Vision and Beauty

Last night was incredible, peaceful, and perfect.  I woke up with my body wrapped in thick ribbons of silver, white, and a gunmetal blueish gray.  How I was wrapped was beautiful and slow and adoring.
A slow cocooning of beauty around me by the most gentle of hands. Healing. Gorgeous. New. Timeless.

(pause)

I've been reading Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D. G. Kelley, again. Reading about the power and importance of the imagination on both individual and social movement levels.  The importance of being able to imagine and look for the future while in the present.

A friend of mine recently posted a memorial/celebration of life post having to do with Grace Lee Boggs who recently passed. My friend who had had the opportunity to be in a series of conversations with her wrote "She told us that she fights for justice with her grandmother in mind, not because she was political woman, but because its important to remember time a hundred years back and a hundred years forward."

I keep thinking of this.

And, in thinking of it, it brought me back to Freedom Dreams because of how closely it relates to what it is about. (It, of course, is no surprise that Kelley mentions Boggs in his book.)

Anyway, what I'm thinking about this morning were some things Kelley wrote about imagination and future vision, and of poetry and poet philosophers and the part they play in creating the imagination that is needed.   Here are three excerpts:

""What presides over the poem" [Aimé Césaire] writes, "is not the most lucid intelligence, the sharpest sensibility or the subtlest feelings, but experience as a whole." This means every thing, every history, every future, every dream, every life form from plant to animal, every creative impulse -plumbed from the depths of the unconscious. Poetry, therefore, is not what we simply recognize as the formal "poem", but a revolt: a scream in the night, an emancipation of language and old ways of thinking."

"In the poetics of struggle and lived experience, in the utterances of ordinary folk, in the cultural products of social movements, in the reflections of activists, we discover the many different cognitive maps of the future, of the world not yet born."

"For Toure [poet Askia Muhammad Toure], the "movement" was more than sit-ins at luch counters, voter registration campaigns, and freedom rides; it was about self-transformation, changing the way we think, live, love, and handle pain."




be well, be loved, be thinking forwards and backwards all at once, and together.

-k.

(image: from the editorial photos from the short film Slumflower)