Writing with Juliet Iwelunmor

Some seasons bring gifts that glow beyond darkness, underneath skies that announce the arrival of thunders, the fall of rain. I am in a season, flooded with poetry, destined to humanize all life’s experience. To be radical they say is to begin at the root. It takes time to tear down people and systems not aligned with you. To insulate yourself from mental slavery. To begin to repair, to restore, and to heal. To be free. This freedom to be, freedom to dream, freedom to resist, freedom to re-nourish, freedom to begin again, this time on your own terms, is as priceless as the knowledge nestled in Jeremiah 29:11. The plans after all are for you. Always have been and always will be for good. So we are weaving together new fabrics for our existence, weaving together new dreamers that are free. We are not letting anyone in. Not when many are not free. If we seem distant or silent, we are uprooting dead weight. Uprooting all those in favor of old ways. Those that lack the depths of how to own, how to dream, how to be free. All for the fullness of our ancestors, the thickness of their hands, the depths of their being and the power of their names. All to plant seeds for a bountiful orchard, that will bring a song for the season…

“Oppressive language,” Toni Morrison once noted during her Nobel lecture, “does more than represent violence. It is violence.” These days I am fascinated by how people use oppressive language so easily to describe their normal state of their affairs. When you refer to principle as problem, it’s oppressive. When you refer to arguments as abuse, it’s oppressive. “All of this limits knowledge, strangles freedom and I reject as Toni Morrison would state, any language that lap vulnerabilities, tucks its boots under lies, moves relentlessly towards bottom-out mind, and quite frankly does not allow the exchange of ideas.” It’s for this reason we are choosing freedom, hence the note above, and all those in favor of it.