00:04:35.680who's the founder of Black Lives Matters,0.84
00:04:37.500in an interview with Kiyanga Yamata Taylor in How We Get Free, Black Feminism and the
00:04:45.600Kambahi River Collective. And she said it so clearly, quote, if we're going to change the
00:04:51.800way that we organize, we have to stop doing this. Like this framework of multiracial organizing is0.98
00:04:58.820so sloppy because it allows us not to take responsibility for the ways that we also
00:05:03.540perpetuate the system, end quote. So I wanted to start by asking you, what are your feelings around
00:05:09.460these growing pains of decolonization? And how do you see us becoming better organizers?
00:05:18.800Wow. Okay. I think a lot of it is rooted in the absence of rituals to practice grief. And to me,
00:05:28.060decolonization is a death ritual, is that's what we're talking about. We're talking about0.79
00:05:32.920letting go and releasing from what we thought either for some people's what we thought we
00:05:41.400wanted and then for others what was imposed upon us and told made us citizens or worthy beings or
00:05:47.940valued beings or declared that we were in fact alive and I think we're at a time in this concept
00:05:59.200of The Great Turning, that it will require pain. It will require grieving. It will invoke sadness
00:06:05.680because everything we thought was true, everything we were striving for is no longer, or now we know
00:06:13.980the impacts of what that old dream will impose upon the earth and other living beings.
00:06:21.500I think the growing pains with decolonization are valid. I think to be better organizers will require patience. And I think the problem is that the work is so urgent. So how do we metabolize that grieving process?
00:06:42.660What do we need to do to instigate that grieving process so that we can show up to the earth and to one another urgently and slowly and how to find that quantum space to be here?
00:06:57.340And I think a lot of it can come through being transparent about the pain that we are in and like being witness in the grief that it is to shift.
00:07:08.340I've been reading a book called Conflict is Not Abuse.
00:07:10.920the author is sharing that supremacist ideology and traumatized behavior reflect one another
00:07:17.760and it's a contentious concept that those two things reflect one another and I'm grappling
00:07:23.960with it while I'm reading the book because I'm like I deserve to be angry I deserve to be pissed
00:07:29.720I deserve to call people out I deserve to not be patient and at the same time being able to sit with
00:07:36.380with the ways these responses come from a traumatized place and what do I need
00:07:44.980in community to support grieving the thing I thought I wanted, grieving this world I thought
00:07:52.800I wanted to be a part of and being curious about what is possible and being okay with not knowing
00:08:03.480the future. This is why I'm really interested in decomposition as rebellion, as was mentioned,
00:08:09.040because it's decomposition as rebellion is saying, I don't know what is coming. I don't know what's
00:08:15.100happening. I don't know what is next. All I know is that I need to die. All I know is these things
00:08:22.400need to be laid to rest. That part I'm sure of, and how to just be committed to that, I think is
00:08:29.040a powerful practice. I think a lot of what arises in these circular, conflicted conversations
00:08:37.940and the miscommunications sometimes is actually grief in disguise. And instead of there being
00:08:46.780spaciousness around grief, it seems that the colonizer mentality has imbibbed even grief
00:08:53.440with competition. Grief is either compartmentalized or expressed haphazardly. It could be misdirected
00:09:01.780at others, which ends up only re-traumatizing and instigating more grief. And tapping into
00:09:09.160our wells of grief is raw and witnessing such can be uncomfortable. So I see this need for
00:09:17.360safe spaces to really grieve where we can learn how to be around other people who are also deeply
00:09:25.080feeling their grief. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on how to create spaces for communal
00:09:30.960grieving that can recognize the inequities among us while simultaneously not demeaning
00:09:42.800Yeah, that was the narrative of 2017 for me, witnessing a lot of spaces where people needed
00:09:50.720to be witnessed and the beauty and the vulnerability of transparency about what I hear in the meta
00:09:59.500scream of grief competition is like, please see me, please love me, please support me,
00:10:05.500somebody give me a hug somebody please somebody love the child in me somebody tell me it's going
00:10:12.860to be okay somebody please help help chaos everything I thought I knew was true is no
00:10:20.720longer true and I'm struggling and I see that I see that need to be witnessed at the same time
00:10:29.000we're in an era of so much disparity and so I think what's happening is this dance between
00:10:40.120traumatized response and supremacist ideology is that the earth is asking us to move into
00:10:47.460recalibrating balance and in that I moved to ecosystems where I'm like okay about balance
00:10:56.140comes through an ecosystem and that would require an ecosystem of support, an ecosystem of spaces
00:11:03.220where people right now, we need to be thinking about how to move on multiple timelines because
00:11:09.440there's things that need to happen urgently and there are things that need a deeper time and space
00:11:14.900to happen. And some people need to be there and some people don't need to be there because
00:11:18.820realistically we can't all be in the same room at the same time truly in one room we need multiple
00:11:27.020spaces to do that work someone reframed recently collaboration is co-liberation co-liberating we
00:11:33.720need the ecosystems to be co-liberating together and I think my struggle is that we often come into
00:11:39.660one space and believe that is the space where healing is only possible and so we demand that
00:11:46.440of that space. We demand that of the gathering that says it's about grieving. And so we won't
00:11:55.040center the people who need to be centered at this time, whose deep, long, ancient history of
00:12:01.520marginalization, their voice and their practices and liberation need to be listened to, need to
00:12:08.780be heard, need to be amplified. To me, this work around grief competition can be grounded when we
00:12:17.160practice humility. This is a big thing I've seen a lot of spaces where people aren't willing to be
00:12:21.740humble, aren't willing to listen, aren't willing to say, hey, what are the other spaces where I can
00:12:26.500get the tending that I need to? And in this space, maybe it's not my voice that needs to be heard
00:12:32.200right now and how to be in that wisdom and discernment. And it reminds me of someone
00:12:37.700tweeting about during the whole all lives matter complex that was definitely this thing we're
00:12:45.100talking about with grief competition someone tweeted like all lives matter is like coming
00:12:51.440into a funeral and being like I too have had someone that has died and being like wait what
00:12:59.960we're trying to honor our family we're trying to just be with our family right now and to just to
00:13:06.860allow like multiple timelines to move together and I think for this work we have to transition
00:13:14.420from the concept of linearity we have to decompose linearity and we have to be humble
00:13:21.480there is so much there so many threads in that response one thing that you brought up a few
00:13:31.500times is urgency, this feeling of urgency. And I want to read a quote from Adrienne Marie Brown's
00:13:40.520Emergent Strategy that really spoke to me. Quote, there is such urgency in the multitude of crisis
00:13:46.920we face. It can make it hard to remember that in fact, it is urgency thinking, urgent, constant,
00:13:54.140unsustainable growth that got us to this point, and that our potential success lies in going deep,
00:14:02.600slow, intentional work. We need to go beyond having a critique, counter-analysis, alternative
00:14:10.500system, systemic plan for society. We have to actually do everything differently, aligned with
00:14:17.600a different set of core principles for existence, especially in movement building, end quote.
00:14:22.480and i'll admit i definitely fall prey to the urgency because while the urgency is real
00:14:32.460sitting with this quote it's good medicine in itself you know perhaps to respect the urgency
00:14:42.000social ecological climactic of this time we need to be slow we need to be gentle
00:14:49.200We definitely need to be intentional. And perhaps if we practice that, we'd be able to organize more righteously, more compassionately, with more potency. I don't know. What do you think?
00:15:06.660yeah I remember someone sharing that an elder had said that this work right now is so urgent that
00:15:16.440we must be slow and I'm thinking about the word intention in medicine in like medical practice
00:15:25.840the word intention is defined as the healing process of a wound and I'm thinking about that
00:15:31.820language around how to be intentional and know that the healing process will take
00:15:36.880time. And I'm really interested in this concept around metabolism. How can we time travel? This
00:15:42.980is why I love Adrienne Marie Brown's work and Afrofuturist practice, because there are ways
00:15:49.780to be in these multiple timelines. And I've been learning from my grandfather who lives with
00:15:55.420schizophrenia about this. He's living in many timelines. And when I'm listening to him, I'm
00:16:00.620like okay wow he's on many dimensions and there's a lot of medicine in that and I'm learning a lot
00:16:06.640from him about that our work is multi-dimensional if we're doing that deep work where we're time
00:16:13.460traveling by healing our spirits the work on this plane and this reality okay on this timeline on
00:16:21.260this linear space we can work with it really well because we're prepared to metabolize a moment into
00:16:28.580a huge consciousness shift. This is why I'm really interested in ways people are gathering.
00:16:33.880Disaster capitalists, for example, are using that moment of chaos and disruption and despair and
00:16:41.700cracking apart. They're using that moment as opportunity. And I feel like there's a lot to
00:16:47.720learn from that evil, what is seen as evil. I think it's a sleeping path where it's like, okay,
00:16:53.900we're going to go in, we're going to encroach upon these vulnerable communities. We have this plan,
00:16:57.860we're prepared. And I wonder for us, how do we start to prepare with the rituals needed to
00:17:03.940shift in that moment when we're vulnerable, in that moment where everything can change?
00:17:12.920How are we prepared to turn, to really say, yes, okay, this is where we're going.
00:17:18.780How do we practice that in the smallest ways, in the ways we love one another,
00:17:24.400in the ways we're intimate with one another, in our friendships, with our families, with
00:17:29.300our chosen families, like, how do we always be in that moment of how can I be willing
00:17:35.420to be creative in the midst of violence, in the midst of the unknown, to really, really,
00:17:42.900really be having those conversations, to speculate about what is coming.
00:17:47.440I really am interested in Adrienne Marie Brown and Octavia Brood's work, and it's come
00:17:53.400a lot into my work around the concept of the oppressor there's so much preparation this is
00:18:00.620traditional there's a tradition to harming people there's a tradition to these systems it's practice
00:18:08.320and so I think we in the same way need to learn from this level of practice this level of training
00:18:15.260how are we speculating how are we training how are we thinking about the moment where we can come in
00:18:21.360and be healers and shift this concept i think this time is asking us to be in this question
00:18:28.020and trust that when we're slow even if it's in your own time even if it's like i don't have time
00:18:35.880to meditate i don't have time to be with myself i don't have time to heal myself i don't have time0.98
00:18:39.200to take care of myself i don't have time to be loved and as soon as i said that shit i didn't0.94
00:18:44.680have time to do anything else so how to actually be like okay healing my body will bring me more0.95
00:21:39.340this tradition that you were talking about of oppression
00:21:43.440And it really clarified this idea for me that there is a practice, a tradition, a deep intention underlying the physicality of oppression, intention behind the production of segregated urban spaces,
00:22:02.900the fragmentation and privatization of ecological webs, and the separation of us from our own
00:22:13.180bodies, from another's body, and ultimately the body of earth. And I think about critical geography,
00:22:22.640this school of thought, which you reference in your work, which speaks to such impacts of
00:22:28.660colonization and white supremacy on geography. Critical geography is actually a fairly new term
00:22:36.400to me. And I imagine it might be for many of our listeners as well. So would you define critical
00:22:42.680geography and perhaps share with us how your understanding of critical geography has
00:22:48.800impacted the way you move through space?
00:22:51.880yeah thank you i would describe critical geography as how do we practice a deeper
00:23:03.560inquiry into the ways spatialization is experienced and how do we inquire the ways
00:23:15.360mapping has occurred and the ways we relate to borders and the ways we relate to how we experience
00:23:24.380place and the ways then that we relate to our ecologies and who is where and how and for what
00:23:32.160reasons and how did they get there and what is the history of migration and movement and also then
00:23:41.040peoples over time who have been in a place, is that a choice? Is it a choice to be where we are?
00:23:48.840Have we been moved there? Have we been forced to go there? Is the movement I make in a day
00:23:54.620not decided for me? That's a big point of this question. Am I actually being moved around?
00:24:02.080Or am I immobilized? And so questions around mobility, transportation, environmental racism,
00:24:09.680ableism racism all come up here to me it's this confluence of we all are in space we're all here
00:24:18.780and we can begin to be in an inquiry about our location yeah I think for me that question
00:24:27.700around place around space has really come through with one of my teachers Dr. Jasmine Johnson
00:24:34.240who has an amazing article from San Francisco on Dear Carrie, an autobiography of gentrification.
00:24:42.560She's both writing a letter to her brother who was killed when she was a child. And she's also
00:24:48.400talking about the ways the city has changed, how San Francisco has become gentrified and how her
00:24:54.840family's bookstore, I believe is the first black independent bookstore in the nation. Marcus Books
00:25:00.600is trying to be torn down for a condominium development.
00:25:05.620And she's moving in between scholarship and narrative
00:25:27.420I learned this from a professor, Dr. Greg Childs,
00:25:30.600for our ancestors it's not that we weren't in the archive it's that our histories have been erased
00:25:36.800that is true and then he challenges the agency of our ancestors to be like was everyone really
00:25:44.820just a race or were some people actually intentionally evading the archive because
00:25:49.860what they were doing for their liberation couldn't be written down it couldn't be
00:25:55.360remembered. It needed to happen through a corporeal experience. It couldn't be in this way
00:26:01.720we understand memory. So that happened through the body or that happened through place or that
00:26:06.560happened in relationship with the earth as an ally. And so I'm interested in that encoded memory,
00:26:14.240this concept of epigenetic trauma that's been coming up about lineages of trauma that are
00:26:19.620encoded into our DNA and that we have these responses that come from our ancestors. I'm
00:26:25.120interested in what's my epigenetic resilience? What are those responses in me that remember how to
00:26:31.540pray, how to practice freedom, how to love? What are those things in me? And to focus there and to
00:26:39.500know those memories live with the earth and how to be in the earth with that process to speculate
00:26:44.800upon things that have not been written down and that I will not be able to find in anybody's books.
00:26:49.420that they were quiet and they can't be told to me. Our initiation into hearing our ancestors
00:26:56.760maybe isn't in the ways we thought they would come in this colonial way where we thought we
00:27:03.140would be passed down the family tree. We can go on Ancestry.com and all the answers will be there,
00:27:08.960but to trust that it's in our bodies. I've been learning from my friend Tayla,
00:27:13.780The revolution will be embodied. The revolution is a somatic experience. It's with the living body. And to learn from my own body as a site of healing. And I've been learning this also from Suzanne Pierre about the body being an intervention through her work with critical ecology when we're in the earth.
00:27:34.240because the ways we're supposed to see black bodies in the earth
00:27:38.100how we imagine that is a site of trauma
00:27:41.100and what is it to see black bodies playing in the ocean
00:42:57.820And how you've been dispelling so much of that narrative that black and brown people are separate, or they don't belong, or they didn't have nature literacy, or don't.
00:43:15.400and um seems like if we're talking about the biology of violence we need to also be talking
00:43:24.840about psychological or community healing and physical healing and to do that we need to
00:43:33.460talk about the way the system is designed to keep people poisoned and unhealthy and the article that
00:43:41.200you directed us to wellness and the black molecular future by mark anthony johnson
00:43:47.120names how there is feedback between the toxicity of the biological systems of our bodies and
00:43:53.640violence calling on flint michigan's lead poison water crisis as an example so would you speak
00:44:01.960through your knowledge on the physiology of violence and how a physical lack of wellness
00:44:09.360and lack of access to wellness limits communal healing process.
00:44:15.000Yeah, I think a lot about Mark's article.
00:44:19.580I remember reading that when I was in India with the Spiritual Ecology Fellowship.
00:44:37.000And I found it again. And at that time, I was so disturbed that we were with these Tibetan Buddhist nuns at a nunnery called Tila Kapoor in the Himalayas.0.99
00:44:49.820We're doing this spiritual ecology series, and my friend Damaris is teaching these disaster management workshops, and there are these infographics of nuns and monks with face masks on, carrying out people on gurneys for inevitable landslides that are happening in avalanches in India,0.98
00:45:16.580that are rooted in like American empire and to think about the people who are living so close
00:45:23.440to the earth needing to be these responders to see that was really intense and I wasn't really
00:45:30.080paying attention because I was paying attention but I was also happened to be reading underneath
00:45:35.600the desk the new Jim Crow and it was this overwhelming moment of like oh my god we have
00:45:43.240really messed up. This is so intense. And then after that time to come back to Mark's article
00:45:49.960and to think about when he references the lead poisoning in Flint to begin to contemplate
00:45:56.000how is people's inaccessibility to wellness then criminalized. For example, if police aren't being
00:46:05.360trained to de-escalate situations and aren't trained in sensitivity to care for people with
00:46:10.980differently abled bodies. What happens if a child in the future who's been poisoned by lead
00:46:18.220for water and flint, which is a neurotoxin, then becomes later in their life criminalized
00:46:25.040in a moment of who knows what happens and is then criminalized for something that
00:46:32.100happened because there was neglect for the safety of people's water. There was neglect for the
00:46:38.880safety of people's bodies and what was entering their bodies. And it's deep that nourishment is
00:46:44.160something that's taken away from us. And yeah, I think that when he says this idea that Black0.99
00:46:52.260wellness is the antithesis to state violence, that implies that state violence is contingent
00:46:59.140upon Black bodies not being well. It means that in order for the state to stay intact in the way0.98
00:47:06.640it is right now, black people have to not be healthy, spiritually, emotionally, mentally,1.00
00:47:12.900physically. That is the project of white supremacy. And it always has been because0.99
00:47:18.780capitalism was built upon us not being well. That's literally how it came to be. And so
00:47:26.340in order for it to stay alive, it has to continue that tradition. And it is one that is designed.
00:47:33.100I remember being somewhere, and I was at a retreat last summer, and people were like, wait, redlining? Wait, what's redlining? Wait, what's food apartheid? And Leah Penniman at Soul Fire Farm in New York has reframed food desert as a food apartheid.
00:47:49.200That's not a natural phenomenon that people don't have access to healthy food.
00:53:33.040And how the diet of the incarcerated and the poor, which is high in sugar and low in nutrients,
00:53:38.560depletes neurotransmitters and how this quote creates physiological grounds for depression
00:53:45.020anxiety and aggression and he calls then for quote an end to state violence all the way from
00:53:51.920the architecture of policing and mass incarceration down to the level of the neuron end quote so for
00:53:59.400people again that's the wellness and the black molecular future by mark anthony johnson and you
00:54:07.240brought up that you're from Atlanta and I want to bring up this project that you're doing and
00:54:14.720as we begin to heal as intersectional earthly communities I'm curious how ceremony and
00:54:24.320symbolic remembrance can help us achieve justice particularly in places where both the land and
00:54:31.160the people harbor intrinsic memories of violence and in conversation at the for the wild live event
00:54:36.660you brought up the work of the Equal Justice Initiative that, quote, recognizes the victims
00:54:41.920of lynching by collecting soil from lynching sites and creating memorials that acknowledge
00:54:47.020the horror of racial injustice in America, end quote. From what it sounds like, you're hosting
00:54:52.940events this spring in Atlanta that are in the same vein. So would you tell us about your endeavor
00:54:59.240led to life a people's alchemy for regeneration i usually start this with sharing that my friend
00:55:07.880harry we were studying in czech republic and he sent me this glow-in-the-dark bike path
00:55:16.100um that's in the netherlands was like just sending it to me because it was this beautiful design and
00:55:21.840it looks like a bioluminescent bike path. And I was just like, wow. And I immediately thought
00:55:29.300of my friend Xavier, who was killed on a bike path in Atlanta. And I get into a lot of manic
00:55:36.940questions about if the conditions were different, would this have happened?
00:55:43.660I asked a lot of things about like, okay, if this had looked like this, would this have happened
00:55:48.580like this. And it's true. I think of it as manic, but it's like true that it maybe could have been0.96
00:55:55.260different. And I don't know how much that serves me to ask, but it's like, can we instigate new
00:56:00.000ways of relating to space? And how does what Dr. Sean Genwright calls the persistent traumatic
00:56:05.680stress environment, how does that inform our experience with violence and proximity to it?
00:56:13.340We're always experiencing trauma and we don't even have that space and time to heal. It's not
00:56:18.400even like post it's just incessant and he was killed on that bike path at 21 young black man0.87
00:56:28.020and he was killed by a 14 year old young black person young black child
00:56:33.720and alice walker says the most important question in the world is why is the child crying
00:56:40.380and i kind of am in that this is the most important question why is the child crying0.95
00:56:47.340why is a black child killing another black child and affording them that question and affording0.97
00:56:53.980them their life and affording them the trauma they must be experiencing to inflict that degree0.99
00:56:59.900of violence onto another being when white kids are afforded that experience they're afforded0.98
00:57:05.700the question what happened to you what happened to you to kill all these people what happened to0.99
00:57:10.540you to walk into a church and kill nine people who were praying for you to walk out with a
00:57:17.020bulletproof vest for you to be on a chase and for people to still ask what happened to you and to0.99
00:57:22.600still see you and to still feel you're disturbed to be seen as a human and to want to give black
00:57:30.000children that experience of being seen as children of their trauma being witness of this desire to0.71
00:57:36.100be a part of capitalism and all of the nonsense that inflicts and all of the mental noise that
00:57:41.120inflicts to be witness and for us to grieve that together that we are told so much that we want
00:57:47.600this thing that we don't actually need and to make other things beautiful to make another way
00:57:53.080of living beautiful which is interesting too about mark anthony johnson's work with the way of the
00:57:57.940diet and diet the etymology is just a way of life that's what it is and how to move out of this diet
00:58:05.220with capitalism and how to be like I don't want to be in that practice anymore and how much
00:58:11.500violence is contingent upon it and my friend was being robbed and that story that history and like
00:58:20.460this kid going to prison and like these two people going to prison young man who was with him
00:58:25.520is just so tender to me it's so tender for me for the families because it's this persistent
00:58:31.760in traumatic stress environment where everyone around me has somebody who's died, somebody who's
00:58:36.860been killed, somebody who's killed somebody else, somebody who's plotting to kill. And then in
00:58:43.400addition to that, we're experiencing state violence, which has informed how we're killing
00:58:48.080one another. And there's not that room to memorialize the folks that we've lost. And I'm
00:58:54.520really moved right now by a dear teacher in my life, Theaster Gates, who Stony Island Arts Bank
00:59:00.760place that he recuperated through his practice, the Rebuild Foundation. They have the gazebo
00:59:07.520that Tamir Rice was killed underneath, 12 years old, killed by the police for holding around a
00:59:12.700BB gun. No due process. No question. Do you have a gun? He's killed in like less than five seconds.
00:59:18.820It looks like a child. And his mother asked for the gazebo. At first they were going to destroy
00:59:28.140And she said, I want the gazebo. I want it. And now Stony Island Arts Bank, it's not an exhibition. They're calling it caretaking material memory, where they have these memories of the gazebo in this space that you can barely go in.
00:59:45.260And this is the sound of the aster and his mother, Tamir's mother, in a conversation about this decision to want it.
00:59:53.840And it's just all of these pieces of the gazebo, the memories of the tape and the teddy bears and all of those things.
01:00:00.440And I'm just interested in transforming that landscape of trauma with Led to Life.
01:00:05.940and the trees are also in pain from experiencing being surrogates for white supremacy literally
01:00:14.800being used to lynch black people trees don't want to do that and to be in that allyship with the
01:00:21.820trees and that accompliceship with the trees and with the soil to know that the soil doesn't want0.99
01:00:27.860to have to take young black bodies so early doesn't want to have to bring us into these
01:00:33.280unnatural deaths wants us to come when we're supposed to come, because we've lived. And so0.95
01:00:39.600I'm excited about gathering healers in Atlanta that I really respect who've healed my body.
01:00:45.940I met Kyle Lemley through the Spiritual Ecology Fellowship and bringing in his work around
01:00:51.580sacred tree planting and the medicine of Pedro Reyes' work with guns to shovels and
01:00:59.300just liberating these rituals into space taking them out of museums migrating them like being
01:01:06.100like okay if someone has some medicine that we need to learn from let's keep practicing it let's
01:01:10.640keep bringing it i was working as a copy editor for pedro's book and i read about palas por
01:01:16.360pistolas and his other work where he transforms weapons into instruments i was like we need to do
01:01:22.240this everywhere. Let's plant things. Let's plant food. Let's reimagine what security is. Let's
01:01:28.840decompose violence. Let's do that work together. And so this work of alchemy feels like the medicine
01:01:34.380that is really needed right now. And I'm excited to gather in Atlanta and we'll be gathering on
01:01:41.340the night that Dr. King was killed 50 years ago. And it feels auspicious. It feels like that moment
01:01:47.160of where the quantum shifts can happen where that energy is open and I feel him in his life
01:01:55.420and legacy walking with us wow Bronte I am so grateful for you and this work and the depth of
01:02:05.140your care and healing and intention and love. It is absolutely mind-blowing. And I have one last
01:02:18.040bonus question for you because I am mesmerized by the way you communicate, by the way you express
01:02:27.760yourself, watching you with groups of people in this interview, I'm always just so taken by how
01:02:36.540you can connect linguistically. And I feel like another reason we can get stuck in the movement
01:02:51.080or through healing is that the English language restricts our expansiveness because it's so
01:02:59.880utilitarian and reductionist and narrow and can lack spirit and animacy. And now as we journey
01:03:08.540further into the Anthropocene, we're facing unprecedented experiences that the English
01:03:14.700language doesn't have the wherewithal to describe I know language is deeply important to you and I'm
01:03:23.400so curious if there's anything you'd like to share about your journey and decolonizing the way you
01:03:29.980communicate yes this is my favorite thing I was with my friend Harry I mentioned in New York
01:03:41.480this past August and I wanted to get a tattoo with alchemy alchemical symbol tattooed on my
01:03:49.480at the base of my throat and was really thinking about like am I speaking from my mind or like
01:03:58.260is this sound coming from my heart and language is really important to me because my parents
01:04:06.060name me this name that means thunder and I think a lot about sound I've had a fight with English
01:04:12.000as a poet and growing up as a poet and being like I as and as a black Latinx woman person to be
01:04:20.340like okay I'm not supposed to be speaking this language and all the ways I relate to myself my
01:04:29.200love my being in the world are informed by the psychology of this language and I love English
01:04:38.180one of its gifts is its flexibility we can make it whatever it wants to be
01:04:44.440literally you can make up any words you want that's why I love the Bureau of Linguistical Reality
01:04:48.940and I love this idea of making up new words to inform our experiences at this time so one way
01:04:57.960for me is making new words and naming experiences. Right now, I am working on a word to name
01:05:07.000the experience of words that only are the antithesis of what we want to separate ourselves
01:05:19.160from. For example, like nonviolence or anti-oppression, but we don't have the word for
01:05:24.740what nonviolence is the only thing we know is it's not that so that's what we've called it and
01:05:29.580like what would be a word to name that constellation of words so that we could start to
01:05:35.720understand our relationship to them and naming is really critical it allows things to have a shape
01:05:42.880a shape in a way where we can see it from many sides and in addition to making up new words I'm
01:05:48.720also interested in rooting English is uprooted colonial language we don't know where it comes
01:05:56.700from so we're speaking things and we don't know what spells that we're casting we don't know the
01:06:01.240history of what we're saying we don't understand the monetization of the language a lot of our
01:06:06.920language around time and love becomes about possession and it's monetized and like I just
01:06:15.520listen a lot to how we're saying things and how I'm saying things and what I'm invoking when I
01:06:19.900let something come out of my body how that sound affects people and to really trust that it does
01:06:25.900to really really really know that it really does and to be careful to be careful because what we
01:06:31.260start to say becomes true when we start to change our language it changes us and that's what I'm
01:06:37.120really excited about when I root the language when I start to root it and bring it back to the ground
01:06:41.620it has another experience I love English now because I'm able to go and be like I wonder what
01:06:48.220the etymology of this word is because I am diagnosing this sensation through a language
01:06:54.040that is colonial and so I am actually closing off the experience of this sensation to be something
01:07:01.900else because I've already decided what it is because I've been told that this sensation means
01:07:08.080this I've been told that this sensation is jealousy this sensation is sadness this sensation
01:07:13.600is anxiety and when I learned that the etymology of anxiety is narrow or when I learned that the
01:07:19.500etymology of jealous is zealous I go wait what was the point when those things got separated and how
01:07:25.260did they and what do I need to do to just be with these feelings and to be more in an embodied
01:07:31.440to experience and to embody and root English a little more. And it feels very important to me
01:07:38.540that we are changing how we speak to one another. It feels very important to me that we're asking,
01:07:42.620what language are we praying in? And I saw in this Land Justice anthology that just came out
01:07:47.380and the etymology of anthology, it comes from anthos, which means flowers.
01:07:53.120There's a quote in there about you can really know someone by the language that they cry in.
01:07:58.360I was like, wow, okay. Yeah, what language do I cry in? And also moving away from language and
01:08:05.740finding more ways to be embodied. I think that's really critical for this time too. And I'm really
01:08:10.300moved by Kevin Quashie's work around the sovereignty of quiet. That's also coming to me
01:08:16.620a lot as medicine to not say anything and to find quiet and to be moved by quiet or to be still by
01:08:25.640quiet wow ronda you have been such a teacher to me in every conversation we have i love the way
01:08:36.880your mind and heart function the depth of your curiosity and all of the roads that you walk down
01:08:48.940and bushwhack through it's such a gift to spend time with you and wonder aloud together