"without a soul opened for it, no word from the Lord can be received. Listening with an open soul, keeping an empty space in our inner life, sharpening our spiritual hearing: this is the only thing we can do. But this is much."

Indeed this is much. My daily walks are a reminder to listen with an open soul. In my tradition, God is in fact not only ever-present, but ever-speaking. God is always calling out. God is both here and imminent, waiting and reaching at the same time. It is incumbent on us to listen widely. And listening widely is beyond auditory. It is a form of witness, of being profoundly open to and attuned for the mystery and grandeur of life as it is.

Sharpening our spiritual hearing is beyond just listening for signs and symbols from on high. It is the practice of dedicating ones life to something greater than ones life. It is the willingness to be a disciple of a discipline. It is the work of honing our craft along our path.

But the empty space- what does Tillich mean? Keeping an empty space in our inner life? Surely many of us feel the widening gnaw and increasing gulf between what matters most and the state of the world we are in. Surely many of us feel the gap between what our one precious Earth deserves as opposed to our present treatment of Earth. But what does Tillich mean by keeping an empty space in our inner life?

In my view: he means that life itself, in order to remain open to the grandiosity of creation and the tremor of destruction, in order to remain open to the awesome vastness of the cosmos and the intimate closeness of our own longings we must be willing to be present with reality as it is. We must steward our spiritual liberation as earnestly as we do all other areas of life we become a devotion to.

Walking with June has been an immense reminder of this wisdom.

Today marks the day that I begin again.

Today is my son’s 1st day of Kindergarten.

Today is the 2 year anniversary of my permanent decision for sobriety.

Today is the 2 year anniversary of my commitment to working with a strength and cardio coach.

Today is two and a half months into my commitment to daily mile long walks with June.

Today is the start of my 8 week program to train for my first ever 5K.

Today is a day to begin again.

Over the last 3 years I’ve been enraptured by the view that our bodies are the dwelling within which God lives. Rather than ourselves being in our bodies, our bodies are within ourselves; each of us are capable of more than we allow ourselves to accept, and so much of the work of life is to accept just that.

Today is a day to begin again.

I want my writing to breathe with the cosmic weight of Benjamin Banneker.

It was his early writings on science and the cosmos that inspired me when I was a child. I remember learning about him in the same breath as Rosa Parks and George Washington Carver. Banneker embodied the spirit of Black freedom writing, a spirit that accompanies me to this day. And it was on this day 235 years ago that Banneker penned his mightiest contribution to the liberation of Black people:

On August 19, 1791, the accomplished American mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Banneker pens a letter to then-Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson corresponds prolifically with luminaries from around the world, but Banneker is unique among them: the son of a free Black American woman and a formerly enslaved African man from Guinea, Banneker criticizes Jefferson’s hypocritical stance on slavery in respectful but unambiguous terms, using Jefferson’s own words to make his case for the abolition of slavery.

Benjamin Banneker writes to Thomas Jefferson, urging justice for African Americans

Twice this year I went on a sprint of writing. Both of these sprints (for Black History Month & in the lead up to my 33rd birthday) were accompanied by a mix of iridescent dreams and luminous visions about how I might write with the same urgency as the times in which we live. My writing picked up with a pace and ferocity that I had yet to experience before in my life. And while I won’t be flooding your inbox anymore (my bad!), I will still commit to writing about love, religion, politics, history, philosophy, art, science, culture, the body, technology, the cosmos, my life and everything in between and beyond.

Like Banneker I feel something invites and unleashes me towards my life, even given the wretched conditions the people and our one precious Earth find ourselves in.

And so- join me as I begin again!

• Today is my birthday, and the acquitted lynching of Cyrus Carmack-Belton brought Breonna Taylor to my mind, who also was born on this day.

• At the end of my last Unbound Sprint, I was preparing to make an exciting announcement. That was disrupted by mean-spirited and callous accusations about my moral character and political commitment. Hurt and overwhelmed, I postponed it.

• This week the acquitted lynching admittedly knocked the wind out of me, and I have decided to postpone it again, to get this message out from my heart:

• Racism is the sin of our time.

• And the unspeakable horror of this verdict, and every verdict where the lynching of Black people is rewarded with freedom, is simply incomprehensible.

• I remember in the 2010s it seemed like every 48 hours there was a new lynching. I remember the wave after wave of social media videos displaying the last moments of life of so many precious Black people. I think about this every day, I carry this in every grove of my bones, I feel this every time I tell my son ‘I will see you so soon’.

• I am not one of those fake and embarrassing so-called Christians that think all we need to do is pray; that is a form of sacrilegious cowardice that makes God weep in disappointment and tries to drown God in anguish. Prayer is necessary and insufficient. We must strategize. Black people and those who love us need to be very clear-minded and deliberate about how we respond to these absolute horrors. We do need to pray. We do need to love our children and our people as long and as deep and as hard as we can. And we also need a revolutionary strategy for the governing institutions of our society to be a force for breaking FOREVER the sinful scourge of racism.

• There is an unsettling reality those of us who unflinchingly love life and tenderness and softness and deep laughs and dignity and God’s creation must come to terms with: re-enslavement and the sadistic annihilation of Black life are the fundamental goals that the forces for a New Confederacy have at heart for the future of Black people on this Earth.

• We must be constant in prayer and permanently readying for anything anywhere at any moment. To give in to the nihilistic impulses and reckless abandon of individual action is to surrender to the false prophet of retribution. To give in to the cowardice of not calling the New Confederacy’s primary goal for Black people in this country re-enslavement and annihilation is to worship at the altar of unbelievable brutality and indescribable indifference.

• When we say faith without works is dead, we mean that we must pray and strategize. We mean that political power is the potential for us to accept the gifts of God. We mean that revolutions like the Haitian Revolution, the Taiping Revolution, the U.S. Reconstruction Revolution, the decolonization of Africa, the socialist revolutions in China, Vietnam and Cuba and many more are grand human attempts to embrace the organized emergence of God's plan. “The Earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.” The imperialists would do well to remember this abiding reality.

• But there is always joy in the mourning. The audacity of the Black freedom struggle is that we are clear that we too are ultimately indomitable, and we will never settle for anything less than the absolute freedom of all of the Earth and of all Black people everywhere forever.

• The greatness of the best of Black people is that we are for an iron-clad, unconquerable and total freedom. The self-evident righteousness of the freedom of Black people to simply live life is a resounding reminder that we will win.

• But first we must weep.

Breonna Taylor was murdered by police who raided her apartment in Louisville, Ky., in March 2020. (Julio Cortez / Associated Press)

unending Genesis commencing completion

the unfurling overflow of life

open and living marrow

our unambigious call

our ever-rising chorus of gladness

waywardness in the valley of the shadow of entropy

worriedness in the overturning heart of hurt

spiritedness in the upward trend of the Almighty

unspeakable but outloud

ineffable etched in each

grand strivings of Tubmans people

sanctified luminosity

Protraction is the art of accompanying time in the course of achieving deep freedom.

For Plato, time is a moving image of eternity. For Leo Tolstoy, time is the medium through which life unfolds beyond ones individual choices. For Roberto Unger, time is a field of open-ended creation. For Dr. King, time is a moral process.

And for those of us who are committed to the liberation of our one precious Earth, time is a co-conspirator in our united struggle for liberation. Time is our cosmic companion; it is the field within which we struggle and strive to achieve and become what God calls us to become. Quantum mechanics might speak to the methods and mechanics of time, but protraction speaks to times meaning.

And so we must reject Platos theory of time; time is not the passing by of an uninterested universe or the ongoing empty progression of existence. Time is not an albatross, it is simply both abundant and finite. Time is abundant and not scarce; it is the cosmic companion that, along with oxygen and connection, accompanies us from the moment we are born. Time is finite and not eternal; one day we will die.

Time is what we do with time. Time is a conduit through which we realize our devotions. One way we might view time is that time is relative when it comes to molecules and intergalatic structures, but time is relational when it comes to precious and precarious death and life. My own Black people are a people of time. All diasporic people find and invoke a home in time given our condition of exile.

Protraction is the political strategy for ones right-sized relationship to time. The ongoing collapse of our planetary climate certainly is an urgent hastening annihilation, but we cannot allow it to rob us of a right relationship to time. Urgency does not mean time has run out, it means that every moment matters.

Protracted struggle is the application of a theory of time as a cosmic companion to the revolutionary struggles for the liberation of all life. We would be wise to remember that those who have come before us have merged time and strategy, for the benefit of all:

“You must respect the enemy tactically even if the enemy is a paper tiger. Short term, the enemy is dangerous. Don’t be foolish. Strategically, the enemy deserves nothing but your contempt. Long-range the enemy has no future.”

5 (More) Quotes That Keep Me Going:

“Our country’s national crime is lynching.” - Ida Bell Wells-Barnett

“Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.” - Paul Tillich

“I am who I am because somebody loved me.” - Dr. Cornel West

“They think they can draw us out of power. They do not know the sleeping giant that they just awakened.”- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

“Audacity, more audacity, and always audacity!” - Samir Amin (via Lenin, via Danton)

The decolonization of Africa in the 20th century marked a decisive shift in the history of the human species and of the organization of the modern world. Africa is the historic origin of the human species. Its rich histories and profound cultures are the result of a lineage of people 300,000 years long. 8 years ago I absconded back to the ancestral homeland of my people, present-day Ghana. And this year, my girlfriend and I will be absconding again.

From the shores of present day Ghana was where my ancestors were abducted. In 1482, the Portuguese built Elmina, the first permanent colonial outpost in Gold Coast. Over the next few hundred years, the colonial empires of the Dutch, Danish, Prussians & Swedish followed. The 19th century was marked by the Anglo-Ashanti Wars, which led to the further entrenchment of British hegemony in the Gold Coast. From 1867 to 1957, Gold Coast was a colony of the British empire. The conquest and colonial division of Africa from 1870 to 1900 was followed by an immense emergence among the people of Africa from the 1950s to the 1980s. Over the course of just a few decades, peasants, workers, and landless millions and their allies rose up from the shackles of colonial subjugation in order to forge history in their own image. 43 former colonies and protectorates gained independence from European empires during this period. World War II led to the severe destruction of the nations of Europe, and the African Revolution was a continental-wide decolonization, one in the midst of a wave of worldwide revolution, a “people’s awakening” sweeping the Global South.

On March 6,1957, Ghana (formerly Gold Coast) became the first sub-Saharan African country to gain its independence from Europe in the 20th century. Kwame Nkrumah played a decisive role in African international affairs, helping to establish the Organization of African Unity. The Convention People’s Party pursued a program of governance united around the need for universal healthcare, national jobs programs, and self-determination for the nation of Ghana on issues of energy production, finance, military, and culture. In 1966, Nkrumah travelled abroad with Zhou Enlai of the People’s Republic of China with the goal of ending the imperial war on Vietnam. While in China, Nkrumah’s revolutionary government was destroyed by an alliance between US imperialist powers, reactionary military elites and policing forces and backwards elements of Ghanaian society. Nkrumah would never again return to Ghana, forced to live out his final days in exile in Conakry, Guinea.

The African Revolution entombed the remnants of the European empires of old, charted a path beyond colonial subjugation and placed the peoples of the Global South, triumphs and miseries alike, at the center of the unfolding development of human history. Black Africa set humanity on a fundamentally new historic path. Since the days of my adolescence I had yearned to return to the shores my ancestors were abducted from.

It was December 17th, 2018 when I returned to those very shores. We woke up early around 4:30am to catch the first tro-tro en route to Cape Coast from Accra. The tro-tro is very affordable, usually very packed, and very reliable. Going to the Cape Coast castle was something I both had been awaiting and dreading during my visit. I knew it was going to open up a well of feelings I might not have been ready to wrestle with. But, we have arrived.

Cape Coast is its own town, and people move at a different pace. It felt like a small coastal town, and people were selling different items: paintings, beads, bracelets. This was clearly a tourist stop. We did not come here to be amused, we came here to return to the shores our ancestors were forced to leave behind. The castle now houses small shops, markets, and, of course, the tour business itself. We paid 90 cedi and joined the tour in progress. The group was a mix of young people, Ghanaians, and a white couple. The first stop on the tour was the male slave dungeon. Horrific and disturbing details were shared by the tour guide. We moved further in to discover that a church was built by the slavers right on top of the dungeon. European sadists praised the Lord in a language alien and grotesque to the enslaved Africans below. We moved to a room with a shrine, one that existed well before colonization and enslavement. The third section led us back to the coast.

By this point, I couldn’t hide my contempt for this tour. The tour guide was clearly an apologist for colonialism, and out of a group of 15 people, only ever spoke directly to the white people on the tour. People in our tour group were taking selfies and group photos, as if emerging out of the dungeons below after having been there for 15 minutes was a cause for celebration. Various colonizers are buried right along the coast, all of whom abetted the horror. Upon leaving the coast, we made our way to the “female slave dungeon” where the tour guide implored the women to enter first. It was at that moment that I realized I wanted to attack him and the white man smiling at the sight of Black women entering this dungeon. I wanted to attack them both with my bare hands. I had a better idea though and decided to leave the group and head back to the coast. The wall overlooking the water below was lined with rusted British cannons. Below, waves crashed against the rocky jagged shore.

I wept.

My ancestors were stolen, abducted from these shores. And this is how the people on this tour treat this historic horror? We did not come to be amused, we came here to return to the shores our ancestors were forced to leave behind.

I wept.

The whole imperial world is a monstrous beast that must be conquered. Its devastation claws across time, ripping and gnashing at the righteous children of Africa. What level of wickedness does it take to look this historic horror head on and make light of it?

I wept.

I reached a point where I ran out of tears. And I tried to focus my attention on the horizon. I soon found myself attended for by my people. “They are because you are.” I realize that the circle is now complete. For half a millennium, my ancestors have been calling for me to return, and God has made a way for me to do so. I don’t know the contours of my contribution to Black freedom, but I know it arises out of the deep wells of Black joy and Black pain. I will avenge the suffering of my ancestors and find my way forward because of it.

As we left the town, I kept these thoughts with me. We decided to go to a nearby canopy walk, look out over miles of trees and catch a great breeze on our journey up and down the skyline slopes. It was a decent attention out, but the coast is unforgettable for all of the right and wrong reasons. For as long as I have memory, nerve, and instinct, I shall never forget the sound of those waves, the texture of those dungeon walls, the unspeakable horrors. But I must also keep in mind that despair must not have the last word. There is always joy in the mourning.

I am grateful for everything my ancestors had to do to survive and grateful to God Almighty for granting grace. And I am grateful for the gift of absconsion.

Loving my life again has produced many fruits, one of which is ongoing anointed love with my girlfriend. Often times, I struggle to put into words the depth of kindness, creativity and passion that she exudes and exemplifies. One word I have been doing some thinking on that might capture the heart of her spirit would be: beautiful.

My views on beauty are inspired by Paul Tillich; beauty is our experiencing of God through perception. What I love about this view / definition of beauty is that it means that beauty is not necessarily about aesthetic standards or about outward decorativeness or about the prettiness of an early Spring twilight or the gorgeousness of ones self. Beauty of course does not preclude those from being present, but beauty is not reducible to them either. Beauty is about divine reality being expressed through some thing or someone that participates in that divine reality. Beauty is the infinite and Almighty being expressed through something finite and temporary.

Perception is ‘the psychological and neurological process of gathering, organizing, and interpreting sensory information to make sense of the world and our place in it’. I have done some nascent exploration of thermoception, interoception, proprioception and vestibularity as complex forms of human perception systems. One way to view perception is that perception is your life interface- perception is the medium through which our lives are capable of being in reality.

Often we hear the maxim that ‘perception is reality’. But we might correct this and say that perception is not reality, perception is what allows us to deal with reality. The reality is…. reality is incomprehensible, dazzling, inescapable, delicate, ferocious and ultimately: benign. Our perception allows us to deal with the benign reality as it is.

Anointed love with my girlfriend has reminded me that my own life, too, is incomprehensible, dazzling, inescapable, delicate, ferocious and benign.

And yup- I’d say that’s beautiful.

• Coaching is a Baptism By Fire.

• According to the International Coaching Federation, coaching is “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.”

• According to the Strozzi Institute for Somatics, somatic coaching is “a transformational, life affirming, emergent process that organizes emotional, social, and spiritual commitments towards embodiment and fulfillment.”

• In my journey towards becoming a certified somatic coach, I have found that coaching at its best is an uncompromising, unflinching presence of the deep freedom of both the coach and leader. Coaching is the emancipatory co-practice of liberating us from what holds us back from deep freedom. Coaching is the upbuilding and generative craft that allows us to turn, to face, to enter into and to move through and beyond present dilemmas in our leadership and wider life.

• In my own Jesus tradition, coaching’s parallel is baptism; a kind of rebirth of one’s soul and self given the dominating impacts of society. Coaching is too often reduced to narrow and shrewd progress for a client or leader. Coaching is too often confused with guidance, consultation or the directing of someone. In reality – coaching is the co-constituent practice of being shared witnesses to God. Coaching is the daring courage and the unrelenting humility to transform what is necessary into what must be possible.

• In many ways, I view the work of coaching as similar to the work of the Prophet Aaron in the Exodus, or of John the Baptist in the water or Jesus harrowing Hell; coaching is the practice of co-intercession.

• Coaching demands that something be set ablaze, torched, and cast into the fire. Coaching questions are the kindling, cultivated silence is the oxygen, and one’s response to those questions and that silence is the spark.

• Every one of us, given the dominating impacts of society and the horrors of history, have internalized some degree of the white supremacy of Hernán Cortés and Christopher Columbus. Coaching excises those racist and colonial vestiges from our person.

• The power and promise of coaching is to liberate us from fixed habits of action and perception towards a more righteous and rightful relationship to deep freedom.

Photo courtesy of The Black Art Depot. Artwork by Johnny Myers, In the Name of the Father

Here are three views on the function of government:

• But first: government refers to the executive, legislative, judicial & bureaucratic institutions that make decisions about the organization of society within the limitations, constraints and dominance of the alliance of ruling classes and their principal political expression (the state). The state and the government are not synonymous. Given that regimes ascend within, struggle for stability within and decay within the context of state power, a major goal of all revolutionaries is to win the fight for democracy and win state power, which is political supremacy. Achieving left governing power provides a major lever to both open mass democratic participation of everyday people in the work of transforming politics and also provides a major lever to battle against the ruling classes state power. Okay, so given that, here are three views on the function of government:

• Government As Target- the historic battle taking place across the United States between the forces for a 2nd American Redemption movement and its governing project (the New Confederacy) and the forces for a 3rd Reconstruction program reminds us that government is a target of peoples protest. The first amendment not only guarantees us the right to protest, but built into the fabric of a democratic society is the right to criticize, challenge and confront government. And, even in extra-legal circumstances (see the insurrectionist attempt of January 6th 2021 and the insurrectionist insurgency of the former Confederate states) the government as a target takes on a literal meaning.

• Government As Tool- the forces for redemption and for reconstruction also show us that government is a tool or instrument for peoples power. We can look at the New Confederate actions like the mass expulsion and ethnic cleansing of immigrant communities, the imposition of arrogant and chauvinistic global tariffs, the pulverization of the democratic rights of the people to vote and to a safe and secure environment are all as examples of government as a tool. And conversely, so are the world-historic victories of the Reconstruction Revolution (the abolition of chattel slavery, due process and equal protection of the laws and the abolition of the US states rights to deny the right to vote based on race, color or previous conditions of servitude), victories that the present day Redeemer movement cannot help but to openly salivate at the prospect of destroying.

• Government As Terrain- the forces for Confederate Neo-Secession and the forces for Third Reconstructionist revolution both view government as a terrain to navigate. This is why Trump and his arrogant minions and MAGA lackeys have gone to war against civil society and the bureaucratic institutions of the government. This is why General Tubman enlisted in the Union Army as a spy, and it is why courageous leaders like Cori Bush today decide to enter into the Lion’s Den of elected office with their principles and heads held high: navigating the unfriendly terrain of government is the necessary precondition for learning how to more effectively target it when it is a force for suppression and wield it when it is a force for liberation.

• What is the beginning of everything? I don’t know, but I do have thoughts:

• I’ve written before “According to the ancient God-loving prophets, we are made in the image of the ultimate power in the history of reality. According to our present-day secular priesthood (the astrophysicists) 14 billion years ago our universe expanded at an inconceivable rate & scale. 10 billion years later, a massive molecular cloud collapsed onto itself, leading to an immense concentration of dust, rock & gas into its center, creating our solar system and our Earth.”

• The initiator of this second theory of primordial cosmology (the Big Bang Theory) is Georges Lemaître, who was a Belgian Catholic priest and a theoretical physicist. He aimed to reconcile Einsteins theory of general relativity with Aristotles prime mover argument and Lemaître’s own abiding belief in the existence of God.

• In some sense, the Big Bang theory and various religious origin stories are a feeble human attempt to declare and accept the origins of the universe. As beings made of both love & entropy, we strive to invoke coherence and meaning. This helps us understand even something like the Gregorian calendar as an attempt to impose human understanding and control over time. It is of course no mistake that both the Big Bang as a hypothesis of the origins of space and the Gregorian calendar as a mechanism to control and direct human time are Christian inventions; too often the so-called Christians have attempted to impose upon the world a kind of self-assured human arrogance that Christ himself lived his life in opposition to.

• It of course is confounding when I come across social media posts and internet slop suggesting Jews control the world, when in reality it was the imperial ambitions of the white so-called Christian people who took possession of the geography of the Earth via colonialism, human time via the Gregorian calendar and human understanding of spacetime via the Big Bang theory.

• I believe the only certainty is uncertainty and that the only thing that is ceaseless is change. I believe the universe and our place in it are so incredibly and extraordinarily more profound than we have yet been liberated to possibly imagine. Even our feeble instruments have detected a cosmic cold spot that throws a wrench into the theory of the Big Bang. Even our primitive tools have posited a cosmological axis of evil that suggests we may be much more important to the universe than most post-modern science might suggest.

• This is not to suggest that science as a wisdom tradition brings nothing to the struggle for liberation. Science is the wisdom tradition most open to innovation and self criticism among all those available to us, and innovation and self-criticism are necessary for the work of liberation.

• But I do mean to suggest that science can be both a force for ill and for good, depending on who controls its aims and directions. And I do mean to suggest that science must be one of the array of wisdom traditions (traditions which include religion, history, culture, the arts, economics, politics and mythology) in our repertoire as we uncover and accept our rightful and righteous place in the universe.

photo credit: Jacob Lawrence, Genesis Creation Sermon I: In the Beginning All Was Void (1989). Courtesy of SCAD MOA.

• Earlier this month I was a leader of our first ever BOLD Southern Gathering. In the conversations around the state of the Black freedom struggle, it was raised that we must be capable of navigating dilemmas. Here is my view on that:

• Yesterday I wrote some about generosity. I wrote that generosity is the convergence of courage and humility. I argued that courage without humility is bravery which slides quickly into arrogance and that humility without courage is modesty which slides rapidly into cowardice.

• Perhaps provocatively, I argued that arrogance is the guiding ethical principle of left errors in social movements and that cowardice is the guiding ethical principle of right errors in social movements.

• But let’s step back for a second. What are left errors & right errors?

• This terminology is bequeathed to us by the communist revolutionaries in China & Vietnam, and these frameworks can help us bring coherence to a wide range of mistakes and errors that inevitably emerge when people organize for change.

• I characterize these wide range of mistakes and errors into three domains: strategy, ideology & leadership.

• The errors of strategy we call adventurism and passivism. Adventurism is an orientation to strategy that throws caution to the wind. It often confuses strategy and tactics, and often elevates singular tactics appropriate for specifc campaigns (say, direct action) to the level of grand strategy. The result is often a foolhardy and reckless plan of action. Passivism is an orientation to strategy that puts wind behind supreme caution. It often views strategy as only the careful management of how we must respond to prevailing circumstances, when in reality we must also be authors of circumstance. The result is often a plan of action devoid of the urgency the moment demands of us.

• The errors of ideology we call ultra-leftism and right-opportunism. Ultra-leftism is the ideological error of pushing for a maximalist ideology. It is a worldview temptation that agitates and aims too far beyond the political realities at hand. Right-opportunism is the ideological error of pushing for a minimalist ideology. It is a worldview temptation that placates and pacifies too far behind the political realities at hand.

• The errors of leadership we call commandism and tailism. Commandism is an orientation to leadership that views the massess of people and the communities of the oppressed with an implicit contempt, and aims to make up for an assumed historical cowardice of everyday people by dictating courses of action to people in lower levels of leadership. Tailism is an orientation to leadership that views the massess of people and the communities of the oppressed as superheros as opposed to human beings, and therefore follows after their every whim, motion and action as if it were peerless in the eyes of revolutionary history.

• The collection of left errors (adventurism, ultra-leftism and commandism) have arrogance as their core ethical principle. The collection of right errors (passivism, right-opportunism and tailism) have cowardice as their core ethical principle. Unfortunately, some on the left confuse left errors as a strategy for liberation (best represented by Trotskyism) and some on the left confuse right errors as a strategy for liberation (best exemplified by Alinskyism).

• We must have the audacity to allow humility to prevent us from the temptation of arrogance and courageousness to prevent us from the temptation of cowardice.

• It is important to note that these errors are not at all the result of a deficient and irreparable condition of the human spirit. These errors are dilemmas, not problems. Problems, like simple algebraic equations, have solutions. Dilemmas, like complex questions of ideology, strategy & leadership, are deep contradictions that are part and parcel of the fabric of living life. Dilemmas do not have solutions, but they do deserve and demand a response.

• Our work as strategists is to navigate dilemmas with increasing levels of sophistication over time. Humility & courage are great companions in that navigation.

• Yesterday I wrote a bit about the important and urgent work of liberating worldview. I defined worldview as the convergence of philosophy, ideology & ethics. I believe the leading ethic needed in our movements for liberation today is the ethic of generosity.

• We can organize the various errors and missteps in strategy & leadership as left errors and right errors. This terminology is bequeathed to us by the revolutionaries in China & Vietnam, and can help us bring coherence to a wide range of mistakes and dilemmas that inevitably emerge when people organize for change.

• Tomorrow I will write about the various errors and how they show up, but I believe each of the errors are only possible when we do not invoke and invite generosity (as a stance of life and as an ethical principle) into all we do. Of course we are human beings which means we will be tempted away from grand principles like generosity. The aim of naming generosity here is not that we won’t ever fall short of its call for us, but rather that generosity ought be an ongoing North Star to strive towards in every circumstance.

• In my view- generosity is the convergence of humility and courage. Courage, in the words of Dr. Cornel West, is the great enabling virtue that allows us to realize any other virtue. Humility is the deep acceptance that no matter how deeply held our worldviews, we carry with us the deeply held stances of openness, curiosity and finitude. Courage without humility is bravery which slides rapidly into arrogance. Humility without courage is modesty which slides rapidly into cowardice.

• Arrogance I would say is the guiding ethical principle of left errors in social movements and cowardice I would say is the guiding ethical principle of right errors in social movements.

• We need generosity, the upbuilding and creative convergence courage & humility, to be the guiding ethical principle at this stage of the struggle!

• Worldview is the convergence of ideology (our views on state, sovereignty and society), philosophy (our views on being, meaning, time, reality, death and life) and ethics (our views on right and wrong and why).

• The philosophers of the West, from the pre-Socratics through the present day, mostly incorrectly try to reduce worldview to ones philosophy or ethics. Social movement thinkers too often incorrectly try to reduce worldview to ones political ideology. Worldview is the convergence of these and more.

• An important and increasingly urgent dilemma facing the movements for liberation in the United States is the systematic underdevelopment of our peoples worldview. I believe the primary worldview contradiction facing our movements is that we do not have, at scale, the ideological, philosophical and moral development necessary to meet our moment; our organizations need firm grounding in philosophy, ethics and ideology.

• And for Black people and those who love us, this dilemma is both important and urgent. As I have written before: too many Black leaders and Black-led organizations do not have mechanisms and systems for the worldview development of themselves and their leaders.

• Take one branch of worldview development: ideological development. The Black Radical Tradition, for example, is an umbrella of lineages. Naming a lineage is political. How do Black people hold onto our humanity in the depths of the slave ship? The Black Radical Tradition is a half a millennia response to this question; it is the maintenance and nourishment of Black life in the face of calamity, and it aims to develop praxis for the sake of personal transformation and collective liberation.

• I believe we need to expose people to the Black Radical Tradition and have people identify their tradition, articulate it and learn how to bring the best of it to bear and bring the best of it to life. We need our movement organizations and leaders to name & claim political inheritance and ideological lineage. And I believe this work are parts of necessary work areas for the development of our peoples worldview.

• I believe the intensive study of the Black Radical Tradition must then be supplemented by historical learning. We must study the Quilombo communities like New Begun and the Republic of New Afrika, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters & the New Communist Movement, the Combahee River Raid & the Underground Railroad, the Hush Harbors & Maroon Churches.

• Liberating worldview is the greatest achievement possible for what we tend to name ‘political education’ in social movement spaces. Liberating worldview deconstructs our practice of theory.

• The Black Radical Tradition is made up of four paramount and co-equal lineages: Black Feminism, Black Nationalism, Black Marxism & Black Propheticism. Naming lineages within the Black Radical Tradition gives us clarifying and cohering language and frames of reference. It does not mean there are not other significant lineages, it simply means they are not co-equal and, given the Black historical experience, not on par with the excellence of these four paramount lineages.

• But in addition to ideology, we need to develop our peoples familiarity with philosophies of death and life and the morals / ethics that undergird the actions and reactions of our people in the world.

• To be explicit: the praxis (theory and practice) of liberating worldview requires our organizations transform the what (content) how (method) and why (meaning) of teaching & learning. The content must include deep and penetrating study of the works and lives of people too often overlooked in movement spaces, people like Paul Tillich and Samir Amin. The method must be one rooted in embodiment, democratic practice and a feminist cooperation of labor. The meaning must be grounded in our historic vocation of achieving our rightful and righteous place in the universe.

photo credit: The Old Plantation - Anonymous, circa 1790.

A long time ago in the middle of an ancient ocean an old vessel careened from wave to wave. One night under a luminous sky and deep from within the bowels of the vessel, a murmur, a voice, some distorted plea reached out. The voice had been shrouded in darkness and draped in loneliness for some time. This voice, at times wafting through the dark room, at times reaching a fevered pitch, seemingly echoed to no avail.

The voice did not know from where it came or how it ended up where it found itself, but the voice did know, deep down, that it was not alone. The rocking of the room and the distant crashing of waves told it so. The syncopated and almost synchronized timing of the sound of a knife carving into a wall told it so. And one evening- the desperate cries of something, someone for help told it so.

This someone seemed distant and faint but desperate and shaken. The voice could indeed hear too. And it heard this someone reach, against the sounds and motion of a seemingly cosmic torment, for help.

And so when the voice awakened to the sight of the man lying on the beach amidst the wreckage of the vessel, it decided to greet him. The mans beard and hair were a mix of salty Black and sun-kissed maroon. His body was bloodied, broken and bruised. And this voice viewed him as some part of itself. And so the voice nourished this man and covered him with sand and seamoss to stop the bleeding. The voice had decided that the man had saved him from his eternal fate in the hull, and rescued him from a permanent state of being in the Maw.

And so he helped the man to his feet, and together they walked away from the shoreline.

pt. 1: The Voyage

10 years ago I started to build an archive of internet links that I found to be interesting. This was back in the mid-2010s when the internet was a bit more than just whatever latest odious slop the plutocratic tech monopolies decided to shove in your face via non-social media. I won’t go as far as to say it was an ideal internet culture, but the internet felt, it seemed to me, to still be a place where I would actually discover new websites and new kinds of information. My work to digitally archive my favorite reads (or at least reads that were captivating or disturbing enough for me to remember) ended shortly before the start of COVID.

Anyways- here is the link to my old Wordpress:

INTERESTING LINK ARCHIVE

Today’s essay is the 100th essay that I have publicly published in my life. In honor of that, I wanted to write a bit about… well, writing!

I learned to write in tandem with reading. My mom was my first teacher both because she is my mom, but also because I attended her at-home daycare when I was 4 years old before our move to the south as part of the Second Great Migration. I remember living with my aunt and uncle and cousin for a bit, and falling increasingly in love with reading books. Reading was a way for me to enter daringly into a new charted reality, and writing was a way for me to then go about charting a reality of my own.

Writing is my fierce urgency of now. Writing is a wisdom practice that helps me avoid the death cult of the doom-scroll and the depressing pull of despair. Today on my 100th published essay and in the midst of my 2nd Unbound Sprint I can say I am a writer and essayist. I can say that I am an artist of the written word and a teacher through written form. But most importantly I can say that writing, like coaching, like teaching, like being Dada, like anointed love, is a freedom. It is a form and way of being responsive to and responsible for the world.

And honestly that rocks.

• Over the last decade, I have been on a twin journey to deepen my relationship to both cadre commitment and the life of embodiment. This work has taken me on two distinct paths, and those paths over the last year have finally converged into a great new path, which has culminated in Mocambo, a new deep freedom project.

• Being a BOLDer has left an indelible mark on my relationship to Black history and Black life. Through BOLD I became politically and somatically connected to some of the brightest and most skilled revolutionaries this side of the 21st century. BOLD is a marronage of Black leaders and Black revolutionaries. The term “maroonage” is not just a metaphorical reference to our ancestors and their temporary absconsion from the clutches of enslavement. Rather, BOLD is a physical and political marronage of Black people (across worldviews broadly defined as Left) rooted in the domains of transformative organizing, political education & embodied leadership.

• My cadre-level commitment commenced after having been convinced, through theory and struggle, that the great tradition of revolutionary socialism, more so than the Black liberal idealism of my early political life or the reclusive Black anarchic disposition I had adhered to for a few short depressing months in 2013, provided the most comprehensive, meaningful, and useful political theory and practice I have yet to take up as my own. The formal process was both an intellectual delight and politically challenging. Studying both the history of the long transition towards socialism with a specific focus on the communist revolution in China and the Reconstruction Revolution in the US South allowed me to view radical history in a new light.

• Today- both my cadre life and my relationship to and with embodiment have deepened and widened to a level I could not have conceived of when I joined these paths. Through my cadre leadership I have led and refounded what I genuinely consider to be the most skilled, strategically positioned and courageous collection of revolutionaries this side of the 21st century in the United States. I am increasingly inspired and convinced that the work of rebuilding cadre organization not only has helped lead to a significant and consequential forward advance for the movements for liberation here in the US south, I am convinced that the work of refoundation, regroupment and realignment is necessary to the whole project of a revitalized movement for a 3rd Reconstruction in the United States.

• I feel similarly about my BOLD leadership: I consider it a blessing of historic proportions to be able to be a commitment to a powerful and coordinated Black left. BOLDs contributions to revitalizing Black social justice infrastructure played a massive role in the Black-led insurgency from the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to the reimposition of Donald Trump in 2025. I am simply proud of being a contribution to this generation of history of Black struggle.

• I feel increasingly clear that converging deeper levels of embodiment with revolutionary cadre organization is a vital need of this moment in the history and future of the US left. We need to converge embodiment praxis and cadre praxis. This is because the last 5 years have revealed with a ruthless clarity the historic lack in both liberation traditions; the social justice infrastructure of somatic and embodiment practice has entered an interregnum period. On the one hand, somatics and embodiment work is becoming more popular in society given the collapse of the social order around us, and on the other hand, organizations across the somatic social justice landscape are either too small and nascent to have deep enough impact, lacking in necessary financial support or are becoming increasingly untethered from their radical origins and visions.

• A similar lack has revealed itself in the socialist movement; only a handful of socialist organizations are taking seriously the ruthless autocratic regime of the New Confederacy and its program to wage war against civil society and the communities of the oppressed and increasingly the world (see Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba). Too many socialist formations are trapped in an inward-oriented navel-gazing one-upmanship that is more obsessed with taking the left position most likely to isolate them from the majority of peoples than it is with taking the strategic and principled line of electoral advance. Too many socialist formations are obsessed with building their political micro-fortresses where criticism is viewed with suspicion and democratic mechanisms of accountability are treated with contempt. And the handful of socialist organizations able to navigate beyond these depressing dilemmas find themselves in need of deeper relationship to each other, in need of a deeper ethic of generosity and in need of a far larger popular base of support than they currently have built.

• One challenge in the wider socialist movement spaces is that a multi-tendency orientation can easily slip into an any-tendency orientation, allowing for the cowardice of right-opportunism or the arrogance of ultra-leftism to reign supreme. And one challenge in the wider somatic movement spaces is the temptation towards either a metaphysical abstractionism that literally ceases to make sense or a semi-Machiavellian orientation to embodiment which aims to calculate and manipulate from somatics what shrewed and short-sighted benefits that it can.

• Mocambo is a deep freedom program for Black cadres. Its purpose is to unleash the deep freedom of each participant, enabling them each to be more capable & courageous leaders of their work and wider life. It is an intervention in the stale socialist culture that predominates too much of socialist organizations by foregrounding the rich array of cultural practices of Black people. And it is an intervention into the politically underdeveloped nature of somatic spaces by making as a condition of ones participation an extraordinarily high level of ideological, strategic and political unity, a unity grounded in the socialist politics. It includes an innovative curriculum called the 9 Paths of Deep Freedom, and combines the best of the Black radical tradition (Black Marxism, Black Feminism, Black Nationalism and Black Propheticism) into something altogether luminous and liberatory.

• Mocambo is an ongoing intervention to test hypotheses around the dilemmas of socialist cadre culture and somatic social justice spaces.

• Mocambo, like BLACKUNBOUND, is a major part of the purpose for my life on this Earth.

Resilience is the inherent regenerative capacity of all life. Resilience is the power of life to bounce back from catastrophic circumstances. Resilience is an ancient wisdom tradition that predates even civilization and complex social organization. Earlier this month I wrote about the two grand trends of the natural universe: love & entropy. One way we might view resilience is that resilience is the embodiment of love in the midst of entropy.

Given the horrors of the world and the everyday overwhelms of life on Earth at the dawn of the 21st century, it is important and incumbent on us living ones to turn to and enter realms of resilience. If only for a moment of respite, or if only as a grand reminder of the deep and profound capacity to liberate joy in the midst of decay, we can and must enter realms of resilience. Here are a few of those realms:

Spirit- the power of religion, spirit and faith is that they point you beyond the feeble realities of your own life and towards something both infinitely greater than your self and also impossible without your life. Faith is, in the words of Tillich, the state of being ultimately concerned. The cultivation of a relationship to spirit is one realm of resilience.

Nature- the power of sunlight, the subtle rhythm of the wind, the immensity of summer lighting storms, the sheer awe of a steady rain on a cosy afternoon or a luminous night of stargazing are all examples of nature being a realm of resilience. When we connect with the natural universe, something in us is compelled, inescapably one might say, towards life.

Relationships- being in relationship to other people is a powerful realm of resilience. Those of us who anointed in love with another, who have forged deep friendships beyond measure, who have been blessed to take care of young people or elders, know on a deep and intimate level the power of relationships as a realm of resilience.

Art / Creation- Life is inherently pro-creative. This is not just in relationship to a biological reproduction (although this is one of the great accomplishments of life) but is also about the artistic, cultural and creative impulse at the heart of our souls. Not one of us can move through life without wanting and needing, on some level, to express the inexpressible, to articulate that which has no language, to share what is at once walled up in ourselves and also infinitely tethered to all that is. That creative drive is a powerful realm of resilience.

Collective Experience- The collective experience of spirit through ceremony and worship, the collective experience of nature through walks in the park, the collective experience of relationships through complex social institutions like organizations, the collective experience of creation through a Shakespearean tragedy point us to collective experience itself as powerful realm of resilience.