thank you Shreya for sending me this incredibly informative talk and introducing me to Jemima Pierre.

the divinity* of creation,

*where divinity is freedom.

This essay did not come to me until I asked my elders for help. I’m far from New York, and my mother moves through cancer with my father at her side, so I petitioned the orange trees in my parent’s backyard.

how do you make art?

They said, to my understanding:

Seamless art passes seeds beautifully. curated creation which slides in and out of our mental spheres, more powerful and more porous than we want to believe— and that’s true for both mind and art: the bloom, the fruit, and the harvest. the allotment of trust when my buds and flesh pass through you— intimate, right?— the feeling of loss of something no longer being expressly mine ; the great relief, the reverence, the pride at watching my seeds grow outside me. savor this moment we share in time space. taste these words with me. tell me they’re not pressed up against your skin.

I eat an orange and consider: there is no way to consume the art of the orange tree without it, however temporarily, becoming a part of me.

-Ismatu Gwendolyn, “the role of the artist is to load the gun”

Radical compassion is a will to care for, a commitment to feel with, a striving to learn from, and an openness to be vulnerable-vulnerable before a precarious other, though they may be drastically dissimilar to yourself. Radical compassion  is not an appeal to an idyllic oneness where difference is blithely effaced, nor is it a smug  projection of oneself into the position of another thereby displacing that other, nor is it an  invitation to walk a mile in someone else's shoes and amble like a tourist through their life world,  leaving them existentially barefoot all the while, rather radical compassion is an  exhortation to ethically walk,  and sit ,and fight, and build, and study, and  work, and maybe die alongside another whose condition may be utterly unlike your own. Radical compassion works to impart care, exchange feeling,  transmit understanding, embolden vulnerability, and fortify solidarity across circumstantial, sociocultural, phenomenological, and ontological chasms in the interest of mutual liberation.

- Dr La Marr Jurelle Bruce, “How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity”