“The first thing which the native learns is to stay in his place and not to go beyond certain limits. This is why the dreams of the native are always of muscular prowess; his dreams are of action and aggression. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, climbing. I dream that I burst out laughing, that I span a river in one stride, or that I am followed by a flood of motorcars which never catch up with me. During the period of colonization, the native never stops achieving his freedom from nine in the evening until six in the morning.” - Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth
“verily, verily, when you get this rhythm, meet us at the crossroads. you’ll know because/ you’ll hear whistling from the mulberry trees. you’ll smell them, too. & we’ll be there, perched./ looking real xenial & otherworldly.” - Destiny Hemphill, how we got our blues tongue
“I got a chopper in the rеntal/Call her destiny's child, yea.” - bbymutha, Pink Poop Emoji
May flowers are blooming, quickly, and already wilting on the vine. Stone fruit season is on the horizon, and the weather, like any good Gemini, can’t make up its mind. I feel blessed to share a birthday with the likes of Sun Ra, whose gifts transcended music, into car mechanics, spirituality, education and fashion. His multi-faceted, multi-talented life, the epitome of Gemini capaciousness. How fascinating, to be so steadfast in cultivating the garden of your own mind. To build an inner strength that is not inflexible, but evolves with the times and conditions.
I’ve been doing a lot of gardening of my own lately, both internally and externally. This has been a critical writing season, with inspiration abound. I’ve been reading a lot too, about the Black radical tradition, disability justice, California native plants, envisioning threads of connection between the three. On an impromptu trip to Denver, my partner, my mom and I piled into her 2006 Prius and drove sixty miles north to Rocky Mountain National Park. On a strip of US-36 W freeway, prairie dog and snake corpses littered the road. I watch people zip by in their cars, wondering if they too are seeing what I’m seeing. Or if death is as plain as another Tuesday afternoon. Or perhaps, because they are “rodents” or “pests” and there are so many of them, what does four or five or six or seven dead prairie dogs really mean anyways? But a dead snake has many meanings, depending on what spiritual lineage you follow. At once, an indicator of change and transformation, simultaneously a signifier of caution, and to prepare for difficulties ahead. At the cusp of my own Saturn return and global intifada, I want to be prepared for the unforeseen. I want to trust in an unknown future to a known Spirit. I found myself in my notes app, mourning tensions between industrialization, exploration and death:
“small bodies accent the roadsides like milestones each mile a martyr miles away in a similar green place children's necks flare red with earthen clay excavating death, shimmer lining the cracks of their palms”
It’s all connected right? So I say a small prayer, press my head against the window, take the bitter with the sweet. Radical thought experimentations fill the chasm left by loss — what happens after the highway dissolves into grassland? A few miles later, majestic snow capped mountains await.
A new south facing balcony has made lots of experimentation possible and I’ve been trying my hand at collards, passionfruit and herbs, with more cultivars on the horizon. A garden, whatever its formation, is a lesson in patience, a promise to a future undetermined.
A couple months ago, I had to restock on soil. As someone who always tries to buy locally and organic, oftentimes this means visiting farms or small gardening stores, buying in bulk for cost effectiveness. Then comes the compost. And the bone meal. And the mulch. And if you’ve ever tried to lift one of those bags yourself…shoo…
I’ve got a pretty powerful lower body from years of playing tennis. Most of your power comes from your legs, and I abandoned any hope to develop a stronger upper body as well because, let’s face it, I wasn’t going pro. But as I move into my late twenties, I notice my body changing, weakening in some areas, growing in others. The goal isn’t to force this vessel to do anything it doesn’t want to do, but build capacity for transformation.
Embarrassment and a tinge of shame rushes over my face every time I struggle to lift a bag of soil, when downward dog makes my arm muscles shiver, when I have to carry litter up several flights of stairs. But each lift gets a little easier, awakening a possibility once confined to the hollows of my imagination. This informal strength training, this faithful practice, this steep incline. I remember Rosa Parks’ yoga practice, how it was a way for her to tend to the needs of her body so it might better prepare her for an ongoing struggle. It wasn’t until I started regularly doing yoga (spiritual & physical strength) and gardening (physical and emotional strength) that I found myself really in my body, rather than stuck in my mind. In the times I feel like giving up, I remember the rewards: fresh fruit, sunshine, pollinators visiting my little lanai, eager to take a piece of shared nectar. All from a bag of soil.
Soil is an archive; it is an educator, a soothsayer bound to this earth. Without its health, nothing can grow. Climate change has eroded some of the world's most fertile soils. In the last 150 years, half of the topsoil on the planet has been depleted. One third of the world’s arable land has already been lost to soil erosion. But a new life cycle emerges, with the help of intentional hands. Soil needs to be taken care of in order to produce what we need most. Soil stains, shifts, shouts. It dances, strengthened, nourished by plant matter. The earth and I speak to each other, too often eulogizing our most authentic selves as we dress our flesh in accouterments of exploitation. We have been conditioned to cut off our limbs to save ingrates who desire the notoriety of our labor, of our strength. Children in the Congo mine for precious metals, watch their mothers suffer sexual assault and violence, small vendors are killed if they dare get in the way. In prisons, devoid of soil, cages of dirt, incarcerated workers with no technical training risk their bodies and respiratory systems are “contracted” clean up crews post-natural disasters, making human silhouette targets, dehumanized in target practice.
Andre 3000’s jumpsuit flashes across my mind: across cultures, darker people suffer most. Why?
Black soil is one of the most fertile soils in the world. From its wet darkness, empires emerge. But like soil, they too can crumble. Desperate to control its life-giving properties, imperialist powers chemicalize, condition, impose growth cycles that only continue to estrange our most powerful companion. But soil does not bend to the will of man-made laws. Everything we know and love could collapse in the wake of its demise. Instead of desperately forcing its cycles, what would it mean to return to its endless dark mouth, to forsake all that imperialism has told us about success, about waste, about killing the darkest parts of ourselves? Tapping into our inner strength, our communal power, can we build up resistance to these colonial regimes? Inspired by soil’s obscurity, can we too become ungovernable?
There is strength in obscurity. Strength in capacity, strength in skill sharing. In the days following the Flower Moon, I’ve been reflecting on my own strengths, what I personally can bring to this new world we are building. The Full Moon in Sagittarius asks us not only to reflect on our growth, but appreciate it. It is also a call for uproar, to flex our strengths, to commit to the dissolution of empire. Strength in numbers, strength in collectivity. Strength in community care.
What are you building up strength for in these coming months?
Personal announcements:
I will be reading alongside some awesome Bay Area poets at the Berkeley Farmers Market tomorrow (5/25, 1 pm)
I will be doing a short reading and longer panel chat with Reyna Brown at EAP’s Emergence: Our Stories in Practice Conference on June 3rd, 1 pm to 2:45 pm, but the conference starts at 10 am — check it out!
I will be facilitating a workshop at the LA Public Library as part of the June 8th Jubilee! Check my social media for further details on time/location.
My books are open for late summer and fall! Curriculum writing, climate literacy trainings, regular-degular readings and guest lecturing, let’s make it happen:
What I’m currently reading:
Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction by Brian Dillon
All That Beauty by Fred Moten