July 2022: You are a Personal Front Line
Listen to this month’s offering as a podcast
The subject line of this month’s email comes from adrienne maree brown, whose teachings I first encountered in 2018 when I read Emergent Strategy. I’ve included an excerpt from a recent interview I heard with her as part of my tarot offering this month because it’s been giving me so much nourishment. I wonder what’s nourishing you right now?
Speaking of nourishment, I had the good fortune to collaborate with friends on a couple delicious projects last month:
- Peg Conway + I started a podcast called The Ritualists, where we talk about ritual + liturgy outside of institutional religion—our first episode is live!
- Finn Schubert’s exquisite new collection of essays Even the Cemeteries Have Space Here is illustrated with my artwork—so proud to be a part of this…
My books are open for readings in July.
Thank you to all of you who continue to support my work in so many amazing and generous ways.
My faith directs me to look for and try to nurture the things that will lessen suffering. So every day I commit to bringing my imperfect and small actions to the pile.
— Mariame Kaba
You Might Be Interested
- Melina Martinez is offering their 6-week Somatics for Social Justice workshop, with cohorts for BIPOC (beginning July 6) + white folks (beginning July 7). I had the good fortune to have this experience earlier in the year, and I will be unpacking the teachings I received for years to come. Feel free to reach out with questions!
What’s Inspiring Me Now
- VICTORY! I have never personally witnessed a group of people in real life leave it all on the field quite like this crew. The Future Must Be Beautiful! (to my local peeps: consider joining the Mid-Hudson Valley DSA—what a crew!)
- The Age of the Possible, a poem by Maria Popova + The Quiet World, a poem by Jeffrey McDaniel
- adrienne maree brown’s StyleLikeU feature: “I’m one of the freest people to ever live.” (…ever seen this early StyleLikeU gem?)
- Resistance Revival Chorus, who I got to see perform at the Old Dutch Church in Kingston last month: SUPERB
- Good Luck to You, Leo Grande on hulu: Emma Thompson plays a 60-something recent widow who turns to a much younger sex worker to check some experiences off her list
- “The Theft of the Commons” by Eula Biss: “Improvement meant turning the land to profit. Enclosure wasn’t robbery, according to this logic, because the commoners made no profit off the commons, and thus had nothing worth taking.”
- Summer of Soul: this squeaked in just under the end-of-the-month wire and if your spirits need a lift THIS IS IT!
Thanks to those of you who continue to send me your inspirations!
The gifts of human life
The following is an excerpt from Krista Tippett’s unedited conversation with adrienne maree brown on the On Being podcast:
adrienne maree brown (amb): It’s just that you are a personal front line. What’s happening in your life and in the relationships you have with your family and how you treat people when you’re upset with them—I always ask people that, when I talk about transformative justice: Are you punishing anyone right now? And could that punishment be shifted into a boundary or a request? Is there a courageous conversation that needs to be had? How do you personally begin to practice whatever’s in alignment with your largest vision?
Abolition is something we practice every day in our lives. Liberation, emergent strategy, all of these are things to practice every day. And I guess maybe to bring it back to the first question of spiritual practice — to me, that’s the ultimate spiritual practice, as well. It’s not about the bombastic meditation retreat. It’s about, can you sit every day? Can you bring mindfulness into every activity?
Krista Tippett (KT): Which also brings us back to fractals.
amb: Yes. [laughs] Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it absolutely beautiful?
KT: [H]ow do we really internalize in our bodies that this is what it’s about: that what you do, what you practice in your everyday, is what makes…a pattern that is part of that larger pattern that you want to see.
amb: That’s right. And there’s so much awakening. So I always tell people that you’re always practicing things. So it’s not like you go from not practicing to practicing, but it’s: are you practicing things on purpose? Are you practicing things you would want to practice, or are you practicing what someone else has told you is the right way to do stuff? And once you start practicing on purpose, then you can actually practice liberation and justice and freedom and — then I think you begin to have this contentment that comes from practice. Like, I know that I won’t see total liberation in my lifetime, but I also feel very satisfied with how I’m practicing liberation every single day and in every relationship.
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adrienne maree brown’s words here made me think of this very particular image of Major Arcana 21—the World. The culmination of the Fool’s Journey + a threshold leading to re-entering a new cycle, Isabella Rotman’s beautiful illustration features a fat Black femme, powerful + free, holding two candles burning at both ends: time swiftly passes. They float inside a ring formed by two snakes—or is it one snake?—eating its own tail: everything that eats will eventually be eaten; life depends on this.
In each of the four corners, we find the symbols of each suit, offered by a hand, as in the four Aces of the Minor Arcana. Aces are considered gifts, and here at this potent threshold of the journey, the World card reminds us of the gifts we come endowed with as human beings:
- the sword—the realm of the mind: thought, attention, intention, wisdom, discernment, truth, justice, communication, messages + sound
- the cup—the realm of emotion: feelings, intuition, relationships, creativity, the soul, the unconscious, the nervous system, dreams + the imagination
- the wand—the realm of spirit + self: creativity, sexuality, passion, desire, instincts, community, direct experience
- the pentacle—the realm of material reality: the 10,000 things, our behavior, resources internal + external, such as time, space, care, money, groundedness, stability + enoughness
These are the materials we have to work with: our thoughts + speech, our emotions + relationships, our creativity + spirituality, and our behavior + resources. Many conditions in our life are not of our own choosing. But we have choice + power in these realms of our experience.
This is what I hear adrienne maree brown saying when she says, “You are a personal front line” and “Are you practicing things on purpose?” Practicing things on purpose has a power when we do it alone, when no one is looking. And it has a power when we do it together, with each other.
This is what I’m thinking about today.
Find out more about my tarot work
Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair.
— Mariame Kaba
