also posted over at wiretap mag

I have been going through some changes lately -- re-using everything from cereal boxes to my bean thread noodle plastic bags to my alfalfa sprout container. I have even decided to walk as many places as possible. Despite my fear of commitment, I have given up my promiscuous vegan ways for the full on commitment, which includes a break with dairy and the occasional bite of fish. I have also stopped buying crap -- the strategically packaged office supplies that I know I don't actually need and have tried to end my obsession with bags, clutches and the like.

I now want to retake my Shahadah, and spend one full week to reflect away from technological distractions. I lit some Nag Champa incense, made some mint tea, turned on some Gil Scott-Heron and turned off my TV to write this.

No, I have not surrendered to the desperately sought after and the highly commercialized uber-conscious, esoteric, cafe-revolutionary lifestyle. I haven't surrendered at all; rather I have been brought back to life by two Mahatma Gandhi quotes I'd never really taken the time to understand. The first is "Be the change you want to see in the world" and the second is "Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."

I've been trying to trick myself in happiness and hopeful thinking -- smiling when I wanted to cry. I'm only able to muster a collection of carefully calculated movements and muscle contractions resulting in an anxious and crooked smile. In my unrelenting cynicism, I had written Gandhi words off as cliche and unrealistic. How do you tell a homeless family who moves from shelter to hotel each week to find happiness in practicing what they preach? How do you tell them to be the change they want to see, when every door seems shut and the change they want to see requires the radical restructuring of the very system so many praise? I reached a bit deeper to see that what is being asked of us is to find a space harmony that can empower us to heal, renew and move forward.

Being that "change" includes a thoughtfulness and strength that we activists sometimes forget. It is the spiritual and psychological colon cleanse we all need. All the aforementioned personal changes are about a type of spiritual and political cleansing that is necessary for me to move beyond the cynicism and myopia that traps me in the cycle of defining problems to a point where I can vividly imagine new futures. I am cleansing out my body and my heart so that I can forge forward in a constructive and sustainable way.

Having spent a lot of my time in universities where rhetorical posturing trumps action and planning committees only plan further delay, I take Gandhi's challenge seriously. I take these words seriously because we spend so much time in the process of formulating the problem --the right words with the symbolic punctuation and the right formatting and the appropriate literature review, that the actual future planning is shortchanged, haphazard and unimaginative. The problem framing process is highly important, but I wondered how far we would be as a society if we trained and encouraged more people to solve problems, rather then to name, label and theorize problems to their metaphorical death.

I admire the beauty of Gil-Scott Heron who could articulate the collective depression of a nation in a song like "Winter in America," then throw a track at us like "Johannesburg" which is laced with action imperatives. I want to embody this beauty. The beauty of articulating a problem and a viable solution in the same breath. I am tired of just talking about the problems, and I want to start talking about solutions.

As we labor towards change, it needn't be a completely painful process. We need to engage in the erotics of revolution to find the sensual episodes of struggle. Poets Turiya Autry and Walidah Imarisha have illustrated this in their poem "Political Man":

hey baby i picketed in front of the jail today. (hmmm, keep it going don't stop)
i set fire to a nike store. (ooh, you know how covert actions turn me on)
i exposed government corruption at the highest level. (oh god, that's what i'm talking about)
girl, i dismantled this whole racist oppressive totalitarian capitalist regime. (oh yeah)
and replaced it with a nurturing respectful egalitarian and open society!
(oh yes, oh yes, right there right there it's sooooooo gooooood!

Irrespective of your opinions about setting fire to a Nike store, we need to celebrate these moments of breakthrough. We need to be sustainable activists -- those who do not burn out, but have found ways to take care of themselves so that they can take care of others. We must all sustain an insatiable appetite for change. As Arrested Development said way back in 1992 in their song "Revolution":

We must acquire a taste for
Something we've never tasted
So, people, let us
Wet our palates (word)

I am done with wetting my palate; I am ready to taste it. So, what does this new world look like? I ask people to take a moment to do as Jayne Cortez has asked us "to imagine somewhere in the place of nowhere." As I "imagine somewhere in the place of nowhere" I see:

We will all have a home. You live in a spacious house with your family. There is running water, electricity and enough food. The only people sleeping on the floor or two to a bed are the ones who want to, not because they have to.

When you say your cousin is hanging on the corner, he is hanging on the corner not selling poison; he is hanging on the corner with his daughter who is selling ginger green tea lemonade and 'zines to fund her youth community production of A Raisin in the Sun.

No police roam the streets, because they don't need to. We have decided that officers with guns, and night sticks that act as an extension of the phallic are less capable of protecting us, then we are of protecting each other. And really, all we are protecting each other from are the slightly hurt feelings of the young ones who are just beginning to understanding that Aisha did not steal Bilal's tree spot, because we all share this earth space.

When your partner gets angry, they know the best use of their hands is around a pen to "write it out" or a warm embrace as a welcome to "talk it out" -- but never a fist to "hit it out."

Your mama dies of old age and happiness, not of heart disease, stress, poverty and a broken heart due to the early deaths of her children.

The youth sit with their elders talking about what they learned at school -- schools where they learned that there is more to literacy than sounding out words. They talk to baba and umi about the teacher who shared the story of the flying Igbo, the revolution of 2015 and the importance of Otis Redding's remake of "A Change is Gonna Come."

Cornrows, Afro Puffs, 'fros are rocked on the daily and young kids playfully compete for the crown of nappiest hair. Perm box kits found in the "ethnic hair" aisle of Wal-Mart are remade into massive collages that cover plain walls. The chemicals are not dumped in a Third World country because we know better, have finally signed onto the Basel Convention have created the technology to deal with such waste and besides the "third world" is a term of the past -- we are now "one world."

Young boys and girls talk shit in hallways and health food corner stores about the Ludacris', 50 Cent's and Luke's of the past, in praise of the hip-hop/punk/jazz/funk fusion of their day.

We can write a dissertation and spit a spoken word piece that same night with no difficulty and no accusations of racial apostasy.

You got 99 problems, but injustice and inequality ain't one.

We wont need Huey's (from Boondocks) black power fist, an inexpensive device "that delivers thousands of volts of imperialism stopping electricity without the need of super powers or secret alien technology" because the work of this external device will be our internal disposition.

Our spirits are vibrant. We are not zombies. We are so alive we exude light and walk with a healthy and confident swagger that calls everyone's attention. Really it "doesn't take a whole day to recognize" and "Umi said shine your light on the world" when we speak, others listen for what is said and what is not said. When we write, our words make love to the words of others and give birth to new worlds.