Let the Wind Blow

Kai's SONG OF THE WEEK: 

"Let the Wind Blow" is a track from Fertile Ground's 1999 "Spiritual War" album. (Lyrics)

Take the time out to listen to this track--it's really great:-)

 

Kai's Thoughts:  

Truth: This past month has been one of the most difficult for me emotionally, spiritually, and physically. My relationship with my partner for the past three years officially ended. I moved to a new place by myself—I have never lived alone. I got the flu and strep throat which I haven’t had since I was 10. All of these happenings occurred during one of my busiest traveling schedules--In the past month I’ve been in WI, MA, NY, and numerous trips to the Bay Area. The traveling along with the major life changes were exhausting, which is one of the reasons why I decided to take a break from the Weekly Jam Post for almost a month—But I’m Back! 

 

Truth: The movement, all of the traveling, the engaging with people in different spaces has been essential for my healing in this moment. I am a person who values stability, and while I know that change is inevitable and necessary I have a tendency to choose stability over change in my personal relations because of fear—fear that I will fall and not be able to get back up again.

Truth: Though this has been one of the most destabilizing moments in my life, it has taught me some important lessons 1) I’m a lot stronger than I thought I was 2) My community goes so deep that there is no reason for me to ever feel afraid. I am always held—we are always held.

Truth: Every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end, but only if you are willing to let go (end.), take risks, and fly.

Truth: Flying can feel like falling until you recognize that you haven’t hit the ground yet, and you won’t. You are okay.

Truth: In the past month I have experienced so much love—all kinds of love from all kinds of people and in all different spaces. I appreciate you. I give more love in return to my elders, more love to California, more love to my people in LA and in Oakland, more love to my East Coast family, more love to my Brown Boi family, more love to my Black feminist family—more love... You have all held me and helped me to recognize this moment not simply as a breaking-down, but instead it is an opportunity to rebuild—there is so much possibility in the remake/remix. Magic. Black.

Truth: I find myself smiling more than ever—genuine big cheesy smiles.

Truth: We are Dandelions (Thank you, Trisse<3).

Truth: The wind blows, but you remain—strong, more beautiful. Black—resiliency.

Truth: It’s time for revival.

A Litany for Revival[1]

Litany: a prayer consisting of a series of invocations and supplications

Revival: an act or instance of reviving: the state of being revived: renewed attention to or interest in something: a new presentation or publication of something old: restoration of force, validity, or effect. 

“Poetry is Not a Luxury.” Audre Lorde Reminds us. “There are no new ideas. Only New ways of making them felt.”

I find you, Black queer histories, Black queer geographies, mapping the terrain of the unnamed and the unknown, but we know you, we feel you. I find you in folders and boxes stored away. In cold dark rooms, on shelves, you, like boiling water somehow keep your fire while overflowing, and I receive the overflow. I am ready now.

Were you waiting for me? Because I have been dreaming of you and your stories. Were you dreaming about me and my friends back then? Were you thinking of us when you asked for Black and Gay, race, class, gender and sexuality? Intersectionality—Intergenerationally. see your souls reached out to me and I have been touched. Anointed because you were unafraid to tell it like it is. Your visions have shaped future generations of Black queer freedom dreamers, Black weirdos, Black nerds who just want to be—we must get free.

Were you thinking of yourselves and just how badd you really were and still are? They told me you didn’t exist like this. But I have seen you now. And I come to you with questions. How did we get here? I know I can’t go back, but perhaps you can give me some ideas as to how to move forward. I come to you humbly and with gratitude. I thank you for the doing and the writing. I thank you for documenting your lives as you lived and loved so fiercely. And I know the record is incomplete. I know there are things I will never truly come to understand. But please teach me what I need to know now—for this moment and for these people, my people, you have certainly help to make possible our radical imaginations—yes a new world is not only possible, it is desirable. We want it. We are hungry for revival and restoration. I talk to you in the past and bring you to the future and back again—see there is no death for us Black queers only resurrection, reincarnation Because I will never quit you and I know that you will never leave me. Past, present, and future all collide to make a beautiful Black feminist elsewhere. And we don’t have time, only love, revolutionary in its call—it comes to heal us as it came to heal you. Your arms, poetry, music, embrace us and we love back, touch back. And they said we didn’t, they say we couldn’t exist—and maybe they can’t see, but I know they feel us now, Audre  Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Sojurner Truth, Gloria Hull, Anne Allen Shockley, Cheryl Clarke, June Jordan, Pat Parker, Frances Beal, Jewel Gomez, Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Ida B. Wells, Flo Kennedy, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Julia Wallace, Treva Ellison, Patrisse Marie Cullors-Brignac, Prentis Hemphill, Jewel Thais-Williams, and YOU, you reading this and helping to make manifest this freedom dream.

There are no new ideas. Only new ways of making them felt. Reach out to your ancestors and to the people around you and just watch how they reach back. We were never meant to survive, but we are here and we will never die because our lives are not bound by earth’s time, this landscape. No, we know spaceships that go beyond space. We carry our maps on our backs, in our blood, with our dreams of freedom we continue to make the world anew.

Welcome to the revival.  

---

[1] These are the comments I offered at the Black Queer Geographies Roundtable @ the SF State Queer Yo’ Mind Conference 2012. (Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Julia Roxanne Wallace, and Treva Ellison were also part of this roundtable).