1. 

I walked on the beach. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve been laughing so much lately.

I was a worried kid in precarious and sometimes violent households, and I grew into a hyper-responsible and depression-prone adult, so long trying so hard to hold so much together that just wasn’t holdable like that.

And suddenly, lately … I’m laughing a lot more. Many of the familiar stresses are still here, but I feel this increased fluidity navigating them, this new kind of ease moving through/with the tough stuff and a sense of the wonderful that’s lasting longer, permeating more. 

I don’t know what it is. I’ve been doing some body work, and long-held tension in my shoulders, neck, and left hip is starting to be released. I’ve been really appreciating my friends and community. I’ve been thinking maybe it’s a growing-up thing, really settling into and liking being 31, being a weirdo adult and actually really loving the growing collection of life lines around my eyes and the way I catch my body in the mirror sometimes and it just looks grown, lived-in. I’ve been wondering if this new easier feeling has to do with how I put my to-do-over-to-feel freakout on display in this space a few weeks ago — if laying it all out there, which was hard in a lot of ways, was a part of transforming it. I’ve been trying to resist singular explanations, or the idea that anything’s been finally “solved” — and just feeling it and acknowledging it and feeling like, I don’t know what it is. But some kind of something is healing, releasing, something. 

I’m laughing a lot lately. The beach last week was amazing. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. 

The Friday before my Wednesday-evening beach walk was May Day. In L.A., there were several different May Day marches, some with overlapping paths, some not. People were half-joking about whether this was a sign of solidarity or lack of solidarity across differences. No one I talked to seemed willing to commit to one or the other of these analyses. Everyone I talked to was committed to justice for immigrants and workers. Every one of them marched on the streets at some point that day. Most carried signs. Even within a given march, the signs often signified which of several related-but-not-the-same marches each marcher was on. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had to work most of the day. By the time I got out onto the streets, most of the marching was over. People who’d been marching were now gathering in the plaza where L.A. was officially “founded” by Spanish colonizers. There was a booth for DirecTV. Hilary and I arrived there after having spent a few minutes a few blocks away, standing in front of the horrifying new LAPD building.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3.

The other side of the city, the beach. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I wrote “(Re)Thinking Walking” in the sand with my toe, but it was too big to capture in my camera’s frame, and then the water rushed in and washed it away anyway. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve been coming to this same beach since I was a little kid. When I was just in between being a kid and being a teenager, I would write about who I loved in the sand here. I’ve gasped with pleasure every time I’ve seen dolphins from this shore — it’s been a lot of times now. When I was a teenager I would come here in the middle of the night sometimes, my friends and me like we were alone in the universe. 

 

4. 

At the end of April, as BFP posted, John Boyd of the National Black Farmers Association walked in D.C. with his mule, Struggle.

He was leading an action to protest the fact that federal lawmakers were trying to cap payments way too low in a class-action discrimination suit brought by Black farmers against the USDA. The USDA’s racist loan practices have directly contributed to a massive loss of Black land wealth and the decline of Black farmers. The class-action suit in question is the largest civil-rights settlement in U.S. history. It has been a long march, and though the late-April NBFA action seems to have motivated politicians to do a little better by Black farmers, it is not over yet. 

5. 

Early in this project, BFP and I noted how the roots of the English word “walk” are “to roll, toss, journey about.” Webster’s notes “roam, wander” as an obsolete meaning. But I want that meaning here. 

Walking on paths outside of, in active resistance to, marginalized by, unnoticed by, prohibited by, unimagined by “official” (white supremacist, patriarchal, colonial, ableist, heteronormative, economically exploitative, hierarchical) culture — that is a way of journeying (rolling, tossing) through life. I almost typed “through the world,” but that pioneer/colonial version of journeying is precisely not what I mean. In the world, of the world, but not through the world. Not alone in the world, on top of the world, in charge of the world, disconnected from the world. Also: “a way,” not “the way.” It’s not singular. Multiple paths. To roam and imagine and walk on paths beyond or other than violent, oppressive dominant culture and its paths — while also facing the realities of walking, simultaneously, on those dominant paths.

Mai’a wrote this wonderful walk the other day. Did you read it?

6.

I participate in a local food co-op. It’s been a loose, feeling-itself-out, volunteer-based project for a couple of years. Now it’s growing and tensions are emerging among group members over visions for the co-op’s future. At our last meeting, after I said something about how the co-op is an opportunity for us to collaboratively create economic and food structures that are community-based and that are real alternatives to failing dominant systems, a white guy said some of us aren’t as “political” as others and he wants us to focus on “common ground” and “inclusion,” not “harsh,” “extreme,” “revolutionary” ideas.

I wasn’t trying to say everyone in the co-op needs to share the same politics. I was trying to (nicely) say it will be a stupid, depressing loss if the co-op becomes yet another space where racism, sexism, economic exploitation, and other systems of domination are replicated, in structures uncritically copied from the status quo.

A few days later, at a talk on giving where the two main speakers were women of color, a white woman in the audience said, “Let’s not not talk about race.” But then quickly: “I mean: We don’t want to be divisive, but let’s not let race be the elephant in the room.”

Careful: honesty about racism might be “divisive.” Careful: looking forthrightly at the current state of capitalism and the planet might require a decentering of the “unpolitical” white guy; himself no longer positioned in the center, will he know where to find “common ground”? 

White liberalism is not an alternative, resistant path. It is a self-indulgent, harmful lie on a wide, paved, mapped highway. 

It’s not the center not holding that I’m afraid of. If what holds the center is violence and hierarchy, the fear of its disruption as damage is deception. Let it move.  

One of the things Maia wrote in that walk: “whatever good that we do in this world is in spite of our privilege not because of it.”

7.

I must have gotten worried somewhere along the line that joy in the midst of so much pain and wrong in the world was … what? Ignorant? Dismissive? Selfish?

Impossible?

To be laughing more, and more joyful, is not to be deluded or in denial.

It might, in part, be about being at home on resistant paths, walking in good company in a life shiftingly centered on connection, responsibility, cooperation, justice. 

Have you seen this?

A joy that is not facile/split/denying, that is real and shifting-uncontrollable and that coexists with realities of pain and violence and oppression and is part of struggles against those and for other ways — part of rolling and tossing about, in our different ways, connectedly …

… different ways of walking on different and interlinked resistant and creative paths, where “different” does not mean “disconnected,” and we know tolerated “difference” alone is not justice, or liberation. There is pain and struggle, and also laughter and joy. 

I walked on the beach, and then a few steps later I was back on this city street. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the rest of the posts in this series, start here.