For The Wild - ＂The Well＂ by brontë velez ⧸186

00:00:00.640 Hey for the Wild community, you're about to hear Bronte Velez introduce an excerpt from

00:00:06.640 The Well Prophecy, written by Bronte and recited by Bronte, Yasmine Calderon-Torres, and Liz

00:00:13.880 Kennedy of Led to Life, and Ramalika Imhotep, co-founder and co-convener of the Church of

00:00:20.900 Black Feminist Thought, and accompanied by Jordi Rosales Ancelo.

00:00:24.880 It was recorded at Lead to Life's 2019 Public Alchemy Ceremony, where Lead to Life gathered community in front of Oakland City Hall to melt guns into metal stars in the shape of constellations above Oscar Grant the night he was murdered in 2009.

00:00:42.660 For the Wild is presenting this excerpt on behalf of Lead to Life, with the request that listeners give generously to Bronte and Lead to Life.

00:00:51.760 We know so many members of the For the Wild community have been deeply humbled and moved

00:00:57.520 by our episodes with Bronte and the ways in which they grow prayer and prophecy in the name of Black

00:01:02.920 liberation, revealing how freedom is unbounded and guiding us to relinquish supremacy. In the name

00:01:10.400 of wellness, financial resources given to Lead to Life will fund their Rapid Response Work, a summer

00:01:17.320 healing series led by black healers for the black community care packages for mothers whose children

00:01:23.240 have been murdered by the police ongoing trauma stewardship programs focused on nature connection

00:01:29.400 and expressive art therapy for families who are survivors of police and state violence and more

00:01:34.840 you can give in gratitude directly to bronte through their venmo at bronte-velez b-r-o-n-t-e

00:01:45.400 dash v-e-l-e-z or to led to life by visiting ledtolife.org

00:01:51.880 slash donate in support of black life black joy and black healing

00:02:04.840 hey hey this is bronte i'm so excited to introduce this piece the well prophecy

00:02:17.440 um for me writing the well emerged from

00:02:23.320 reading mark anthony johnson's wellness and the black molecular future article

00:02:30.280 on Huffington Post, and thinking about a Black feminist study of wellness that is

00:02:40.660 beyond commodified or dominant paradigms of wellness that, yeah, perpetuate industry, 1.00

00:02:54.540 actually perpetuate our unwellness and perpetuate dissonance.

00:03:00.080 So this was about folding into a well, a deep reservoir provided to us ancestrally, 0.98

00:03:10.780 provided to black people ancestrally, that is beyond something that has been given to us.

00:03:18.940 The Lead to Life team, black femmes and black non-binary folks on the Lead to Life team 0.59

00:03:23.760 have been talking about Dr. King's call to be creatively maladjusted to an ill society. 0.95

00:03:32.380 And so it's about a mad maladjusted wellness. 1.00

00:03:37.400 And as a queer black femme who comes from sick and disabled black people, mad black people, 1.00

00:03:45.440 this offering to be well is about something much deeper than I think we can either think or talk 1.00

00:03:59.860 about it's a fugitive wellness it's a wellness that comes from a place of radical black imagination

00:04:09.420 And what you're about to hear is a recording of Ramaliko Imhotep, co-founder and co-covener of the Church of Black Feminist Thought and Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley in Black Studies.

00:04:27.860 Liz Kennedy, the communications director for Led to Life, among so many other things, other

00:04:35.180 projects as an organizer, and Jasmin Calderon Torres, producer for Led to Life, and among so 0.99

00:04:43.140 many other things, just deeply connected to bringing Black people back to the land, queer

00:04:49.200 Black folks and queer folks, queer folks of color to the land. So the four of us convene to recite

00:04:56.660 this prophecy that you're about to hear. We drew upon Alexis Paulingham's Black Feminist

00:05:05.200 Breathing Chorus practice as a study in ecologizing the prophet and as a study in

00:05:15.280 liberating prophecy from coming from one person, rather calling upon a Black feminist prophetic

00:05:21.220 tradition where the prophecy comes from the community. So we create the conditions where

00:05:27.240 the community becomes prophet. The community is creating experiences and practices that help us

00:05:35.280 murmurate dreams and prayers together. So this was a practice in that simultaneously while we were

00:05:44.660 reciting this. We only practiced once that day. Reciting this simultaneously behind us,

00:05:55.420 there was, to let you know where we were, we were gathered in front of Oakland City Hall

00:06:02.420 after the annual Reclaim the Radical King March held by Anti-Police Terror Project in Oakland,

00:06:10.400 occupied Ohlone territory. And folks gathered to come to this site where there was a

00:06:17.680 furnace, a crucible. And James Brenner, our Little Life's main metal collaborator and another

00:06:27.460 and host of Oakland metal artists came together to support us to transform guns into stars,

00:06:34.940 into the molds, into molds that were stars

00:06:37.840 that reflected the constellations above Oscar Grant

00:06:40.680 the evening he was murdered 10 years prior.

00:06:45.260 And folks came to cast their prophecies into these stars.

00:06:50.840 And Black mothers joined us who have lost their children

00:06:56.600 to police brutality in Oakland to share their prophecies

00:07:01.380 and their stories and their dreams for an Oakland that was free from violence.

00:07:10.600 The mothers of Celine Tindall, Crystal Lavelle Jones, and Dijon Armstrong were all present.

00:07:20.660 And they shared their prayers and their prophecies and their music.

00:07:25.500 And so many people from around Oakland just showed up to dream, dream into what else might be possible.

00:07:36.100 So I pray that context supports you.

00:07:40.960 Jordi Rosales is on the cello in the music that accompanies the prophecy.

00:07:46.980 and I want to offer a way to listen that Jordi and I just recently held through a workshop

00:07:54.740 with the Emergence Network called Confiagua Practices in Prophetic Listening. We invited

00:08:01.320 folks to listen to this prophecy first as just themselves and to see what images and themes came

00:08:09.020 up and then we invited them to listen a second time as an ancestor or a future being in the

00:08:17.920 lineage of Joanna Macy's work that reconnects practice to imagine an ancestor in your line

00:08:25.160 who couldn't imagine what we did was possible and to what would happen to them to be able to

00:08:30.880 be liberated or healed through hearing this prophecy in this practice and the way what

00:08:35.740 we were doing in itself was prophesied for us. Or a future being hearing an archive of folks

00:08:44.240 dreaming another way into being. And then we invited people to a third time to listen to it,

00:08:51.920 breathing, praying, grounding each time, and to imagine themselves as the wound of where the

00:09:01.520 mountain or the site of land where the minerals were extracted to create, the elements were

00:09:09.300 extracted to create the guns that we melted, to imagine listening from the site of the

00:09:14.540 wound or to imagine themselves listening as the fire that was melting the gun that evening.

00:09:22.100 So I invite you into that practice that we held of prophetic listening.

00:09:29.580 And the fourth round was continuing the prophecy.

00:09:34.160 This comes from a Brother Rabbi Nahum's practice introduced to me by my friend Sarah Bradley from the work of nuns and nuns.

00:09:43.180 To, via Rabbi Nahum, to then weave yourself into the prophecy.

00:09:48.680 What other language seeks to come?

00:09:52.200 What other things were unseen or provoking you from listening to this?

00:09:57.900 And I encourage you to join us in prophetic practice

00:10:01.740 because we need that insight, that deep dream work right now

00:10:06.880 to fortify our work towards justice.

00:10:10.780 I'm thinking of each of you.

00:10:12.860 I pray this blesses you.

00:10:15.060 Enjoy.

00:10:19.640 Well, the church said. Well, we got to be well. Well, a pitted place. Well, a seed. Well,

00:10:40.720 Well? The echo. Well? So deep. Mark says, black wellness is the most radical act against state violence. And we say, well?

00:10:58.020 We become so well, so well that we are the well, a reservoir of joy, absorbing all light 0.98

00:11:08.060 and laughter this skin made of soil can sip on. 1.00

00:11:12.420 White's supposed to reflect all light that enters it, all these reflections and they 0.98

00:11:17.300 still can't see themselves?

00:11:19.960 But we gon' keep on being mirror, we gon' keep on keeping on, cause we gotta be well,

00:11:27.680 so well that we are the well.

00:11:31.660 We learned about the sovereignty of our prayer, ceremony as a place for the unhomed, where

00:11:38.180 black ain't a vacuum, ain't the shadow of whiteness, but its own grace. 0.71

00:11:44.260 We so black now, we done decomposed darkness as evil out our mouths. 0.53

00:11:50.160 We loved the night so much that we became the night.

00:11:53.760 We loved the unknowns so much that they ain't never going to find us.

00:11:57.960 Our laughter made us fugitives under the spell of numbness.

00:12:02.300 And we say, well, the prophecy has already been written.

00:12:08.980 No need to conjure nothing new.

00:12:11.520 Tubman already let us know, my people are free.

00:12:17.940 My people are free!

00:12:19.940 My people are free!

00:12:21.940 My people are free!

00:12:23.940 My people are free!

00:12:25.940 And Alexis said to us,

00:12:27.940 may we continue to breathe in the presence of our freedom,

00:12:31.940 so we inhale, trust it is already here.

00:12:35.940 Nothing future about our freedom,

00:12:38.940 cause my people are free!

00:12:40.940 My people are free!

00:12:42.940 Right in the here and now,

00:12:44.940 my people are free so if we already free all we got to do is lay down everything

00:12:55.980 that makes us unfree all we got to do is be well

00:13:03.660 Someday, we let go of all of this, even this language won't last on our tongues.

00:13:18.880 Now we know too many prayers the shape of freedom, and English never cull that kind

00:13:24.760 of imagination anyway.

00:13:27.340 We in our bodies are not afraid of them.

00:13:30.500 We in our bodies, disciples of listening, we in our bodies entrusted to our flesh.

00:13:37.600 We created the initiations to prepare us to hold the earth while they are birthing us

00:13:42.780 anew.

00:13:44.180 We learned to dance inside the contractions, learned to shake and shapeshift.

00:13:50.340 Ancestors taught us to stir, swirl, drop it low and close to the ground, orbit our own

00:13:55.980 flesh, to fall in love with our body and the many shapes they can take. The earth

00:14:01.860 taught us to do this as they got warmer from ignorance and waste. As the weather

00:14:10.740 became more erratic, as disaster was declared, we listened to the earth and

00:14:16.620 followed suit. While they became enraged, inflamed, a fugitive in their own body,

00:14:22.500 we listened as they asked us to heal ourselves, to bring the huracan and

00:14:28.200 terremoto to our center. We started to shake and rage and shift shape as a

00:14:34.140 reflection of the earth taking their body back. We danced ourselves back home to

00:14:39.300 source, till there was no memory of separation. Because this is not our

00:14:44.580 apocalypse, we have already been revealed to ourselves. This is not our apocalypse,

00:14:51.000 We have come to lay white supremacy to rest.

00:14:55.000 This is not our apocalypse.

00:14:57.000 My people are free.

00:15:01.000 This is not our apocalypse.

00:15:03.000 We have come to lay patriarchy and greed to the ground.

00:15:07.000 This is not our apocalypse.

00:15:10.000 We are giving it back over to the soil to do their work.

00:15:14.000 This is not our apocalypse.

00:15:16.000 We are just offering the eulogy.

00:15:19.000 This is not our apocalypse. We are the doulas.

00:15:23.520 We have been to the mountaintop. We saw that, in truth, the earth itself had become the nigger of the world. 1.00

00:15:31.640 They were unearthed and howling, ripped open to make weapons to take black folks from this earth. 1.00

00:15:38.200 We have been to the mountaintop. The mountaintop said they don't want nothing to do with that. 0.98

00:15:43.680 So we're crying out with the stones.

00:15:47.080 We are crying out with the soil and the volcanoes.

00:15:50.580 We came to bring the weapons back to the earth.

00:15:53.960 So the geography of ossuaries, call them hoods, call them ghettos, call them gone, 1.00

00:16:00.440 each corner some memory of some memory, too many of the same story, too many black children 0.99

00:16:07.200 gone too early. 0.85

00:16:08.840 We wanted a new story to live by.

00:16:11.600 We wanted sanctuary, and we didn't need to do anything to make the ground holy.

00:16:17.280 The ground was always holy, and there was nothing we needed to build.

00:16:22.360 Everything was already here.

00:16:24.640 There was nothing we needed to do, just shift, just love, just be, and it wasn't easy.

00:16:33.460 We were so entangled, got liberation and accumulation confused.

00:16:38.280 How you gon' ask and dispossess people to renounce possession?

00:16:43.380 And yet, this is what is really about us to really be free.

00:16:48.200 Cause we found that reparations also meant we had to repair with the earth, our only

00:16:54.820 real home.

00:16:56.560 We wanted our breath back, so we took our breath back.

00:17:00.840 With the artifacts of war, we brought the oaks back.

00:17:05.340 We un-damned the creeks.

00:17:07.360 We planted medicine everywhere.

00:17:09.960 The chorus of other beings who miss the trees

00:17:12.620 are singing with us.

00:17:14.200 The ecology done returned.

00:17:16.660 The earth wasn't a metaphor.

00:17:18.820 We had to really ask them, what do you need?

00:17:22.680 Trusting that our needs will always be in alignment

00:17:25.620 with their health and wellness.

00:17:27.880 Well, we were scared.

00:17:31.220 We wondered, where is black me

00:17:33.760 after everything is laid to rest?

00:17:36.520 If they lay down their guns,

00:17:38.580 if they lay down their chapels and governments,

00:17:41.440 who do I become when they use my body

00:17:43.800 as the scaffolding for their violence?

00:17:46.680 But then I surrendered, asked,

00:17:50.340 will I become you again, sweet soil?

00:17:53.640 Ocean, will I be like you, full and everywhere?

00:17:59.580 We keep our breath flowing so our joy can come home.

00:18:03.740 We undam our chest.

00:18:05.920 Our joy, like water, like salmon, got perfect memory.

00:18:12.280 It is always on its way.

00:18:15.300 We always on our way.

00:18:18.240 We always been the way.

00:18:21.680 My people are free.

00:18:25.680 My people are free.

00:18:29.680 My people are free.

00:18:33.600 My people are free.

00:18:37.680 Thank you.

00:19:00.580 Thank you so much for listening.

00:19:03.600 to our offering so grateful um if you feel blessed by this work by this vision by what

00:19:13.240 it instigates in you and you have resource privilege um and you want to redistribute to 0.71

00:19:19.380 a black queer-led org um who is holding ceremony work you can redistribute wealth to us we we will 0.80

00:19:27.860 really receive it and be good stewards of that love offering of that tide of that reparations 0.60

00:19:36.120 um if you're a non-black listener or a white listener primarily who who has access to resource

00:19:45.940 privilege and yeah wants to wants to see this work and practice um be supported i would both

00:19:55.520 love to receive the continuation of your prophecies, and I love for you to fulfill

00:20:01.600 the prophecy of reparations. I think prophetic practice not only means what writing or mantras

00:20:09.620 or prayers or spells might we write or art might we make, but there are tangible things we can do

00:20:16.100 right now. There is the prophetic practice of giving to bail funds. There's the prophetic

00:20:21.100 practice of showing up on the front lines to support the health and wellness and protection

00:20:29.920 of Black people. There's so many ways to show up in the movement ecology right now, and I encourage

00:20:37.220 you to find what is yours to do. Follow our work and who else we share and who else is in our

00:20:44.620 Ecology of Work. I encourage you to give to Anti-Police Terror Project and Mama's Bailout

00:20:52.620 Fund, the Nat Ministry, and there's so many others. Sigorte, Land Trust, anybody who's just

00:21:02.540 dreaming another way of being into possible. I encourage you to give to them today. We're not

00:21:11.380 the only ones we'll we'll share some some other visions but thank you thank you so much for

00:21:17.140 listening thank you for your offering continuing the prophecy and and sending us what you what you

00:21:23.940 heard and what you create um if it's financially supporting us or if it's just finding out ways to

00:21:30.080 get involved with our practice you can write to us at ledtolife.org thank you so much for listening

00:21:36.000 so grateful um for your prayer

00:21:41.380 the music you are hearing is from Siba Kapstad thank you all for listening

For The Wild - June 15, 2020

＂The Well＂ by brontë velez ⧸186

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