The Free List

The Free List : Vol. 1, No. 13

THE FUTURE IS NOT FIXED / SIT AT THEIR FEET

Siri, play Tony, Toni, Toné 's "Anniversary". :0D

It has been thirteen full moon cycles since I started The Free List, yall. Thirteen moons is, for many indigenous cultures worldwide, considered a full year (as opposed to Pope Gregory and the Catholic church's instituted 12-month calendar, which I've talked about before).

As I continue re-indigenizing, the moon cycles grow more and more important in my life. HUGE thank you to those of you who've been with me for the entire ride so far, especially Jeffrey Shiau, Erin Shipley and Toi Smith who shared their wisdom and reflections to help me figure out how to begin this newsletter thang in a nourishing way.

After a year communing with the languages of this list I'm sitting with what all of it means. I'm listening and moving accordingly.

I want to conclude the celebration portion of this email by bowing in gratitude to original O.G readers of The Free List: my grandmother, Esther Juanita Jackson Smart and my (self-appointed) mentor and collaborator, Ms. Vinie Burrows.

93 and 95 Years Alive, they are Black women who take no mess and no prisoners; who have not made it this far because they care about everyone's opinions. They are about their work in the world. They are about their missions to forward freedom and they continue to move through life with their eyes open. I do not "stand on their shoulders"--I sit at their feet. I listen for what I need to know. I pray that I am learning well.

"To make a revolution, people must not only struggle against institutions. They must make a philosophical/spiritual leap and become more ‘human’ human beings. In order to change/transform the world, they must change/transform themselves. I remember swearing, when I was young, that I would not change because if I changed, I would betray the revolution. As I've grown older I've understood I should change. Changing is more honorable than not changing."—Grace Lee Boggs

A series of recent thoughts on institutions:

I, like many artists have been operating under the illusion that we can “use” institutions on the same way that use us. We cannot. John Henry proved this fact. Institutions are designed to run like locomotives (model-sized or major-human-sized) with different conductors and porter people and passengers entering and exiting the locomotive. A singular body is not a locomotive. A singular body cannot use an institution in the same way an institution can use a singular body.

There is no equal sharing of power between an institution and a singular human body. This is often unacknowledged by either party because of our desire to believe in ideals, which are not inherently bad, but are also not treated as the guideposts they are meant to be in the project of liberation.

You are relating to the institution as an individual and relating, often as if that institution itself is an individual that is responding to you. It isn’t. An institution is a set of people, ideas, and resources, and/or a holdover from terrorizing conquest (e.g. marriage instituted by The Church, the Gregorian Calendar, also instituted by The Church). It produces thoughts and responses through people, but most often has a set of guidelines that limit those responses from being wholly reflexive. In some ways, an institution is designed to limit humanity.

Institutions have become the arbiters of our rites of passage and initiations we need as we move through life. Indigenous Rites of Passage (that we all have from cultures that have been obscured and hidden often by our institutions themselves) create in us an understanding of our importance and our purpose. We try to "use" institutions to heal from the losses of our Rites of Passage. Institutions have not proven themselves to be a sufficient replacement for sitting at an elder's feet.

There is no replacement for Rites of Passage, but there are ways to re-member and reclaim them.

The thing institutions do perhaps most, is rein-scribe the Social Order some are established to upend. They do this in opposition to the natural order of birth life death and rebirth; as institutions, by definition, seek to exist in some form of the eternal. Humans are organisms who suffer from the constant omission of death from our cycle of Being and the larger cycles of the actual Real World. Institutions do not serve us by furthering our denial of death. Where there is no death, there can be no rebirth.

Growth is a subtractive process. When you grow you have to let go of what was.Who am I going to be without (this attachment)?Who am I now going to emerge as?Growth is not when we add things to our lives. Success can never come from things added. Success in a true growth process is subtractive because you get to learn who you are going to be without these external accoutrements and attachments.--Dr. Shefali

Working sacred manifesto excerpt from wild googleDoc:

I refuse the position of Victim that would have me believe that I am powerless and/or must accept the way things have been or “the way things are.” Things were not always this way. This isn’t just how it is. “This”--where we are now in/with/as these systems is how it’s become. Things were not always this way. We have lived and breathed and walked in other ways that live in our bodies underneath the neural patterns of urgency, panic, and extraction and underneath the violence: the programming of abuse we have been abused into accepting.

“This” is programming;

“This” is a set of patterns that can be changed.

In the scope of human history, Where We Are Now is a New Kind of nightmare. It is not nearly as old as the teachings of the grandmothers. Its age is perhaps the worst lie of the nightmare: it espouses itself to be ancient and permanent. It is not.

The grandmothers know better.

This is why I commit to the Great Remembrance of those Ascended Ancestors, the Wise Ones who are ready and willing to counsel those of us who open to their ancient-future ways. We are no one’s victim in the eyes of the Wise.

Refusing Victimhood does not mean unjust things have not happened to Us, to me—it means that I refuse the position of my own subjection in my own life. It means I do not accept the view Supremacy culture has of Me, my People, or humankind more broadly. I refuse perspectives that still emanate and are being exorcised every day from myself and from others that reinscribe Me or any other human being as powerless.

Powerlessness is a lie;

a well-made carving in the soulless cave of the White Imagination that has taken parasitic roots in our bodies through a culture of fear and forgetting.

Inscriptions of victimhood are not permanent,

I repeat: they are not permanent.

They can and are being healed.

The etchings of the White Imagination are not permanent. They do not and cannot touch the realm of dreams and Truth.

~

All of the work here is brought to you by the gifts of our Ancestors; seen and unseen, known and unknown. May we remember our rising, may we light the shadows. May we all together thrive.