Pisces wisdom (and other birthday thoughts)
Notebooks: February 25th, 2016
Pisces wisdom means doing your deepest self-reflection in the coldest, deepest part of the year. I was born in this exact season.
As a person with many intersecting privileges, this manifested, for awhile, as a deep self-loathing.
The divisions set up by patriarchy, white supremacy, and hugely unequal distributions of wealth & power … I feel these every day in my body. I am prone to feeling them most deeply and despairingly in winter.
Pisces is followed by Aries -- youthful, bounding, fearless spring.
I am coming around to a feeling -- with all of your help -- that is this word liberation.
Liberation is hibernation inside out?
If you’re a Pisces, you’re born right before we all wake up.
But my gifts are not this heaviness ----- it’s a lightness.
Feeling pain deeply creates space for the healing.
How do we do that collectively?
What comes after?
*
Like many of you on my feed, I watched Hillary Clinton ignore (bring to heel) the pain of the young black activist who turned her words back on her.
We become defensive whenever we are not yet willing to live in truth.
That night I watched a member of my class defend [what she thought was] her own class interests.
*
Let it be said, not by me
but earned, come true over time,
that I was a traitor
to my interests.
[[ ]]
*
I am a commitment to healing, and to playing my right-sized, right-placed role in movements toward a world in which land, wealth, and power are shared. [In which people’s basic needs are met. In which we are living in balance with the planet, and in which there is a lot of playfulness and love and dancing.]
*
On my birthday, some things I am feeling particularly grateful for:
Beautiful multiracial communities of which I am/have been a part -- including my family, Upward Bound, past/present Resource Generation staff and member-leaders, broader movement family
All my role models & allies in figuring out how to do this whole healing feminist masculinity thing
Safety and access to health care, nutritious food, shelter
My amazing partner @Vero
Continued opportunities to learn & grow & take risks
My working-class-turned-upper-class-through-marriage (Jewish) mom from whom I get my love of people, empathy, sense of injustice
My silly, gentle, dutiful WASP dad, from whom I get the ability to hyperfocus on one thing for hours, love of art and creativity, for-real spirit of hard work and responsibility
My sister Kate from whom I get a balance to my older brotherness (I <3 your instinctual and non-theoretical resistance & rebellion)
MY FRIENDS
My writer pals, w/ your deep intuition and wackyness and brilliance
Solitude
This connection
*
The way we’ll win
I’m pretty sure we’re in