The Forest Rising

activist writings, musings, and resources

[theforestrising-blog]

First of the Last Days

Hey y'all, to everyone who has enjoyed this Tumblr please follow my new one!

Backstory: I used to have about five tumblrs that I posted on. That became unsustainable. I'm switching everything to one Tumblr now :)

It has funny, it has beautiful, it has music, deep politics, and more.

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"As Fanon...reminds us, colonization is about compartmentalization. The more simply you render an event or an individual, the easier it is to render knowledge about them. The EZLN sought to demystify capitalist accumulation by rendering an organic terrain of justice that is plural and not universal." - N. D. Natividad

One would think that campaigns built around key frames are not exactly "organic terrains of justice" - but these campaigns may emerge from such an organic terrain. What does that terrain look like? 

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Does the heart of the college belong to its students, its profs and its faculty, or does it belong to elite interests? Anne Bishop wrote that North American colleges and universities are primary entities whose purpose is to preserve, pass on, and strengthen the things that make up Western civilization: dominant American culture, knowledge and learning, social class, structural racism/sexism, personal growth that doesn't challenge individualism and capitalism. And clearly our civilization belongs not to the people, but to elite interests. So how do we win the heart of the college, battle to change the institution to build a different set of values, a diverse set of values, for a different society?

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Surviving the ups and downs of social movements - Waging Nonviolence

Can theories of movement cycles equip activists to persevere over the long haul?

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“Ella Baker had an innovative understanding of leadership, an idea which she thought of in multiple ways: as facilitator, creating processes and methods for others to express themselves and make decisions; as coordinator, creating events, situations and dynamics that build and strengthen collective efforts; and as teacher/educator, working with others to develop their own sense of power, capacity to organize and analyze, visions of liberation and ability to act in the world for justice. Ella believed that good leadership created opportunities for others to realize and expand their own talents, skills and potential to be leaders themselves. This did not mean that she didn't challenge people or struggle with people over political questions and strategies. Rather, this meant that she struggled with people over these questions to help develop principled and strategic leadership capable of organizing for social transformation.

Baker described good leadership as group-centered leadership. Group-centered leadership means that leaders form in groups and are committed to building collective power and struggling for collective goals. This is different than leader-centered groups, in which the group is dedicated to the goals and power of that leader.”

Chris Crass

"Leadership is taking responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty."

Marshall Ganz

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"If politics is the art of the possible, then organizing is the art of making more possible."

Paul Wellstone

“An activist is a person who comes to activities and an organizer is someone who is responsible for the activities.”

Chris Crass

“Bob Zellner once compared organizing to a juggling act - how many plates can you keep spinning at one? Organizers had to be morale boosters, teachers, welfare agents, transportation coordinators, canvassers, public speakers, negotiators, lawyers, all while communicating with people ranging from illiterate sharecroppers to well-off professionals and while enduring harassment from the agents of the law and listening with one ear for the threats of violence. Exciting days and major victories are rare. Progress is a few dollars raised, a few more people coming to pay poll tax.”

Charles Payne

[sonofbaldwin]

Had the pleasure of chatting with an American white person who gets it. This person is actively anti-racist not because they particularly like black American people; they understand why that doesn’t matter. They are actively anti-racist because they understand how oppression functions. ...

[theforestrising-blog]

Sometimes I think the greatest danger out there is attempting to make sense of the world without experiencing it directly or taking the time to study it.

Like my aunt, who unknowingly refused to support democracy of the economy by saying "if everything were equal, no one would have to work hard anymore!"

Like my professor, who unknowingly stopped our group from building more of a campaign by saying "if we go big, we'll be like the revolutionaries from Les Miserables, for whom no one showed up when they went into the streets!"

Like my dad, who unknowingly misses the complexity of how messed up our world is by saying "the core problem is people who believe the end justifies the means!"

Like me when I unknowingly did the same by saying "the only thing that will make a better world is us developing more empathy!"

Like anyone who says "when people get fed up enough, things will change!"

The truth is, the world is complex. General statements like this give us an illusion of security to hold on to, when in reality, what's going on and how to take action are understandable only if we make a commitment to constantly learning more about them, and experiencing them more fully.

[theforestrising-blog]

A letter to my dismal allies on the US left

God bless this woman.

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This music breaks one's heart and puts it back together in one.

When I think about watching this movie, I'm always haunted. The question I always have is - why is the Holocaust so special in our eyes? I watched a movie once about the Belgian Holocaust in the Congo. The drums beat darkly, blaring a sound of dull and aching terror. The eyes of the dead stared out from their dark faces. 

When I watch videos of Holocaust films I'm always surprised at how the skin of both killer and killed is white.

And I know that the Holocaust is remembered above the Belgian genocide because of that fact. Because European Jews came, after the second World War, to possess a previously unbelieved-of political power, helped in no small way by their color.

It must needs change the way we stylize their massacre. I remember one person saying of "Twelve Years a Slave" that they wished for moments of beauty in between the scenes of horror. Instead there was not a single respite, and the dark horror of imprisonment floated in the gorgeous Spanish mosses and swamp trees under the sun.

Perhaps our stylization of the oppression of Black and African people is rooted in racism as well. Or are haunting violin solos merely a European lament? In what ways would the many peoples of the first continent voice their loss and life? I cannot answer.

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All the true things. God bless Gopal. One of the many people I look to as I build my own leadership.

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Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Frederick Douglass

Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.

Assata Shakur

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Sometimes I have to remind myself that in the midst of huge stress and excitement about the challenges and the power of organizing, the whole reason we're doing it is because we want to live joyfully and beautifully on the planet.

So it would miss the point to not live joyfully and beautifully on it now.

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Something in me believes that our greatest challenge is to be emotionally honest with each other.

I have talked with one other organizer, and said that I thought a lot about how to bring spirituality into organizing work. He said he thought a lot about it too, but was cautious about it distracting from building power.

I had a similar fear, too. That fear is slowly eroding.

Today in "Towards Collective Liberation," I read Chris Crass's account of the schisms that occurred in the San Francisco Food Not Bombs group, of activists divided and fighting each other bitterly over the politics of the organization. 

Bitter fights are not about organizational politics. They're about our emotional histories, our baggages, our unlooked-at pain that perpetuates the roles of both the oppressor and the oppressed. And those baggages are as critical a thing to address as our politics, analysis, and structure.

I've been coming to realize that fear of making compromises between two necessary thing is almost always misguided. They're all interconnected, and saying no to one means saying no to both.

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And spirituality is first and foremost about emotional honesty. As some wise person who wrote a famous book a long time ago said:

"The path into the light seems dark, the path forward seems to go back, the direct path seems long, true power seems weak."

It's for this reason that I've always loved the story in the photo above, told by Natalie Goldberg. It embodies perfectly the acceptance of our emotions as they are, the abandonment of the need to change them, of a false ideal of what they should be.

In the acceptance of those emotions comes a freedom from them.

Why, as activists, are we always so intent on feeling inspired all the time? It all seems a shade to cover the brightness of our despair. Why are we afraid to say simply that we feel discouraged, but have instead to qualify that we do feel hopeful too? Only because we're afraid of being seen as "not in it," or of actually "not being in it."

We've worked hard and long enough that we should know that we most certainly are in it. And any emotions we feel along the way are simply part of the process.

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The article above that I just linked to evoked something strong in me. It seems to tear down those barriers, those pretensions, made me naked again in my pain. I realized that all my theorizing about the time when pain would overwhelm us, forcing us to wake up, was denying the possibility of such an occurrence happening in the here and now.

Because we feel pain in the here and now. And when we drop our myths, we realize that we feel pain for the whole world as well. 

"The problem is to connect, without hysteria, the pain of any one's body with the pain of the body's world." - Adrienne Rich

When we just let the pain be, it's okay.

As I read the article by Robert Jensen, I felt my heart burning.

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Today in the morning I had a really nasty spell of moodiness from not being able to get along with my mother. And it was really weird - I just let myself feel like that. I found that I could still walk, talk, and do chores while feeling completely dead and morose. After a while I started to feel better on my own. It wasn't the goal. It just sort of happened. And I think that's really the thing to take away about emotional honesty, which is that it doesn't mean miring yourself in the feeling or exaggerating it, just - continuing on while letting it be there. You neither feed it nor deny it. After a time you start to feel lighter. Or the feeling becomes transformed. It starts to be punctured by the light.

[theforestrising-blog]

Self-reflection - life experience journalling pt. 1

This is the kind of stuff I would explore in a one-on-one conversation. I turned inward today and tried to find a little more in my past than I usually do. I wrote it mostly for myself, but others may get something out of it as well.

I'm trying to root my direction in life to my experiences, rather than just to my beliefs.

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When I was young, I learned that there were rules in life.

In the trailer park where I lived, I played with other kids in the trailers around the street. Jazmine was my best friend – she came up to our door once, grinning, and asked to play. That was the first time I met her. After that we played a lot. We threw beans into the sandbox, and when it rained and there were sprouts in it the next week, we were told that that's what happened when you threw beans in the sandbox.

We were told that you couldn't do backflips on the trampoline (though of course Jazmine's older brother broke that rule). We were told (or I was told, anyway) that you couldn't glue-stick drawings to your bedroom door. I remember learning that we would be leaving for New York for five years, and started spending more time with Chelsea, who was pretty. When Jazmine asked why I was spending more time with Chelsea and not with her, I told her “I won't see Chelsea for five years!” It took me a while to realize that I wouldn't see Jazmine for five years, either. Oops.

I learned in the woods that I could be alone.

Alone is how I spent much of the rest of my life. There weren't many other kids my age in the homeschooling group that my family belonged to – Sean, who I always argued with, Juliet, who I was a little afraid of, Joel, who I thought was weird. My sister had lots of friends, though. They were older. They laughed and hugged and had adventures with each other all the time. I had to beg into the adventures, because I was younger and couldn't make my own. I learned that older kids could make adventures, but that I couldn't.

At the skating park they once got everyone to change directions ten minutes after the usual direction change just for the fun of it. And everyone switched directions! It was incredible. I was giddy, and tried to get the same thing to happen. I told one or two people, and told them to tell the rest, but it didn't happen. One of them looked weirdly at me as the clock hit the right point and nothing happened.

My sister and her friends had lots of other adventures, too. They created games of capture and intrigue. I wanted to be captured, and for there to be intrigue. I wanted desperately to be captured so I could feel the thrill of being alone in an enemy camp, spitting at the feet of my jailors, watching their secret plots with a gag in my mouth.

None of that ever happened, so I had to make up most of my adventures in my head. They got very gruesome at times. Lord of the Flies tells it like it is, everyone.

When I was a little older, I went deep into the woods with two instructors and twenty other kids in a Primitive Pursuits program. We learned to start fires with bow drills and hand drills. We walked all through the woods playing games, building huge shelters and snow houses. I made a bow once. But also, we listened to the stories that the instructors told us.

They told us about Tom Brown Jr., who learned to track animals when he was young. He learned to move through the forest as silently as an animal. He came once upon a man in the forest sitting by the river, stalked him, and stole his gun from right by his side.

Once our instructor, as we were all sitting around, told us about the philosophies of some Native American peoples who had lived in the woods in some of the ways they were trying to teach us. “An owl's life, a snail's life, a tree's life, a person's life – they are all worth the same,” said Jed. “When you take a plant for your use, take the smallest one, or the one that is crowding out the others. Leave the forest in the right way. Thank it for what it gives to you.” Our instructors knew much more than we did. They sometimes lived in the woods for long periods at a time, in built shelters, hunting other animals. I longed to be able to do that. But it was enough to root around in the woods while we were there, dig up leeks to eat, create small fires.

I think it was in the woods that I learned how much there is to life that is never explored, but that waits for us out there, endless in its possibility.

I learned some good lessons. I learned some bad ones, too. In New York I started taking karate, and quickly found out that I was good at it. I could remember the names of the moves and could do them right. The instructor pointed to me: “This is Leland. He knows how to do a Ha Dan Mah Kee.” I learned that I was good at things. I knew things, could understand them. I was good at them.

When I look back on it, I realize that it was adventure I always craved. But I rarely was able to create the adventure myself. I didn't have the social power, the friends, the mystical know-how of lighting a spark to the tinder of people's possibilities. I learned that adventures were out there, but that it was other people who created them, and I had to jump in with theirs or create them in my mind. So today, still, I doubt about my ability to create real adventures, but I spend lots of time planning them out with my brain. I took the MBTI once in college, and it told me exactly that; that people with my personality type have a powerful intellect and can use it to create intricate, wide-reaching plans, but that in the real world we sometimes stumble, forgetting to deal with the situation on the ground.

I create plans in my mind all the time – writing out long thoughts on the Internet, philosophizing deeply on change, reading many many books. But in the real world my efforts have been less fruitful. I talk to people but don't always get through to them. At Knox my dreams of an adventure, of a group of people helping each other to heal and build power as a movement, is so far unrealized. I haven't yet found the inner knowledge, the inner influence, that clicks.

[theforestrising-blog]

A Gentlemen’s Guide To Rape Culture

Bless this article!

"I don’t know about you, but I don’t spend much of my life feeling vulnerable. I’ve come to learn that women spend most of their social lives with ever-present, unavoidable feelings of vulnerability. Stop and think about that. Imagine always feeling like you could be at risk, like you were living with glass skin."