrain, down Lee Street, that gates. Those gates of Spelman. Daze. Days.

Man, and these two were seniors when I was a freshman, so.. geesh.. without them even knowing prolly, man I was so emotional to see these two, like almost tearing up at the appreciation. Man! We represent and are so much. It was almost like coming home to a memory that for a long time was in your head. ( I’ve been Wesleyan rolling for the past 3 years. )

But for real .Slick looking up to those two and other ones then, and still thinking of them now. Slick meaning. meaning.

I’d post some pictures of those Spelman Days, but most all of them are from my film, pre-digital era. Soon soon.

But… Phoenix. AZ. Or Arizona. More soon. Or rather lots more. There are a couple of posts I’ve had pushing at my mind. On the assembly line.
With heart. With love.

INTISAR

Patagonia

patagonia, az
Finding this place and the people we met was
an AMAZING experience. These pictures only attempt to do justice to a crazy experience that literally defies explanation. To what was honestly one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever encountered.
First time seeing a full double rainbow. That and some other type stuff. We’re grateful to have met some amazing people on some real adventure novel/fantasy type status. Following the journey..

Setting out into the world with a passion and a plan and getting somewhere, life itself,
lining up for you.

I. figures.