More on politics and bodies

Notebooks: June 2nd-8th, 2018-2022

Hey all,

I missed my Friday deadline last week, but better late than never: here’s three notebook entries from three different years, all of which seem to play off similar themes. The last is a poem that feels *just* on the edge of something I feel too embarrassed to share – it was written while deep in a leadership retreat, years ago¹ – but there’s maybe enough in there that it feels worth it. Again, this is kind of the mandate I gave myself with this Substack, i.e. to share things I wouldn’t otherwise be sharing. So here goes.

Side note: I’ve also been working on a longer post about movement leadership, burnout, and discerning hurt versus harm – again sorting through some old notebook entries – but that’s one that I honestly I don’t know will ever get there (or feel like the right moment to post). Bigger fish to fry in this moment.

(Solidarity with immigrant communities and protests in Los Angeles.)

Thanks as always for reading,
Adam

---

June 8th, 2022:

Ideology is not based in ideas, but in soma — the body.

Ideology is just the justification, an echo of the physiology of the response to certain events.

I feel scared.

I feel angry.

The enemy is ______.

Embodied ideology is what we need. Not to study, but practice

If we want to create the cultural-somatic shifts that increase safety, dignity, and connection for all.

The Right has a powerful somatic ideology that speaks to ancient and always-current impulses — fear of change, fear of Others, fear of weakness/vulnerability/disease.

“Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationalism” — new contexts, related language, more or less identical physiology.

---

June 6th, 2021:

I notice compassion turning to
Ash in my mouth.

If I don’t set healthy boundaries
(Not getting swept up in other people’s projections)

I can’t actually show up for this work fully, powerfully, attuned to others.

---

June 3rd, 2018:

I am on this wild rollercoaster
That it is to be healing
In a white man body.

The practice
At this moment
Brings me joy in the way it

Surprises me, returns me to
Myself in the collective.

I did not expect this.
For it to be like this.

I thought it would be hard, the way
Masculinity is supposed to be,

The way capital magnetizes its cells
To one another, at the cost of people

And gathers and becomes stuck.

I forgot where I come from?
(was whiteness?)

A breeze blows down the overgrown empty highway.

I came from this
Something tells me.

Something tells me
I can find my way home.

*

Every circle is a spiral
When you feel your way back 
in time.

*

I have knowings in my body so wild
I am ashamed to tell you.

I knew, once, the President
Deserved healing.

I knew it because I knew I deserved healing
Which was something that was taught to me

By fighting harder than I ever fought before
at the side of giants.

Dignity
Becomes you, sister.

I am everything you and we
Have taught me, am learning.

Remember the time I bled all over the floor
And you cleaned my blood, and I remembered
I was bleeding, and you were on your knees

And I rushed to join you?

And in my rush you
swept in from a different edge
Of the spiral I was remembering

Because your body remembered
To take care,

To become care.
And you became it.
And you danced me to the edge of the square that contained us. 

And when, as you cleaned my wound, I said
You don’t have to do that you said
I know.

And in that too was a teaching.

*

One contradiction: that we need white, men, wealthy people
To come apart 
In order to change shape

But that coming apart risks such mess.

The knowing impulse says:
That we must build armies of woke transformed

White, men, wealthy people to perform the labor
Of containing and cleaning what blood and shit and fluid
Pours out.

It may be a true thing
The knowing impulse knows.

It may be pouring out already.

But the truth may also gather in a pool
of a sheen slightly different.

It may be of more communal stitching. 

Gratitude and relation.

*

Not bigger, or smaller.
It is not a question of size.

Not even the full length, width, and depth
Of us all.

*

The body itself 
Asks its next question.

1. There’s really too many people to credit on some of these posts, in terms of influences and/or just straight up gratitude, but I would like to acknowledge generative somatics, both as a framework and as a community of practitioners, and specifically gs teachers Spenta, Alta, adrienne, Jennifer, Danielle, and Hilary (as well as every single participant in that 2018 Detroit cohort), for creating such a transformative space, and specifically one that could hold so much deep work across so much difference.