Desired Destruction: The Breaking of a Shell to Reveal What Matters

There are many people in my life that I admire and am moved by, intellectually. The majority of them are not academics, and the rest of them are academics that have wide-spreading roots in community organizing.  It goes beyond just the words of "analysis" and "intersectionality" and "praxis" and, and...

It's something more that that.

Something that matters.

Something that is not just abstract theory.

Something more than important but regurgitated and slightly too fixed (as in, static) texts of recent history, or beyond.

It is the living breathing chest of now, of then, and of future.

It is the turning of soil and the spreading of deeper, richer understandings and connectedness of immigration, of sexuality, of race, of AIDS activism, of sex work, of disability, of language, of power, of colonization, of neurodiversity, of mass incarceration, of gender, of class, of the medical industrial complex ~  all while actively engaging with the communities around them, and around the world, in a multitude of ways.

(pause)

This year has been a good one.

One that has been teaching me a lot and leaving me thirsty for more.

Thank you to all of the people who keep me grounded and searching.  All of you who collectively emphasize and reprove that dusty books and unbreathing theories serve as nothing more than a lazy, self-satisfied mirror that will eventually suffocate,

or that already aids in suffocation.


Here is to respiration. The kind that topples the dirt piling upon our chests as we lie still on our backs at night.



  --k.

(A perfect song to listen to after reading this from 1998, here: Escúchela- la ciudad respirando)

(image: via witchesxsabbath tumblr)