[quotes] Carceral Capitalism - Jackie Wang 2018

 

"Prisons and law enforcement may actually grow when the ideology of small government is hegemonic because the maintenance of law and order is considered the proper (morally authorized) domain of government. For Bernard E. Harcourt, neoliberal penality is rooted in 'the assumption of government legitimacy and competence in the penal arena and, on the other hand, the presumption that the government should not play a role elsewhere.'"

"Thus, as growth in the 'real' economy remains low, in our perverted debt economy, falsely categorizing borrowers as delinquent has become a financial opportunity in itself."

"All of this to say that a vast number of humans - whether they are laborers or soldiers - may become superfluous, though they my still be needed (for now at least) as users and consumers."

"This antagonistic relationship to production also redefines how the People's War is waged: rather than seizing the means of production, Jackson emphasized the destruction of the protective and productive forces."

"Law itself is a construction designed specifically to manage 'poor, desperate people like me.'"

"Will these credit instruments and the 'discipline of the free market' reduce our lives to the acquisition of 'marketable skills' and make it impossible to explore, wander, create, invent, learn (as opposed to 'acquiring skills'), relax, form non-instrumentalized social bonds, loaf, and daydream? Without a revolution or a social movement to overturn or counter the direction of the debt economy and techno-capitalism, we might be catapulted into a future where our lives are disciplined and determined by our dependency on credit."

"But what exactly is primitive accumulation? It entails the creation of a labor market and a system of private property achieved through the violent process of dispossessing people of their land and ways of life so that they can be converted into workers for capitalists. In order to turn peasants, small craftsmen, and others into workers who have nothing to sell but their labor power, these people must first be alienated from their means of subsistence."

"1) Capitalism is inherently expansionary, as it seeks to realize an ever-increasing amount of surplus value; 2) There is no reason why surplus value need be realized within the formal capitalist sphere when realization can be secured through violence, state force, colonization, militarism, war, the use of international credit to promote the interests of the hegemonies, the expropriation of indigenous land, predatory tariffs and taxes, hyper-exploitation, and the pilfering of the public purse."

"Harvey agrees with Luxemburg's claim that capitalism has a dual character: one sphere is governed by freedom of contract and the rule of law while the other is dominated by political violence and looting carried out by hegemonic capitalist nations. The looting component of the accumulation process is often carried out through the international credit system, which Harvey notes is the linchpin of late capitalism."

"To accept risk scores as an index of personal competency is to embrace a liberal politics of personal agency, where those who work hard to maintain good credit get what they deserve."

"The idea that people have a moral obligation to make good on their promise to pay their debts is partly tied to the idea that freedom means personally bearing the risks of your actions and decisions."

"A generation - financiers, abolitionists, actuaries, jurists, preachers, legislators, corporate executives, philosophers, social scientists - developed a vision of freedom that linked the liberal ideal of self-ownership to the personal assumption of 'risk.'" - Freaks of Fortune, Jonathan Levy

"the credit system is legitimized by the moral framework that shapes our understanding of debt - whereby the creditor is framed as benevolent while the struggling debtors are viewed as lazy or irresponsible for defaulting on their loans. However, as lending practices become more predatory, this moral framework is at risk of unraveling."

"The financialization of municipalities, the loss of key tax revenue streams, deindustrialization, and capital flight are the causes of the fiscal crisis - not reckless public spending. The situation has led to the development of socially deleterious methods of revenue extraction that target vulnerable populations, particularly poor black Americans."

"However, I want to emphasize that the state is no ordinary borrower; it is a borrower endowed with the legal power to loot the public to pay back its creditors."

"... a municipality's financial standing (or its credit-worthiness) is partly tied to its ability to remain solvent by using the police power and court system to extract revenue from citizens."

"The kapitalistate framework also posits that two primary functions of the state in a capitalist society are to facilitate the accumulation process and to legitimize capitalism."

"Foucault asserts that biopolitical forms of power target the 'aleatory,' unpredictable, and potentially destabilizing elements of a population for the sake of keeping the whole population in balance."

"Foucault puts it bluntly when he says, 'In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable... Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State.'" - Society Must be Defended

"It's as though in order to come to any recognition of common humanity, the other must be assimilated, meaning in this case, utterly displaced and effaced: 'Only if I can see myself in that position can I understand the crisis of that position.' That is the logic of the moral and political discourses we see every day - the need for the innocent black subject to be victimized by a racist state in order to see the racism of the racist state."

"For Gilmore, the problem 'is not to figure out how to determine or prove the innocence of certain individuals or certain classes of people, but to attack the general system through which criminalization proceeds.'"

"The media construction of urban ghettos and prisons as 'alternate universes' marks them as zones of unintelligibility, faraway places removed from the everyday white experience. Native American reservations are another example of 'void' zones that white people can only access through the fantasy of media representations. Whatever happens in these zones of abjection and vulnerability does not typically register in the white imaginary. In the instance that an 'injustice' does not register, it will have to be translated into more comprehensible terms."

"Morally ennobled victimization has become the necessary precondition for determining which grievances we are willing to acknowledge and authorize."

"Surviving gendered violence does not make the survivor incapable of perpetuating other forms of violence... That does not mean delegitimizing the claims made by survivors, but rather, rejecting the framework of innocence, examining each situation closely, and remaining cognizant of the multiple power struggles at play in different conflicts."

"I see this rejection of collective forms of organizing - and the unwillingness to think beyond the individual as the foundational political unit - as part of a historical shift from queer liberation to queer perfomativity that coincides with the advent of neoliberalism and the 'Care of the Self'- style 'politics' of choice."

"Safety requires the removal and containment of people deemed to be threats. White civil society has a psychic investment in the erasure and abjection of bodies onto which they project hostile feelings, allowing them peace of mind amidst the state of perpetual violence."

"The insistence on innocence results in a refusal to hear those labeled guilty or defined by the state as 'criminals.'"

"When we build politics around standards of legitimate victimhood that require passive sacrifice, we will build a politics that requires a dead black boy to make its point."

"But what if - instead of reacting to these charges with counterarguments that persuasively demonstrate that the abolitionist position is the only sensible position - we instead strategically use these charges themselves as points of departure to show how the prison itself is a problem for thought that can only be unthought using a mode of thinking that does not capitulate to the realism of the Present?"

"When we act in accordance with the prophetic dream, the dream comes to directly constitute reality."

"Our bodies are not closed loops. We hold each other and keep each other in time by marching, singing, embracing, breathing. We synchronize our tempos so we can find a rhythm through which the urge to live can be expressed, collectively. And in this way, we set the world into motion. In this way, poets become the timekeepers of the revolution."

[quotes] The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study - Stefano Harney and Fred Moten 2013

  

“Debt, as Harney puts is, presumes a kind of individualized relation to a naturalized economy that is predicated upon exploitation” 

“we cannot be satisfied with the recognition adn acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls” 

“In order to bring colonialism to an end then, one does not speak truth to power, one has to inhabit the crazy, nonsensical, ranting language of the other, the other who has been rendered nonentity by colonialism. Indeed, blackness, for Moten and Harney by way of Fanon, is the willingness to be in the space that has been abandoned by colonialism, by rule, by order.”

“when we listen to music, we must refuse the idea that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up an instrument; music is also the anticipation of the performance and the noises of appreciation it generates and the speaking that happens through and around it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening.”

“no one will really be able to embrace the mission of tearing this shit down until they realize that the structures they oppose are not only bad for some of us, they are bad for all of us.”

“If there is no church in the wild, if there is study rather than knowledge production, if there is a way of being together in brokenness, if there is an undercommons, then we must all find our way to it.”

“Critique lets us know that politics is radioactive, but politics is the radiation of critique.”

“We owe it to each other to falsify the institution, to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination. We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything.”

“In fact, there is no state theory in public administration programs in the United States. Instead, the state is regarded as the proverbial devil we know. And whether it is understood in public administration as a necessary evil, or as a good that is nonetheless of limited usefulness and availability, it is always entirely knowable as an object. Therefore it is not so much that these programs are set against themselves. It is rather that they are set against some students, particularly those who come to public administration with a sense of what Derrida has called a duty beyond duty, or a passion.”

“Any attempt at passion, at stepping out of this skepticism of the known into an inadequate confrontation with what exceeds it and oneself, must be suppressed by this professionalization.”

“The state, the economy, and civil society may change size or shape, labor may enter or exit, and ethical consideration may vary, but these objects are both positivistic and normative, standing in discrete, spatial arrangement each to the other.”

“Perhaps then it needs to be said that the crack dealer, terrorist, and political prisoner share a commitment to war, and society responds in kind with wars on crime, terror, drugs, communism.”

“perhaps more universities promote more jails. Perhaps it is necessary finally to see that the university produces incarceration as the product of its negligence.”

“The university, then, is not the opposite of prison, since they are both involved in their way with the reduction and command of the social individual.”

“What is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.”

“The anoriginary drive and the insistences it calls into being and moves through, that criminality that brings the law online, the runaway anarchic ground of unpayable debt and untold wealth, the fugal, internal world theater that shows up for a minute serially - poor but extravagant as opposed to frugal - is blackness which must be understood in its ontological difference from black people who are, nevertheless, (under)privileged insofar as they are given (to) an understanding of it.”

“Whom do we mean when we say ‘there’s nothing wrong with us’? The fat ones. The ones who are out of all compass however precisely they are located. The ones who are not conscious when they listen to Les McCann. The Screamers who don’t say much, insolently. The churchgoers who value impropriety. The ones who manage to evade self-management in the enclosure. The ones without interest who bring the muted noise and mutant grammar of the new general interest by refusing. The new general intellect extending the long, extra-genetic line of extra-moral obligation to disturb and evade intelligence. Our cousins. All our friends.”

“The Soviets used to say that the United States had free speech but no one could hear you over the noise of the machines.”

“The NGO is the research and development arm of governance finding new ways to bring to blackness what it is said to lack, the thing that cannot be brought, interests.”

“When governance is understood as the criminalisation of being without interests, as a regulation brought into being by criminality, where criminality is the excess left from criminalisation, a certain fragility emerges, a certain limit, an uncertain imposition by a greater drive, the mere utterance of whose name has again become too black, too strong altogether.”

“Credit is a means of privatization and debt a means of socialisation. So long as they pair in the monogamous violence of the home, the pension, the government, or the university, debt can only feed credit, debt can only desire credit.”

“Governance only works when you work, when you tell us your interests, when you invest your interests again in debt and credit. Governance is the therapy of your interests, and your interests will bring your credit back. You will have an investment, even in debt.”

“The student with interests can demand policies, can formulate policy, give herself credit, pursue bad debtors with good policy, sound policy, evidence-based policy. The student with credit can privatize her own university. The student can start her own NGO, invite others to identify their interests, put them on the table, join the global conversation, speak for themselves, get credit, manage debt. Governance is interest-bearing. Credit and debt. There is no other definition of good governance, no other interest. The public and private in harmony, in policy, in pursuit of bad debt, on the trail of fugitive publics, chasing evidence of refuge. The student graduates.”

“What we are calling policy is the new form command takes as command takes hold.”

“Policy is thus arrayed in the exclusive and exclusionary uniform/ity of contingency as imposed consensus, which both denies and at the very same time seeks to destroy the ongoing plans, the fugitive initiations, the black operations, of the multitude.”

“As resistance from above, policy is a new class phenomenon because the act of making policy for others, of pronouncing others as incorrect, is at the same time an audition for a post-fordist economy that deputies believe rewards those who embrace change but which, in reality, arrests them in contingency, flexibility, and that administered precarity that imagines itself to be immune from what Judith Butler might call our undercommon precariousness. This economy is powered by constant and automatic insistence upon the externalisation of risk, the placement at an externally imposed risk of all life, so that work against risk can be harvested without end.”

“Policy is the form that opportunism takes in this environment, as the embrace of the radically extra-economic, political character of command today… It is a demonstration designed to separate you from others, in the interest of a universality reduced to private property that is not yours, that is the fiction of your own advantage… its ability to see the future of its own survival in this turmoil against those who cannot imagine surviving in this turmoil… Every utterance of policy, no matter its intent or content, is first and foremost a demonstration of one’s ability to be close to the top in the hierarchy of the post-fordist economy.”

“Policy is correction, forcing itself with mechanical violence upon the incorrect, the uncorrected, the ones who do not know to seek their own correction.”

“Governance, despite its own hopes for a universality of exclusion, is for the inducted, for those who know how to articulate interests disinterestedly, those who vote and know why they vote (not because someone is black or female but because he or she is smart), who have opinions and want to be taken seriously by serious people.”

“Policy’s vision is to break it up then fix it, move it along by fixing it, manufacture ambition and give it to your children. Policy’s hope is that there will be more policy, more participation, more change.”

“To work today is to be asked, more and more, to do without thinking, to feel without emotion, to move without friction, to adapt without question, to translate without pause, to desire without purpose, to connect without interruption.”

“Traditionally strategy led and logistics followed. Battle plans dictated supply lines. No more. Strategy, traditional ally and partner of logistics, is today increasingly reduced to collateral damage in the drive of logistics for dominance. In war without end, war without battles, only the ability to keep fighting, only logistics, matters.”

“Modern logistics is founded with the first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak. It was founded in the Atlantic slave trade, founded against Atlantic slaves.”

“Blackness is the site where absolute nothingness and the world of things converge. Blackness is fantasy in the hold and Wilderson’s access to it is in that he is one who has nothing and is, therefore, both more and less than one. He is the shipped. We are the shipped, if we choose to be, if we elect to pay an unbearable cost that is inseparable from an incalculatble benefit.”

“Hapticality, the capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you, this feel of the shipped is not regulated, at least not successfully, by a state, a religion, a people, an empire, a piece of land, a totem.”

“There’s a touch, a feel you want more of, which releases you.”

“What is we thought of the experiment of the hold as the absolute fluidity, the informality, of this condition of need and ability? What if ability and need were in constant play and we found someone who dispossed us so that this movement was our inheritance.”

“it’s not so much having a shoebox in which I’m writing down my thoughts as that I’m having a long conversation with a few people.”

“If you ask me, I couldn’t tell you, ‘oh there are these four or five ideas that I’m constant going back to that I have to have in my box.’ It doesn’t feel that way. It feels more like there are one or two things that I’ve been talking about with people forever.”

“the concepts are ways to develop a mode of living together, a mode of being together that cannot be shared as model but as an instance.”

“I’ve been thinking more and more of study as something not where everybody dissolves into the student, but where people sort of take turns doing things for each other or for the others, and where you allow yourself to be possessed by others as they do something.”

“and we just basically had the temerity to believe that our desire for some other mode of being in the world had to be connected to our attempt to understand the way that we were living and the conditions under which we were living at that moment.”

“Everybody is pissed off all the time and feels bad, but very seldom do you enter into a conversation where people are going, ‘why is it that this doesn’t feel good to us?’”

“But, that’s the insidious thing, this naturalisation of misery, the belief that intellectual work requires alienation and immobility and that the ensuing pain and nausea is a kind of badge of honor, a kind of stripe you can apply to your academic robe or something. Enjoyment is suspect, untrustworthy, a mark of illegitimate privilege or of some kind of sissified refusal to look squarely into the fucked-up face of things which is, evidently, only something you can do in isolation.”

“I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in the world and I want to be in that.”

“On the other hand, it does seem to me that you’re asking people to call themselves into a certain form of identity. This is what Gayatri means by the first right being the right to refuse rights, I think.”

“And I don’t say that people should suddenly not do NGO work. But, I also feel that it’s necessary for us to try to elaborate some other forms that don’t take us through those political steps, that don’t require becoming self-determining enough to have a voice and have interests - and to acknowledge that people don’t need to have interests to be with each other.”

“how important it would be, how interesting it might be, what new kinds of things might emerge out of the capacity to refuse to issue the call to order.”

“What emerges is a form, out of something that we call informality. The informal is not the absence of form. It’s the thing that gives form. The informal is not formlessness.”

“the first act of management is to imagine that what’s informal or what’s already going on requires some act to organize it, rather than to join it, rather than to find ways to experiment with this general antagonism.”

“You need to elaborate the principle of autonomy in a way in which you become even less of yourself; or you overflow more than what you’re doing right now. You just need to do more of the shit that you’re doing right now, and that will produce the scale.”

“So, that with and for, the reason we move into more autonomous situations is that it grows, and we spend less time in the antagonism of within and against.”

“The first thing I made everyday when I went to university was myself, and the university these days is not necessarily the best place to make yourself.”

“I owe everything to my mother, I owe everything to my mentor. That stuff also becomes very quickly repressive and very moralistic. There has to be a way in which there can be elaborations of unpayable debt that don’t always return to an individualisation through the family or an individualisation through the wage laborer, but instead the debt becomes a principle of elaboration. And therefore it’s not that you wouldn’t owe people in something like an economy, or you wouldn’t owe your mother, but that the word ‘owe’ would disappear and it would become some other word, it would be a more generative word.”

“But I also know that what it is that is supposed to be repaired is irreparable. It can’t be repaired. The only thing we can do is tear this shit down completely and build something new.”

“I think and I concur, is an abolition of credit, of the system of credit, which is to say, maybe it’s an abolition of accounting. It says that when we start to talk about our common resources, when we talk about what Marx means by wealth - the division of it, the accumulation of it, the privatization of it, and the accounting of it - all of that shit should be abolished. I mean, you can’t count how much we owe one another. It’s not countable. It doesn’t work that way.”

“People were telling us, ‘she owes her son a hundred thousand dollars.’ And me and Laura, driving back, we were like, ‘how you gonna owe your son a hundred thousand dollars? How do you owe a parent a hundred thousand dollars?’ That’s some crazy, barbaric shit. You have to be a barbaric monster to even be able to think of some shit like that. You know what? It’s no more barbaric than owing Wells Fargo Bank a hundred thousand dollars. You think at first glance that it’s barbaric because it appears to violate some sort of notion of filial, maternal relation. But, it’s barbaric because it’s a barbaric way of understanding our undercommon-ness.”

“What I’m really saying when I say that is: anybody who’s breathing should have everything that they need and 93% of what they want - not by virtue of the fact that you work today, but by virtue of the fact that you are here.”

“So, you want to figure out some way that that wealth can be enjoyed. And that’s not by managing it, because managing it is the first step to accounting for it, attributing it or distributing it. It’s about developing some way of being with each other, and of not thinking that that requires the mediation of politics. But, it requires elaboration, it requires improvisation, it requires a kind of rehearsal. It requires things. It’s just that it doesn’t require accounting or management. It requires study.”

[quotes] The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors - Lama Rod Owens 2023

 

"I am not a New Saint because I feel divine or extraordinary. I am a New Saint because I have chosen to give a shit about myself and everyone around me and because I have figured out much of the work I need to do to help people experience the freedom to be their most authentic selves, I do that work, and I keep showing up to do that work."

"Systems of dominance have co-opted the work of goodness to keep people from disrupting systemic violence. In this sense, goodness is understood to be an expression of virtue if it does not challenge the power imbalance and does not make the people who benefit the most from that power imbalance uncomfortable. When you are good, you are not causing trouble. Here I define trouble as creating discomfort for others."

“goodness is the choice I am making each moment to do what is conducive to freedom for me and others. Goodness is a verb that I am actively engaging with: I like to say, ‘I am gooding’ as opposed to ‘I am being good.’

"Voting, educating ourselves, highlighting the voices of the most underrepresented folks, being at least liberal, recycling, carrying people's groceries, reading the current justice books, never saying 'Candyman' into a mirror, putting up Black Lives Matter signs, saying please and thank you, paying taxes, not wearing white shoes after Labor Day, supporting charities, avoiding cracks and walking under ladders, and offering thoughts and prayers are all wonderful things to do, but they are more about feeling good about ourselves and making sure others view us favorably. Which of these beloved labors will actually get us free?"

"Saints are people from various spiritual and religious traditions who have deeply embodied love and compassion and whose embodiment has inspired countless others to aspire to that same practice."

"... the real superpower of the Buddhist saint is giving a shit - giving a shit is an expression of their bodhicitta, or their deep desire to help free people from suffering."

"The first practice is the expression of what I call awakened care: an expression of love and compassion for themselves and others, an expression of joy all grounded in clarity. The most profound care we and others can experience is to be free from suffering and all the causes and conditions of suffering. The second practice is the development of the capacity to disrupt habitual reactivity to everything that arises for us by choosing to experience what arises for us, which helps us transition into a place of responsiveness. Experiencing and then choosing how to respond with care is an expression of liberation. The New Saint can choose the most beneficial way to respond to anything."

"We will not get everyone free because not all of us are ready to be free. When someone isn't ready to be free, forcing them to do the labor of awakening becomes an act of violence. We can neither drag people to freedom nor scare them, manipulate them, intimidate them, or use one of our favorite collective techniques - yell at them on social media - to get them to freedom... Training in awakened care is training in love, compassion, and joy, which helps us to get clear about what it takes to get people free. We can't do the work for others. Each of us must choose liberation on our own terms, and in doing so, commit to our individual labor."

"What we need is vital. If we don't get our needs met, not only will it be difficult to meet the needs of others, but we may also start manipulating those we have committed to help to get our unmet needs fulfilled in ways that are harmful and unethical. On the New Saint's path, we must figure out what we need and acknowledge that our unmet needs create distractions for us and impact the work of liberation for others. This is one of the most challenging aspects of the New Saint's work. We must love ourselves enough to care for ourselves and, in doing so, reduce the labor we force others to do for us."

"... it can become easy to mistake collecting practices as the practice and work itself."

"Freedom is the agency to choose how we want to be in relationship with ourselves and the world around us."

"Regardless of whether we are conscious of this or not, our deepest longing is to remember our liberation, but if we are not actively working to get free, then in a way we are consenting to the delusion of the state."

"When I began practicing community service and activism, I was trying to get free from the violence of systemic oppressions ranging from racism to queerphobia. IT seemed that the best way to honor my life was to dedicate my life's labor to studying freedom, trying to get free, and helping others around me get free."

"With the remembrance came an ethical responsibility called compassion"

"We abolish anything that prevents us from being in direct, honest, and compassionate relationships first with ourselves and then the communities we belong to."

"Most of us are afraid to get free because in freedom we have to do the labor of figuring out who we are... The ego functions best when its boundaries are defined for it... We can't handle space and openness; we don't understand what they say about who are are. Most of us will not get free anytime soon because we don't want to be free. It costs too much. We are too dependent on being defined by the closet... We have become acclimated to the suffering of everything, and we tell ourselves this is how it is and must be."

"Liberation is my primary goal in life, and I am training to align everything I do, say, and think with the goal of liberation. Therefore, I do what is conducive to getting free, while letting go of activity that is not conducive to freedom. This framework helps me to understand that what others have to do to get free is not necessarily what I have to do to get free and vice versa. This keeps me from judging other people's work."

"My ethics are also how I maintain my integrity. My integrity is my clarity as it pertains to the work I am doing in this life. My work is to get free and help as many others get free as possible. The intensity of this clarity is often read as arrogance from people who are not that clear about their work. Most people I meet have jobs and professions that they feel obligated to do to make money. A lot of people don't get joy from their work. It is hard for people to understand that my work is my life; it is what I have chosen as the best possible thing for me to do to benefit people. I am cared for in this work. I am joyful in this work. My needs are met in this work. I am fortunate to have the support I do in this work. This may sound like bragging, but this is what it feels like to find and do your work."

"Love means we touch the ground of reality as it is, not as we want it to be. It is the labor of telling the truth and allowing the truth to tell us. And none of this is supposed to be easy. Allowing ourselves to expand the pain into the space and then to start identifying with the space is how love frees us."

"Conditional love is an expression of love from a place of separation and contraction. People weaponize it against others. I consider conditional loving an act of both personal and interpersonal psychic terrorism that hurts both the person expression conditional love as well as the recipient."

"Compassion is the meeting point between deep empathy for our pain and the pain of others and the wish for us all to be liberated from this pain. The work that arises out of compassion is the strategic and informed intervention into the experience of pain... As I've gotten older, I've begun to feel compassion as an opening to freedom, fluidity, agency, and power to determine how we want to experience freedom. Compassion is not just about caring. It is not the obligatory 'thoughts and prayers' after a tragedy. IT is the work we engage in that begins to undo the root causes of the tragedy."

"Our suffering turns into violence when we can't hold space for the discomfort it causes. We react to it in ways that erase or bypass the experience of who we believe is causing us to suffer. This reactivity replaces the labor of holding and experiencing, distracting us from tending to the primary suffering."

"Felt in the body, joy is the experience of release, a letting go that feels like putting down a heavy package. At other times joy is the experience of the body as a blooming flower. Joy makes us expand outward to connect to all phenomena. We are no longer afraid of everything around us."

"A want is something that feels good to have and experience. Wants fulfill basic desires for pleasure and fun. Though pleasure and fun are wonderful and can also be needs, when we lack an awareness of how to use pleasure as an experience of liberation, it can become self-indulgent, leading to overconsumption. Overconsumption means I bypass what is needed in favor of accumulation. Often I use consumption to cover up or numb discomfort."

"We must know what we need and what we want in order to support the collective in a way that is not reproducing harm and violence. When I know what I need and want, I'll also understand the things that I can't do for myself. And so when I Lean on the collective, knowing what I am asking those around me to help me with, I also understand what I can offer back to the collective. The path of liberatory self-care isn't about bypassing what I need in order to perform a kind of selflessness that makes me look good. Liberatory self-care is about understanding what I need and then understanding how to get what I need while offering others what they need. Ultimately, what we all need is to get free."

"When I think of home, I think of being in a place where I am wanted. I think of being in a place where people notice me and see me. It is a place where I can say my name without fear of being judged or being afraid of hurting someone's feelings. Home means belonging not just to a physical location or a group of people, but to myself. When I say 'home,' I mean that I am resting in my own experience. I am resting within the recognition of who I am, not within the projections of those around me telling me who I am. This king of belonging is restorative care we can offer to ourselves."

"As I find myself sailing through my middle-aged years, it seems that I am becoming like the old church elders, always praying and fasting, watching and fighting. I used to rebel against becoming an old, praying Black man, but this expression is native to my flesh and bones, buried deep in my DNA. My ancestors have called me into the world; I consent to being a reflection of them."

"I also use this space to acknowledge that my body is an extension of the earth, and like the earth, it is a primary support - there can be no work without my body."

"I have known for years that as a descendant of enslaved people I would have to return, somehow, to the experience of the Middle Passage because, as Mother Alice Walker has taught, healing begins where the wound was made."

"She was both a youth and an elder. Her strength never faltered. She was both a mountain and running water, hurricane and gentle breath."

"Touching the earth reminds me that I am an extension of it. The ground feels like my own body. The water is my blood. The wind is my breath. The rain is my tears. The thunder is my anger... To touch the earth is to remember that the earth is alive, free, awakened, and feeling - that it remembers and mourns, that it loves and has no animosity toward us, that it can support us in getting free."

"My body is a loving extension of the earth. Stillness, stability, and a capacity for nurturing and growth are qualities that the earth and body share. When I die, I will be returned to the earth through burial or fire. My ashes will be scattered back to the earth, my Mother. When I walk on the earth, I am walking on my body. When I lie on the earth, I am lying on my body. When the earth is in trauma, I am in trauma. When the earth is colonized, I am colonized."

"I have the hands of people who had to mold survival out of earth; who touched the earth and prayed for food, built shelter from wood and brick, washed clothes by the creek, hauled and sewed, kneaded and braided, held babies, and dug graves for their dead. My ancestors and I link hands together across realms."

"When I am touched by others, they are transferring the essence of their lineage into my body. Just through one touch, I know what they have survived and what their songs are. I can feel their joy, how they have cried in their life, how they have wanted to be free. How we touch is an expression of how other people have touched us."

"My lips remember so many other lips I have kissed in pleasure, in friendship, or as blessing. My kisses have adorned so many bodies. The only reason to have lips is for this adornment."

"I have decided to get braces to further care for my teeth. It was an act of care for myself, and I have noticed how much more I smile and let the world see my teeth. Sometimes we need to do things like this because of how it can help us support our work of helping others. I wish that I could use my practice to transcend anxiety about my teeth, but sometimes we can take a quicker, more worldly path to reduce suffering."

"I feel the erotic when I close my eyes and shift my attention to my heartbeat and the way it reverberates within the essence of all phenomenal reality. The whole world is alive with my pounding heart. The masculine erotic is a life force; it is the point at which I start believing that things are workable and changeable."

"Darkness can be an expression of a different kind of clarity - one that invites us to consider how darkness isn't necessarily asking us to figure it out but instead is asking us to take care of it."

"Loving God is the only way to God in the same way love is the only path to liberation."

"In the New Saint's tradition, I define forgiveness as the experience of wanting the person that hurt me to experience the care they need to be well."

"Of course, disprivileged communities have had to develop a sensitivity to the needs of dominant groups to survive. Maybe we didn't really forgive dominant offender groups, but we had to pretend to in order to make the dominant groups reduce violence against us."

"I love you, but I don't trust you. I don't know how to say that when I look into your eyes. All I see are all my own unmet needs for belonging looking back at me. I know it was never more than just a moment, or a cuddle and orgasm, and yet I still want to run away from this. I get it now. I need more than what I taught myself to settle for."

"I am haunted by how we are born into this world beautiful ones and how that beauty gets broken up into little pieces. And then, broken up, we go about trying to collect the little pieces of our beauty while calling that gathering a life. It is the labor of re-membering not being that occupies our living."

"It's not just about me and this life or this moment; it's about everything. We have a responsibility to remember we are in debt to the beautiful ones who have made our living possible and full of potential. This recognition is how I choose to continue. My heart is full of sorrow and at the same time my heart is a vast ocean of care that can tend to the sorrow. If you don't get this, you will never understand why I do the things that I do."

"And although sometimes I am confused about what freedom feels like or if I am as free as I think I am, I know this for sure: I consent to this sacred work. I consent to the brokenheartedness, the rage, and the hopelessness, as well as to the joy, the gratitude, and the care. I consent to the weight of being healed and the responsibility I choose to get others well and free. This has been the only choice for me in this life. With the help of the saints, both old and new, I keep moving on."