UNDROWNED

This book by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist, with a forward by @adirennemariebrown, is full of water and wild and wonder, and is one of the most beautiful books I’ve read—poetic, alluring, haunting, visionary, and practical.

Above all, these meditations are a love manifesto to the world and to black and queer liberation. With lessons for everyone. As she writes in the intro, it’s for “everyone who knows that a world where queer black feminine folks are living their most abundant, expressed, and loving lives is a world where everyone is free.”

Lessons of slowing down as strategic intervention, of adaptation and collaboration, of #deeplistening and #emergentstrategy, of heart-centered living, of hiding and showing up, of cultivating chosen families, including other-than-human kin, of clarity in the midst of colonial confusions, of resisting and defying extractive economies, of inter-generational and cross-border community-care and love as a renewable resource. How the interpersonal is political is interspecies.

And along the way you learn about cetaceans and seals, salt and sanctuary, sonar and siren songs, all learnings from her apprenticeship to marine mammals.

Like, Dolphins use the fat in their foreheads to modulate their biosonar listening. And the Breathing of whales is as crucial to our own breathing and the carbon cycle of the planet as are the forests of the world.

Like, southern sea elephants spend a whole month just snuggling. Not mating or hunting. Just spooning and resting. And shedding, becoming shiny new and silver.

Like, One of the very first things the Columbus crew did upon arriving in Caribbean was kill black monk seals. Their blubber oil literally lubricated the plantation economy. Or as Donna Haraway refers to the Anthropocene, the Plantation-ocene. Then onto the matter: indigenous and black slavery and genocide. White modernity turning Blackness into sugar.

In conversation with the horned narwhal in the Arctic, she writes “Not every black unicorn is showing you her horn. But some of us are here reorganizing your dreams. You are welcome.”

Thank you 🙏🏽

COURTING THE WILD TWIN

The business of stories is waking up.

“And something happens when we, maybe rashly, give ourselves utterly to the turbulent luminosity of the universe.”

This tiny book sprouts giant wisdoms and exquisite rememberings. Wisdom about adoration and the miraculous. Of life’s grief, but not despair. Of possibility and passion and risky eros. Of making covenants with the unexpected. Of both being defeated by beauty and looking through the eyes of the monster.

This is a tale(s) of locating our long-abandoned wild twin and courting it home. Re-gathering our exiled energies. The cost of not doing so is terribly high. And we are living in its consequence.

It’s time to fess up.

But “Be skeptical of the quick route. It’s truly what’s got us into a thousand unruly messes. And not the kind the poets praise.”

Martin Shaw is the consummate storyteller and has a few tricks in his hat and his pockets are a-clatter with magic. He knows facts don’t hold the story. He knows to ask: what shady place have we allotted in our life to let our thinking lope and purr and get all old-womanly? As such he’s also a guide and offers some underworld etiquette necessary if we are to navigate through this collective initiation.

Like how not to dominate the Miraculous with certainty. Like the need to give up our addiction to day-words. To trust our senses and give our songs addresses. Slow down. To learn to operate equally from grief and wonder at the same time.

May we encounter the appropriate trouble.

#ryansreads2021