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Hello beloveds and baddies!
As you may already know, I help people raise money to fund the revolution.
I have started a Skool community to share songs and meditations and create anticapitalist business and thriving finances to fund the revolution. Link is below, so feel free to scroll and sign up or share with beloveds if you have already heard this message. Also please feel free to share with others as you feel inspired to do so.
This movement space I am creating is a partial response to Audre Lorde’s now famous quote about caring for oneself not being self-indulgence.
“I had to examine, in my dreams as well as in my immune-function tests, the devastating effects of overextension. Overextending myself is not stretching myself. I had to accept how difficult it is to monitor the difference. Necessary for me as cutting down on sugar. Crucial. Physically. Psychically. Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
This quote and this work is an essential piece of my own journey, and my question for many years now that I have been asking again and again: “How do I get free? How do you get free? How do we get free? What does freedom look like? Sound like? Taste like? Feel like? Smell like?” And the questions have led me to studying medical journals, poetry, prose, dance, learning and singing songs, expanding my ancestor and altar practices, and making art and money and love and caring for babies and and and.
As many of you may know, there are medical journals that tell the story of how enslaved Africans were worked until their muscles tore from their bones, and then worked until they died, with those muscles separated the whole time.
It’s enraging.
Infuriating.
Overwhelming.
How do we get free in the midst of that kind of brutality?
Harriet Tubman escaped seven times.
Seven times.
Because she went back and got people free.
But also because she was building a network of allies and accomplices who could hide Black escaped folks and feed and clothe them and give them extra food for the journey.
That network was made up of other still-enslaved folks, of free Black folks, of Turtle Island Indigenous folks, of Irish and German and Dutch and Scottish and and and. There was no race or type of people that didn’t participate in the Underground Railroad.
This message is already too long, and it is also part of a series of letters that I am writing that will come out in Thursdays as I am able, and the flesh is willing.
So I will say that this community is about building resources, for ourselves and others, so that we can get free.
It’s not about becoming millionaires or billionaires, but about becoming trillionaires, together. (I will write about this more in another letter I promise!)
We must shift the so-called US economy so that it is people-powered.
And this will require more resources that most of us have never even conceived of.
Not because we are greedy or self-indulgent, although honestly who doesn’t love a home made or locally sourced oatmeal face mask after shutting down a bridge??!!
It’s about fueling the revolution and building the world that is to come.
And the bridge from here to there takes resources.
And most of us are either groomed to believe that we shouldn’t have those resources or that if we have them believe we will be harming others.
Here’s the thing.
Money just makes you more of who you are.
If you are generous and kind and AntiRacist and you get a little bit of money in, of course part of that is going to fund Black trans futures and right nows!
But if you are also carrying anxiety, scarcity, judgement, fear, etc., (and honestly, who isn’t sometimes and some ways?!) those things also get amplified.
That’s why you hear stories about leftist and abolitionists getting large amounts of funding and turning on their own values.
It’s not because they are bad or wrong, necessarily. I think the jury is still out on many things and I’m not sure juries are always effective ways of getting justice anyways.
But I have raised and redistributed over 8 million dollars in my direct networks and helped to raise and redistribute over 50 million dollars through organizational and interpersonal coaching in my close communities.
And here’s what I see again and again.
When we have a little money for alcohol, we drink. When we have a lot, we drink more. Often there’s a crash. Harm reduction gets swallowed up by the recovery extreme machine. We become zealots and try to get everyone around us sober instead of letting them be.
Or.
We are scarred from being unhoused or under resourced. Used, by people we know and are close to us and by people who don’t love us. We get some resources. We feel guilty and give too much away. We become resentful and locked down.
Or.
We are finally secure enough to have a home and family who loves us but we ruminate and live in terror of losing everything. This makes us hold back and refuse to give anything. Or give everything until we can’t breathe or don’t have that security anymore.
We get the resources to do things and we don’t know how to both keep and share so we err to one or the other like a toddler drunk on milk and power.
I have been many of these things. I have seen many more. And as a Black trans Indigenous two/spirit third gender nonmonagamous parent and artist and coach who creates and shares resources everywhere I go, like seeds falling from my hair and growing in fertile soils until we all are fed, I am sometimes a wind tunnel for others to help fly and migrate, sometimes a a pool wall for others to push off of, sometimes a place to gather resources for the long journey to freedom that others are on.
And I love this role.
But.
It is not enough for me to learn how to get free.
We must create a freedom map for ourselves and eachother, one that we can return to again and again and again.
This program is the freedom map I am drawing. It’s not the only freedom map. There are literally millions of freedom maps that have been drawn and are still being drawn every day.
But here is mine.
And here is the thing I return to again and again.
We need care. And we need skills.
Because people think that care is a feeling. And it is.
But it’s also a set of skills and tools and technologies that can be learned and practiced and embedded into your consciousness and subconscious and taught to and shared with others to cut through the noise of oppression every day.
It is a freedom journey.
And in the freedom journey, we often get caught by the oppressions that enslave us. The dogs at our heals, we give up or lose heart. Or we run with everything we have, but get caught anyways. We lose the desire to get free, or keep the desire but lose the believe that it’s possible.
But I have a map. As a brain-injured survivor like Harriet I claim the right of freedom for Black disabled folks, and for everyone on the journey with us. I was born free and have been captured again and again and beaten and enslaved and oppressed and r*ped and harmed by individuals and systems again and again, and I have learned to escape again and again, and I am filled with love and learning and technologies of care that are overflowing and wanting to be shared.
This is my gift, and my own freedom journey.
Join me. Make your own maps and communities and be supported in that journey to building resources that get you and other people free, building nervous systems that can hold that freedom, and coming again and again to the water of freedom that is flowing here and everywhere, while we build our skills and tools and technologies to become freedom scryers and movers everywhere we go. Thanks for being on the journey with me. Whether you join this community or not, you are already doing beautiful things to raise the vibrations into a frequency that breaks chains everywhere you go. May you be safe and free, always and in all ways. May it be so. And so it is. Amen. Aho. Ashe. Blessed be.
Grow While You’re Here: AntiRacist and AntiCapotalist Business and Life Coaching school where we learn how to raise resources for the revolution that gets us all free.
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