This is the year...

Participants in the 2019 Advanced Practitioner’s Training closed the week together by composing a “This is the Year” poem together.

This is the year, we ….

This is the year, we embrace failure by risk-taking for a better world.

This is the year, we get some rest and sprout our internal selves

This is the year, we fuckin’ get free.

This is the year, we remember to put the oxygen masks on ourselves first so that the pressure of the work getting more intense doesn’t make us feel useless and defeated because we need that oxygen for when we laugh and sigh — and we must always remember that Our Breath was made for more than just political chanting.

This is the year, we become who we have been waiting for.

This is the year, we remember our way into the future.

This is the year, we dismantle the cages we were told would protect us and smile in the warmth of each other’s embrace. Este es el año en el que desmantelamos las jaulas que dicen existir para protegemos y sonriremos en de nuestrxs abrazos la calidez.

This is the year, we see our power become clear, focus to them to everyone.

This is the year, we forgive ourselves first.

This is the year, we destroy capitalism and anyone who protects it!

This is the year, we stick together fight for a better world and win.

This is the year, we let go of the differences and build a community where you are free to imagine, create, laugh and love.

This is the year, we rediscover our leaf on the evolutionary tree of life; see our moment in the vastness of geologic time and life’s cycles of aberration, diversity, growth and extinction. This is the year we find humility.

This is the year, we will fill the holes in our hearts with the building of loving communities.

This is the year, we don’t go back to unhealthy spaces or places that demand, extract, and exploit our being. This is the year that we replenish our whole selves.

This is the year, we pull back the curtain between black, indigenous and Latin peoples to heal the harms of slavery, exploitation and violence we committed against each other in the name of white supremacy.

This is the year, we
See like Demons do
Move like “Spirits” do
Love like light moves….
Dig up the landmines and flow freely like rivers

This is the year, we love and protect each other in all the way we need to love and protect each other.

This is the year, we realize that our local and national struggles are part of a global movement for liberation and begin to organize as one powerful resistance.

This is the year, we name our villain and aim for their head.

This is the year, we come together from all walks of life to make our country work for us - the people - and truly win equality and justice for everyone, no matter what we look like or where we come from.

This is the year, we press our ears to the earth and hear its wisdom.

This is the year, we overthrow caste supremacy and white supremacy.

This is the year, we open empty lots and space and fill the with homes for anyone that wants one.

This is the year, we see the wrinkled, sunkissed hands of our grandmothers return to the soil to tend the plants that make the medicine that keeps us well.

This is the year, we sit with butch/femme elders and ancestors, scale up stories of belonging and safety and care, where desire braids a life from the threads of our existence, a flexible weapon to pull down the walls of white womanhood as our dignity is our own, our own, our own and sits on the ashes of racialized capitalism and patriarchy.

This is the year, we live and organize from the place of power that has always been ours and not from the place of power that was taken.

This is the year, we create something more compelling and meaningful than our enemies ever could.

This is the year, we laugh till we pee.

This is the year, we find grace in our human messiness and build a longing for the immensity of the sea.

This is the year, we overwhelm white supremacy with the power of people, culture and song.

This is the year, we turn it around on them instead of each other.

This is the year, dream and love and be and stay and laugh and remember.

This is the year,  we stop, rest, recall everything we’ve witnessed, endured and have had to carry. We can cry, scream, laugh, talk and write to our heart’s content. We grieve for days and days and days. Then we begin to regenerate.

This is the year,  we build a better future from the shards of stolen dreams

This is the year, we really take care of ourselves and stop the idea that we have to be martyrs for freedom.

This is the year,  we stand not only in solidarity, but in the struggle with our brothers and sisters in venezuela, Puerto Rico, Yemen, Syria (just to name a few out of too many) and all those fighting to see another day in man made war, man made famine, political oppression and fight for their liberation.

This is the year, we see life as a magical box of colored crayons to color a new story into being.

This is the year,  we will ride on a horse freely to delight and share in our people’s unifying visions of us and our world is our birth to write.

This is the year, we never stop speaking out against injustice.

This is the year, we plant seeds of imagination, tend our garden with care, and harvest liberation so we can taste our power and feed our souls and grow the movement.

This is the year, we re-deploy all “Top Chef’s” full time into the cafeterias of our frontline public schools to model what health tastes and looks like.

This is the year, we build a huge huge colorful treehouse in the desert and it has a million rooms where we love, heal, eat, cook, apologize, share, tell stories, take naps, make art, dance, and remember. The year we call this treehouse home and we are safe.

This is the year, we get it started.