Joy

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Lorde made me look deeply at my life to find the orgasmic, full-bodied “yes!” inside of me, inside of the communities I love and work with, and inside our species in relationship to our home planet. Through her writing here and in other places—Lorde was prolific—I became attuned to the ways erotic and other pleasures shaped and healed me. It helped me to understand that there is no way to repress pleasure and expect liberation, satisfaction, or joy. With Lorde’s guidance, I reflected on how my experiences with sex had opened doors to loving my body in spite of what society had taught me about big Black glasses-wearing queer girls being undesirable. I began to move toward my own yes, my satisfaction. I examined how my experiences of deep political alignment with people who wanted to collaborate had taught me more than years of battling with people who wanted to dominate me or compete against me. I began to make decisions about whether I wanted to do things in my life and in the movements I am part of by checking for my orgasmic yes. And to feel for resistance inside, the small place in my gut that knows before I do that something is not a fit for me and will not increase my aliveness. This exploration led me to some core questions that have shaped my work: What would I be doing with my time and energy if I made decisions based on a feeling of deep, erotic, orgasmic yes? How do I find balance in the things that give me pleasure, especially the things that tend to be misunderstood and manipulated by racialized capitalism, such as drugs, sex, drink, sugar? How do we learn to harness the power and wisdom of pleasure, rather than trying to erase the body, the erotic, the connective tissue from society? How would we organize and move our communities if we shifted to focus on what we long for and love rather than what we are negatively reacting to? Is it possible for justice and pleasure to feel the same way in our collective body? Could we make justice and liberation the most pleasurable collective experiences we could have? Again, most of my work has been facilitation—making it easy for those transforming the world to be with each other, be impactful together. As I facilitate these movements for social and environmental transformation, with a focus on Black liberation, I always prioritize how people feel.20 Is it a pleasure to be with each other? Does the agenda or space allow for aliveness, connection, and joy? Is there a “yes!” at the center of the work? There are so many things that are violent, offensive, unbearable. An embodied “no” is so justified—but I don’t believe it moves us forward. “Yes!” has a future. Witnessing an embodied yes in the body of a historically oppressed person is irresistible to me.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference. Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife. This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe. During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag, releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. Then taking it carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and forth, over and over, until the color had spread throughout the whole pound bag of margarine, thoroughly coloring it. I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Pleasure activism acts from an analysis that pleasure is a natural, safe, and liberated part of life—and that we can offer each other tools and education to make sure sex, desire, drugs, connection, and other pleasures aren’t life-threatening or harming but life-enriching. Pleasure activism includes work and life lived in the realms of satisfaction, joy, and erotic aliveness that bring about social and political change. Ultimately, pleasure activism is us learning to make justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences we can have on this planet. Pleasure Principles What you pay attention to grows. This will be familiar to those who have read Emergent Strategy. Actually, all the emergent strategy principles also apply here! (Insert eggplant emoji). Tune into happiness, what satisfies you, what brings you joy. We become what we practice. I learned this through studying somatics! In his book The Leadership Dojo, Richard Strozzi-Heckler shares that “300 repetitions produce body memory … [and] 3,000 repetitions creates embodiment.”12 Yes is the way. When it was time to move to Detroit, when it was time to leave my last job, when it was time to pick up a meditation practice, time to swim, time to eat healthier, I knew because it gave me pleasure when I made and lived into the decision. Now I am letting that guide my choices for how I organize and for what I am aiming toward with my work—pleasure in the processes of my existence and states of my being. Yes is a future. When I feel pleasure, I know I am on the right track. Puerto Rican pleasure elder Idelisse Malave shared with me that her pleasure principle is “If it pleases me, I will.” When I am happy, it is good for the world.13 The deepest pleasure comes from riding the line between commitment and detachment.14 Commit yourself fully to the process, the journey, to bringing the best you can bring. Detach yourself from ego and outcomes. Make justice and liberation feel good. Your no makes the way for your yes. Boundaries create the container within which your yes is authentic. Being able to say no makes yes a choice. Moderation is key.15 The idea is not to be in a heady state of ecstasy at all times, but rather to learn how to sense when something is good for you, to be able to feel what enough is. Related: pleasure is not money. Pleasure is not even related to money, at least not in a positive way. Having resources to buy unlimited amounts of pleasure leads to excess, and excess totally destroys the spiritual experience of pleasure. A Word on Excess

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences.29 To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd. The erotic cannot be felt secondhand. As a Black lesbian feminist, I have a particular feeling, knowledge, and understanding for those sisters with whom I have danced hard, played, or even fought. This deep participation has often been the forerunner for joint concerted actions not possible before. But this erotic charge is not easily shared by women who continue to operate under an exclusively european-american male tradition. I know it was not available to me when I was trying to adapt my consciousness to this mode of living and sensation. Only now, I find more and more women-identified women brave enough to risk sharing the erotic’s electrical charge without having to look away, and without distorting the enormously powerful and creative nature of that exchange.30 Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama. For not only do we touch our most profoundly creative source, but we do that which is female and self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  By this time he had become a biologist. He had spent some years in Asia Minor dissecting animals and plants and writing detailed descriptions of his investigations. Aristotle brought philosophy down to earth. He had become especially interested in the process of development and decay: he once broke an egg every day to chart the growth of the chick embryo. Where Plato and other Axial sages had been disturbed by flux and mutability, Aristotle was simply intrigued by the whole process of “becoming.” Change was not dukkha; it was natural to all living beings. Instead of seeking meaning in the immaterial world, Aristotle found it in the physical forms of transformation. For him, a “form” was not an eternal reality beyond the realm of the senses. It was an immanent structure within each substance that controlled its evolution until it attained maturity. Each person or thing had a dynamis that impelled it to grow into its form, as the acorn contained within itself the “potential” to become an oak tree. Change was not to be feared but celebrated; it represented a universal striving for fulfillment. But this was a purely earthly achievement. Aristotle had no ambition to leave Plato’s cave. There was much beauty to be found in the phenomenal world, if a philosopher knew how to use his reason. After his return to Athens, Aristotle began to turn his attention to metaphysical and ethical subjects, but his focus remained fixed steadfastly upon the faculty and exercise of reason. Aristotle was a man of logos. What distinguished the human being from other animals was the ability to think rationally. Every creature strained to achieve the form within it. Theoria, the pursuit of truth for its own sake, was the final “form” or goal of man (Aristotle had little opinion of the female, which he saw as a defective form of humanity). The eudaimonia (“well-being”) of man, therefore, lay in his intelligence. His “good” consisted of thinking clearly and effectively, planning, calculating, studying, and working things out. A man’s moral well-being also depended upon logos, because such qualities as courage or generosity had to be regulated by reason. “The life according to reason is best and pleasantest,” he wrote in one of his later treatises, “since reason, more than anything else, is man.”108 A man’s intelligence (nous) was divine and immortal; it linked him with the gods, and gave him the ability to grasp ultimate truth. Unlike sensual delight, the pleasures of theoria did not ebb and flow, but were a continuous joy, giving the thinker that self-sufficiency that characterized the highest life of all. We “must, in so far as we can, strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us,” Aristotle insisted. We could not, like the gods, completely immerse ourselves in intellectual contemplation, but when we did, we activated a divine principle within. A man could only reach toward this divine attribute “in so far as something divine is present in him.”109

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  This is a ch’i*6 which is, in the highest degree, vast and unyielding (hao jan). Nourish it with integrity and place no obstacle in its path and it will fill the space between Heaven and Earth. It is a ch’i which unites rightness and the Way. Deprive it of these and it will collapse. It is born of accumulated rightness, and cannot be appropriated by anybody through a sporadic show of rightness.59 The practice of ren would bring ordinary, frail human beings into harmony with the Way. Zhuangzi had experienced something similar, but had claimed that self-consciousness could only impede the flow of the qi. Not so, Mencius replied; unity with the Way could be attained by disciplined, sustained moral effort. The Golden Rule was crucial. This was the virtue that made the junzi truly humane, and brought the individual into a mystical relationship with the entire universe. “All the ten thousand things are there in me,” Mencius said in one of his most important instructions. “There is no greater joy for me than to find, on self-examination, that I am true to myself. Try your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself, and you will find that this is the shortest way to benevolence [ren].”60 By behaving as though other people were as important as yourself, you could experience an ecstatic unity with all things. A junzi no longer felt that there was any distinction between him and other creatures. Such a person became a divine force for good in a troubled world. When he looked back to the feudal period, a time when the king’s egotism had been constrained by the li, Mencius believed that his subjects had been content. Those distant days seemed like a golden age compared with the violence and terror of the Warring States period. The king had radiated the potency of the Way and had exerted a profound moral influence on his people, who had been “happy,” “expansive and content.” They had “moved daily toward goodness without realizing who brought this about.” There were no kings of that caliber today, but anybody could become a junzi, a fully mature person, and have the same effect on his environment. “A junzi transforms where he passes, and works wonders where he abides. He is in the same stream as Heaven above and Earth below. Can he be said to bring but small benefit?”61

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Johnnie dropped into a chair. “Well,” he said, “we met with the state senator. He committed to introducing a bill to get funding for a pilot program. Maybe not the whole half million, but enough.” “That’s terrific. How about the high school principals?” “Just got back from a meeting with Dr. King, the principal at Asante’s school. The rest of ’em haven’t returned my calls.” “That’s all right. What did Dr. King have to say?” “Oh, he was all smiles,” Johnnie said. “Said he really liked the proposal. He got real excited when he heard we might get funding. Said he’d encourage the other principals to work with us and that we’d have his full support. ‘Nothing’s more important than saving our youth,’ he said.” “Sounds good.” “Right. Sounds good. So then, I’m about to walk out of his office when suddenly he gives me this.” Johnnie reached into his briefcase, pulled out a piece of paper, and handed it to me. I read over a few lines before handing it back. “A résumé?” “Not just any résumé, Barack. His wife’s résumé. Seems she’s kinda bored around the house, see, and Dr. King thinks she’d make an ‘excellent’ director for our program. No pressure, you understand. Just once the money is allocated, some consideration, you know what I mean.” “He gave you his wife’s résumé—” “Not just his wife’s résumé.” Johnnie reached into his briefcase and pulled out another piece of paper, waving it in the air. “Got his daughter’s, too! Tells me she’d make an ‘excellent’ counselor—” “Naw—” “I’m telling you, Barack, he had the whole thing figured out. And you know what? The whole time we’re talking, he’s not batting an eye. Acting like what he’s doing is the most natural thing in the world. It was unbelievable.” Johnnie shook his head, then suddenly shouted out like a preacher. “Yessuh! Doctah Lonnie King! Now there’s a brother with some nerve! An enterprising brother! Program hasn’t even started yet, he’s already thinking ahead.” I started to laugh. “He don’t just want one job! He gotta have two! Go in to talk about some kids, he gonna hand you his whole goddamn family’s résumé….” I shouted out, catching the spirit. “Doctah Lonnie King!” “Yessuh! Doctah Lonnie King!” Johnnie started to giggle, which made me laugh even harder, until soon we were doubled over in loud guffaws, catching our breath only long enough to repeat that name again—“Doctah Lonnie King!”—as if it now contained the most obvious truth, the most basic element in an elemental world. We laughed until our faces were hot and our sides hurt, until tears came to our eyes, until we felt emptied out and couldn’t laugh anymore, and decided to take the rest of the afternoon off and go find ourselves a beer.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  client and teach a preschooler how to tie his shoes. We do all these things and a bajillion more—all because God prompted us to. And as we build the spreadsheet for the glory of God, as we wipe the table in service to God and our people, we don’t have quite as much time for ourselves. It’s the act of surrender. It’s the choice of obedience. It’s the joy of self-forgetfulness. We need to become excellent at being self-forgetful. But it’s difficult to forget big things, especially ourselves. So we shift our gaze. See, there’s a greater plan for service in our lives, and this is it. We interrupt the spiral of self and the pattern of complacency when we lift our gaze off of ourselves, fix our eyes on Jesus, and run the race set before us. What race are you running? Are you even on the track? Are you standing still? Are you gazing at your feet? Where are you in this? But let me pull you in close and tell you that when you start taking risks for the kingdom of God and running your guts out, Satan will do everything in his power to discourage you. The devil delights in distracting us from worship, from running our races, because he knows that living out our purpose here is a direct result of our love for God, our wholehearted focus on Him. When you look at Jesus, you are so moved by His love, so moved by His grace, so moved by what He did for us, that you can’t contain yourself. So you go give Him away. It’s how we’re supposed to live. Single-Minded Service Hebrews says, “Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.” 12 I used to think that the three key elements in this passage were a linear progression: you do one, then the next, then the next. I thought I needed (first) to get rid of my sin streaks—my negative thinking patterns, my hurtful attitudes, my terribly selfish ways—so that I could (second) run my race, and then I would (third) finally see Jesus, who was probably so pleased I’d done the first two things. But that’s not at all how Jesus works, which is what told me I’d interpreted the

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  While we do want to challenge ourselves to keep growing, we don’t want to squeeze ourselves into a pulp. When we’re living in a mentality where our worth is defined by what we do, rather than who we are, our lives become a bucket with a hole in it—it’s never enough. We constantly need more and more to feel like we have any value. I realize this is one of the hardest nuts to crack. We’ve grown up in a society where we judge others by where they went to school, how many followers they have, and what kind of car they drive. We haven’t been taught to find value in quiet afternoons, long conversations that don’t have agendas, and walks where our steps aren’t tracked. But it’s okay to sit back and float in your waters. You can still have a productive and fruitful life that is rooted in times of guiltless rest. That is a choice you get to make. Maybe it’s time to enjoy the water rather than feel like you always have to swim from one destination to the next. Watching Jordan float back and enjoy the water around him made me feel so happy for him. The man I first met was inundated with the pressures of his life— he was living for everyone else but himself. The man I finished therapy with was still working incredibly hard—and he was taking time to enjoy his life at the same time. He had learned how to embrace the both/and, and he was giving himself full permission to marinate in what brought him joy. Don’t forget that you can do the same. CHAPTER SEVEN KNOW WHO YOUR LIFEGUARDS ARE AND WHERE THEY ARE Sometimes it’s a parent who reaches out to me instead of the actual client. It’s not uncommon that I’ll get worried voice mails from moms and dads, asking whether I can see their child (a grown adult) as soon as possible. I’m always happy to oblige a consultation, but I go in a little more cautiously when this is the case. While sometimes we need a loved one’s support to take that first step, I’m mindful of how much the parent wants the help for their child, rather than the client wanting the help for themselves. I met my client Casey in this way. She was a straight, biracial (half white, half Latinx), cisgender woman. At twenty-six, she was in her first year of medical school and lived with two roommates. I met with her after her mom, Jessica, had disclosed to me what had been going on recently. I learned that the harried call from Mom was after one night on Casey’s recent spring break.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I think it is important that we hold space for each other to feel good, to be touched in whatever ways bring us pleasure. I notice the impact it has on people I care about when erotic healing, self-love, and the tender touch of a lover, or a few lovers, is needed. I think this is yet another place to apply the wisdom of Grace Lee Boggs: “transform yourself to transform the world.” I believe that if everything else in the world stayed the same, but every single person deepened their physical and spiritual practices of self-love and great sex, the domino effect would be a revolution of our understanding of our purpose here. Suffering is a massively important and absolutely true part of life, a spiritual reality. But I deeply believe we were not placed on this gorgeous, sensational planet to suffer. It is not the point. A coach recently told me, “What is easy is sustainable.” I have been thinking, what feels good is sustainable. When my body feels good, my life feels good, and I want to keep going, and fight for my right to exist and love and grow and evolve. This is true whether it is in the context of a meeting, or a relationship, or a night of lovemaking. That doesn’t mean the absence of discomfort or awkwardness or hard conversations or learning. But the majority experience should be presence—being fully alive. And I think that comes from experiencing ease, pleasure, connection. As Nina sang: “Feelin’ good.” So, go forth and “turn that cherry out!” And yes, I am blushing.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  amb. I feel like from Jodie I have learned that it is worthwhile to invest in the quality version of the thing you actually need. Like a perfect omelet pan. Or an anti-Zionist home bubbly water machine. Like the pleasures of aiming for perfection in how home feels. And that if you want the ocean, you should go to the ocean. And from Dani I have learned a lot about the pleasures of care, of family. The love and care she brought to her aunt through her cancer, finding ways to ease her pain and focus on her joy … and the pleasure of motherhood, the absolute massive love I get to witness Dani give in how she cares for keeping the world clean and healthy for her child, it’s amazing. Also the pleasure of being effortlessly fly, I have relaxed so much more into my fashion by witnessing the breezy Dani ways. AMB. We are also committed to making the best life we can for our next generation of nibblings and babies. Can you talk about what this space makes possible for your parenting/auntie work? Jodie. I fell in love with my first nibbling by love before they were born, and I was committed to Noah from the jump. Noah was ten when I first met adrienne, and our friendship provided a space where I could share the shape and meaning of this relationship. Noah has always been a source of joy, inspiration, and wonder. Adrienne and my first bio nibblings were born within a month of each other—one of our many life parallels. Sharing that phase of our lives has been incredibly validating. Woedom honors my role in all of my families, and that acceptance is like sunshine and water to the beautiful garden that is my network of intimacy and relationships. amb. Yes, and it has helped to have this other familial space in which to check in around stuff—to understand especially around boundaries of auntiehood. We are lucky that our nibblings are being raised by people who we are mostly aligned with in terms of their choices. And then Dani, watching Dani choose and move toward her child. All of us falling in love with her before she existed. Jodie. Watching Dani choose motherhood and be blessed with her child has been one of my greatest joys. Having Dani’s back and supporting her dignity amidst the demands of parenting is a privilege. Watching her daughter grow and cheering on her best life is a gift from the gods. Dani’s an incredible mother, and I am so grateful that she is writing about how we raise liberated Black children in these times.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  That’s what we took from Audre Lorde’s words: how do we live, love, suck, fuck, and liberate ourselves? How come we’re not talking about sex or desire anymore in relationship to liberation? And Audre Lorde was all about it, in a positive, consensual, erotic, fully embodied way. With cancer, without cancer, with physical disability, with different ways of living your life. And we thought, oh shit, where is this in the vision of how are we naming self-love, collective love, and desire and pleasure, as consensual, as transformative? How does this become our liberatory practice? We brought poets and burlesque performers and musicians together. And we did a ring-shout that Adaku Utah led at the beginning, because I said, “Girl, can we have a ring-shout?”42 Adaku looked at some recordings, and we did a fucking ring-shout. So it’s, like, how do we call ourselves in and call each other to see ourselves and bring testimony to each other? And there was a hot erotic photo booth. I was fascinated by how long it took us to get to the erotic. To get to a level of comfort and sexy when folks let it all hang out … much later into the night. I was like, oh, it probably needed more time. It needed to get a little bit later into the evening. amb. Those low lights … Cara. We had a fabulous photographer, who was dressed in leather and wearing leather suspenders, with toys and things for us to unravel with. He brought pleasure. Anyway, I just think the intention was there, and I thought, what if we had done this event into the wee hours of the morning? Who knows what would have come undone? But the burlesque dancers were off the chain. And we had fabulous gifts that we gave—dildos, vibrators, harnesses—as the raffle. Alongside archival pieces from Audre Lorde’s collection, donated by her daughter. And what was there? The conference program for the Audre Lorde Cele-Conference. Full circle. And prints of poems that she had on her wall. Gifts given to her. Cloths from Barbados. Just everything? To have that integrated with the hot burlesque and to understand all of these things and to name Audre Lorde inside of “what is the political positioning in twenty years, to fight for freedom?”—despite all odds that still say we’re expendable, cannot be loved, cannot be desired, cannot be powerful. We flipped that shit on its ass. We must continue to do that. And we celebrated that.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  She holds the hawk with cautious concentration, as if it were a pitcher full of some caustic agent. She stands straight-backed, still and composed, a small figure fifteen yards away in skinny black jeans, T-shirt and bright red sneakers. ‘OK!’ She turns, and Mabel bursts towards me, dragging the creance behind her, flying so low her wing-tips almost brush the turf. With each deep wingbeat her body flexes and swings but her eyes and head are perfectly, gyroscopically, still, fixed and focused on my glove. The silvered undersides of her wings flash as she spreads them wide, her tail flares, she brings her feet up to strike and she hits the glove feet-first like a kickboxer. ‘Was that OK?’ shouts Christina. I give her a thumbs-up, and she responds the same way: for a moment we are two traffic controllers on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. We do it again. And again. The next day brings heavy rain so we fly her loose between us in the front room of my house, back and forth from fist to fist, over the rug, past the mirror, under the light, wings sending up draughts that leave the lampshade swinging wildly. By the fourth day the hawk is flying twenty-five yards to me, will come without hesitation from the ground, from Christina’s fist, from tree branches, from the roof of the pavilion. ‘Thank you so much for your help,’ I tell her as we walk from the field. ‘You know, I think we’re nearly there. Once she flies a full fifty yards I’ll let her loose.’ The thought brings a squirmy, high-pitched joy. I mustn’t rush. I cannot wait.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Dallas. Put it in terms of theater: we’ve constructed these identities, these masks that we don’t realize are fucking hilarious masks and whether it’s the … a mask of what is a man or a mask of what is an activist, anarchist, radical or mask of a feminist—they’re all masks that when you start breaking it down, like, look, those are actually fabrications that are quite funny and absurd. Maybe not necessarily funny but absurd in ways. It’s an absurd fabrication of our social conscience—we’re fabricating our reality. And we can’t help but do that. It’s ingrained in who we are ’cause we’re self-aware, and so, in the process of being self-aware, we create these … we fabricate these identities. amb. And they’re hilarious. I’m like, we have this whole miraculous life and then we spend so much of it developing rigidity and developing, like, okay, here’s the one way to do this. I’m grateful to you for constantly throwing your rocks up against the windows and being, like, the house is made of glass. It’s still made of glass. It’s still made of glass. Dallas. And it will continue to be made of glass. That’s the balance in that. For Indigenous humor, that’s the recognition that the comedy balances out the fabrication. The humor balances out what we create for ourselves. And that is a balancing act that will forever go on until we serve our purpose, whatever it may be. The idea that one has to overcome the other is an absurdity in itself. amb. I often think “what is dinosaur humor,” you know? What was dinosaur humor, those moments where you’re like: we’re going extinct, let’s enjoy it. Even if this is the end of the world, right, or the end of the world as we know it or the end of our species on this planet or whatever. Just do the fucking best you can and be the best person you can, put up the best fight you can, but then you also have to be able to laugh and release. Laughter increases our time. If you have time to tell a joke, you’re not too rushed. 99 amb: I love crystals and energy, for the record.100 Mní wičhóni, translated as “Water is life,” is the narrative framework of the #NoDAPL struggle. For Dakota, it is the spiritual casus belli, reminder of their original instructions to defend the sacred.101 I worked at the Ruckus Society, which trains organizers in nonviolent direct action, for five years. I currently sit on their board.Fly as hellA Conversation with Sonya Renee Taylor Sonya Renee Taylor is the founder of The Body Is Not an Apology, an international movement committed to cultivating global Radical Self Love and Body Empowerment.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  An hour later all is calm and companionable. We’re watching television. The hawk balances evenly on the balls of her feet, mesmerised by the flickering screen. Tiny white wisps of down still attached to the finials of her scapular feathers wave in the draught from the hall. Then, without warning, she bursts from my fist in a whirlwind of a bate. Papers fly. Christina flinches. Shit, I think. I should hood her, let her rest. This is too much. But I am wrong. Fear did not engender this bate. Frustration did. She picks at her jesses in displaced fury, then tears at the meat beneath her toes. She is hungry. The food is a wonderful discovery. She is a delicate, decisive gastronome. She picks, and bites, and swallows, and squeaks in happiness, and bites and swallows again. I am thrilled. But also indignant. This moment was to have been born of solitude and meditative darkness. Not this. Not daylight with another person in the room and ’Allo ’Allo! on the television. Not in the presence of comedy Nazis and a soundtrack about giant sausages and the occupation of France. She narrows her eyes with pleasure, bristles around the nose, and her feathers soften into loose falls of ochre and cream. ‘Has she done that before?’ asks Christina. ‘No,’ I say. ‘This is the first time.’ Laughter from the television audience as an SS officer dressed as a woman hoves into view and the hawk finishes eating, lifts herself into a vast, frothy mop of feathers, holds them there for an instant and shakes them all back into place. A rouse. It is a sign of contentment. She has not roused before.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  Which is, as James 2:17 says, dead faith. No, to live out the abundance we’re promised in John 10:10, we must have equal parts of both ingredients: surrender and obedience, obedience and surrender. We go where God says to go. We stay when God says to stay. We lean in when God whispers our name. We serve when He asks us to serve. You know, we tend to glamorize Jesus’s earthly ministry, as though every moment of His existence here was star studded with excitement and stimulation. Yes, there were definitely noteworthy occasions throughout those three years. A scene involving bread and fish comes to mind. Sometimes our service gets noticed. Sometimes it’s more public and people will praise us for it, like in the case of many of Jesus’s miracles and healings. But sometimes, service goes unseen. It’s found in a charitable conversation, or in a shared meal. Much of Jesus’s life here was spent sitting with a small group in a small room over a simple meal, talking about forgiveness and about grace, and spent noticing the hurting and serving the poor. Nothing flashy. Nothing “like”-able. Nothing that would lead the evening news. Just ordinary life with the One who was constantly bending down to meet the needs of people. So we wipe breakfast tables and speak kindly of someone who’s being criticized and write thank-you notes and build spreadsheets and take a stand against injustices and make coffee and apologize for what we said and send emails and hug a sobbing teenage daughter and change diapers and reach out to a client and teach a preschooler how to tie his shoes. We do all these things and a bajillion more—all because God prompted us to. And as we build the spreadsheet for the glory of God, as we wipe the table in service to God and our people, we don’t have quite as much time for ourselves. It’s the act of surrender. It’s the choice of obedience. It’s the joy of self-forgetfulness. We need to become excellent at being self-forgetful. But it’s difficult to forget big things, especially ourselves. So we shift our gaze. See, there’s a greater plan for service in our lives, and this is it. We interrupt the spiral of self and the pattern of complacency when we lift our gaze off of ourselves, fix our eyes on Jesus, and run the race set before us. What race are you running? Are you even on the track? Are you standing still? Are you gazing at your feet? Where are you in this? But let me pull you in close and tell you that when you start taking risks for the kingdom of God and running your guts out, Satan will do everything in his power to discourage you. The devil delights in distracting us from worship, from running our races, because he knows that living out our purpose here is a direct result of our love for God, our wholehearted focus on Him.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I stop again. I inch across the carpet until I reach that hair-fine juncture where any movement nearer will make her bate from the perch. Breathing as carefully as if I were about to take an extravagantly long rifle-shot, I slowly – so slowly – extend my garnished fist towards her. I can almost taste the hawk’s indecision; the air is thick with it. But – joy! – she is looking at the food in front of her. She leans forward as if to pick it from the glove, but then something inside her snaps. With an awful clang of the metal ring of the perch against its steel base, she bates away from me. Damn. I take her up onto the glove for a few mouthfuls of food. When she is settled back on her perch, we play the game again. Flick. Hop. Flick. She’s solved the puzzle of where the food is coming from and some part of her is reconsidering my place in her world. She watches me intently as I inch towards her and again extend the garnished glove. She leans across and snaps up my gift of steak. My heart leaps. She takes another piece, and then another, smacking her glossy black chops. As I sit there happily feeding titbits to the hawk, her name drops into my head. Mabel. From amabilis, meaning loveable, or dear. An old, slightly silly name, an unfashionable name. There is something of the grandmother about it: antimacassars and afternoon teas. There’s a superstition among falconers that a hawk’s ability is inversely proportional to the ferocity of its name. Call a hawk Tiddles and it will be a formidable hunter; call it Spitfire or Slayer and it will probably refuse to fly at all. White called his hawk Gos for short, but also awarded him a host of darkly grandiose other names that for years made me roll my eyes in exasperation. Hamlet. Macbeth. Strindberg. Van Gogh. Astur. Baal. Medici. Roderick Dhu. Lord George Gordon. Byron. Odin. Nero. Death. Tarquin. Edgar Allan Poe. Imagine, I used to think, amused and faintly contemptuous. Imagine calling your goshawk any of those things! But now that list just made me sad. My hawk needed a name as far from that awful litany, as far from Death as it could get. ‘Mabel.’ I say the word out loud to her and watch her watching me say it. My mouth shapes the word. ‘Mabel.’ And as I say it, it strikes me that all those people outside the window who shop and walk and cycle and go home and eat and love and sleep and dream – all of them have names. And so do I. ‘Helen,’ I say. How strange it sounds. How very strange. I put another piece of meat on my glove and the hawk leans down and eats.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  What I see is not just winter moving onwards to spring; it is a land filling slowly with spots and lines of beauty. There’s brittle sun out on the hill this lunchtime, and a fresh westerly wind. Mabel’s pupils shrink to opiated pinpricks as I unhood her, both of her eyes narrow with happiness. It is exceptionally clear. The red flag over the range cracks with the wind and the sound of distant rifles; the radio mast on the horizon looks like an ink-drawing over a wash of shadows and lines and bolts of land rippling up to the chalk hills before me. We walk up the track. From the top I can look down and see the whole of Cambridge. The light today is beguiling. The rooftops and spires seem within a hand’s grasp; a chess-set town glittering among bare trees, as if I could pick up the brute tower of the university library and move it six places north, set it down somewhere else. From here, the city is mild and small, and looks all of a piece with the landscape around it. The beauty of a vantage like this is that it obscures the roads and walls with trees, makes Cambridge a miniature playset of forest-set blocks and spires. These days, when I go into town, I’m increasingly finding excuses to park my car in the multi-storey car park, because from the open-air fourth floor I can stare at these fields. They run like a backbone across the horizon, scratched with copse-lines and damped with cloud-shadow. A strange complication arises when I look at them. Something of a doubling. Leaning out over the car-park rail, I feel myself standing on the distant hill. There’s a terrible strength to this intuition. It’s almost as if my soul really is up there, several miles away, standing on thistly clay watching my soul-less self standing in the car park, with diesel and concrete in her nose and anti-skid asphalt under her feet. With the car-park self thinking if she looked very, very hard, perhaps through binoculars, she might see herself up there. I feel I might be up there, because now the hill is home. I know it intimately. Every hedgerow, every track through dry grass where the hares cut across field-boundaries, each discarded piece of rusted machinery, every earth and warren and tree. By the road, half an acre of fenced-off mud, scaled with tyre-tracks and water reflecting pieces of sky. Wagtails, pallets, tractors, a broken silo on its side like a fallen rocket stage.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  She turns, and Mabel bursts towards me, dragging the creance behind her, flying so low her wing-tips almost brush the turf. With each deep wingbeat her body flexes and swings but her eyes and head are perfectly, gyroscopically, still, fixed and focused on my glove. The silvered undersides of her wings flash as she spreads them wide, her tail flares, she brings her feet up to strike and she hits the glove feet-first like a kickboxer . ‘Was that OK?’ shouts Christina. I give her a thumbs-up, and she responds the same way: for a moment we are two traffic controllers on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier . We do it again. And again. The next day brings heavy rain so we fly her loose between us in the front room of my house, back and forth from fist to fist, over the rug, past the mirror , under the light, wings sending up draughts that leave the lampshade swinging wildly. By the fourth day the hawk is flying twenty-five yards to me, will come without hesitation from the ground, from Christina’s fist, from tree branches, from the roof of the pavilion. ‘Thank you so much for your help,’ I tell her as we walk from the field . ‘You know, I think we’re nearly there. Once she flies a full fifty yards I’ll let her loose.’ The thought brings a squirmy, high-pitched joy. I mustn’t rush. I cannot wait . I had called so many hawks before, but calling Mabel was different. I stood there, raised my arm, and whistled the whistle that meant, Please come. This is where you want to be. Fly to me. Ignore the towering clouds, the wind that pushes the trees behind you. Fix yourself on me and fly between where you are and where I am . And I’d hear my heart beating. And I’d see the hawk crouch and fly. I’d see her drop from the perch, speed towards me, and my heart would be in my mouth. Though she was still on the creance, I feared the faltering. I feared the veering off, the sudden fright, the hawk flying away. But the beating wings brought her straight to me, and the thump of her gripping talons on the glove was a miracle. It was always a miracle. I choose to be here , it meant. I eschew the air, the woods, the fields . There was nothing that was such a salve to my grieving heart as the hawk returning.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The thought brings a squirmy, high-pitched joy. I mustn’t rush. I cannot wait. I had called so many hawks before, but calling Mabel was different. I stood there, raised my arm, and whistled the whistle that meant, Please come. This is where you want to be. Fly to me. Ignore the towering clouds, the wind that pushes the trees behind you. Fix yourself on me and fly between where you are and where I am. And I’d hear my heart beating. And I’d see the hawk crouch and fly. I’d see her drop from the perch, speed towards me, and my heart would be in my mouth. Though she was still on the creance, I feared the faltering. I feared the veering off, the sudden fright, the hawk flying away. But the beating wings brought her straight to me, and the thump of her gripping talons on the glove was a miracle. It was always a miracle. I choose to be here, it meant. I eschew the air, the woods, the fields. There was nothing that was such a salve to my grieving heart as the hawk returning. But it was hard, now, to distinguish between my heart and the hawk at all. When she sat twenty yards across the pitch part of me sat there too, as if someone had taken my heart and moved it that little distance. It reminded me of Philip Pullman’s children’s fantasy series His Dark Materials, in which each person has a daemon, an animal that is a visible manifestation of their soul and accompanies them everywhere. When people are separated from their daemons they feel pain. This was a universe very close to mine. I felt incomplete unless the hawk was sitting on my hand: we were parts of each other. Grief and the hawk had conspired to this strangeness. I trusted she would fly to me as simply and completely as I trusted gravity would make things fall. And so entrenched was this sense that the hawk flying to me was part of the workings of the world that when things went wrong, the world went wrong with it. She’d left Christina’s fist with all the joy and certainty in the world. I watched her approach and waited with happy anticipation for the solid thwack of her landing on my glove. But it did not come. Instead, she snatched at the food in my fist with one down-dropped taloned foot, and kept flying, fast, out and away from me.