this time we will

Valentine’s Day is upon us, so it seems appropriate to reaffirm my love, most especially in those places in which I have been least clear. Just over three years ago, I wrote a short essay called “finally american.” It was a love letter of sorts in which I expressed my relief in being able to claim my nationality with dignity and pride instead of shame and disdain. I used “hope” in some form no less than three times.

Since then, like many others, I’ve watched that hope wane under the most relentless onslaught of political pounding of a President any of us has ever seen. Because I was so disappointed by the chasm between that hope and the reality, I stopped professing my love. I sit here now, realizing all is not lost. My feelings have been hurt and I have felt betrayed, but in the end, I still not only believe in, but hold love for, not Barack Obama, Savior, but my President, Barack Obama, the man.

I know many of us may still believe he failed and owes us. Maybe we’ll even be tempted to punish him by staying home pouting this election year. I suggest we leave the childish crush of 2008 behind and this year, invest in a grownup—and mutually supportive—love.

 

Dear Mr. President,

From the first time I laid eyes on you, I knew I was in love. I didn’t want to be, so I hid it from myself by saying you couldn’t win. Electrifying the DNC was one thing, but They wouldn’t allow it, we said. You were too young. Too inexperienced. With too Muslim a name. And, yes, too Black.

But you kept wowing us with your fantastic smile, unflinching confidence and unequivocal Yes, We Can. And so we did. You were Presidential. I believed you. And so did many others. So we got hitched and got behind you and win, you did.

I remember it like it was yesterday. Hunkered down around the television, we clung to every word as you swept the nation off its feet in a resounding victory. In triumph, we poured into the streets, dancing into the night as if Liberation, herself, had finally come.

We carried you across the threshold into the White House on a delirious wave of excitement, brimming with expectation and overwhelmed by the potential that lay before us in this great union: Hope. Progress. Change.

And then we left you there.

No sooner than when you took your seat, they began to wrench the legs out from underneath you. We looked on with dismay as they took everything you had. We sat aside in horror as they made you fight for anything or anyone you wanted. We recoiled in disbelief as they turned the things that could have been your sweetest victories into bitter fruit. The ugliness of it all was too much to bear.

So we turned away.

Then there was that Tea Party, a terrible event that shocked us to our core. Not only were we not invited, but brazenly reminded that we never belonged. Our naïveté about the depth and nakedness of hate was laid bare. The coded language didn’t even seek to mask the righteous indignance of racial superiority. We were not real Americans and they wanted us to leave so they could Take Back America.

We were so delighted with ourselves for having you, we forgot to show up for you. We set forth our demands and desires, but were not flexible enough to see where you needed our support. We brought our challenges and critiques, but did not express the unconditional love you deserve for your willingness to continue to show up every day they tried to beat you down. In short, we did not give you what you needed to be your best and blamed only you for coming up short. But we were the ones that walked away from you.

The limitation of our childish love was suffered by us all, and our lessons hard won:

• We now realize that this marriage is not a sprint, it’s a marathon.
• We see that compromise is necessary and we can’t just turn our backs whenever things don’t go our way.
• We recognize that this system of “checks and balances” can be used to hold a President hostage, and that by letting Fear and Hate win, we tied your hands ourselves.

So we ask for your forgiveness, Mr. President. I ask for it. I may have strayed, but my intention is clear. My resolve is firm. My love is true.

Give us one more chance. This time, we will.

—yours in truth, aKw

dedicated to the people in my life that i have not sufficiently expressed my unconditional love for: may i be forgiven and may you know that you were, are and always will be for me both source and subject of great, abiding, unwavering love.

A nationally respected social justice educator, Victor has conducted seminars, workshops, keynote speeches, and “train the trainer” programs across the United States, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and Germany. He is best known for his inspiring leadership role in The Color of Fear, an unusually powerful video about racism, which received the Golden Apple Award for “Best Social Studies Documentary” of 1995.

Lewis has also served as Chaplain/Spiritual Director at the Starr King School for the Ministry (Unitarian Universalist), is a former member of the Leadership Council of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism (NOMAS), and has served as Director of Adult Education at the Oakland Men’s Project (OMP). He is a past member of the board of A Safe Place, a battered women’s shelter program and former Co-Chair of the Black Church and Domestic Violence Institute. An activist with deep environmental concern, Lewis is a founding board member of the Urban Habitat Program, and a former board member of Urban Ecology, Inc.

He is a Neuro-Linguistic Programming Master (NLP) Practitioner, an NLP Health Practitioner, an EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) Advanced Practitioner, an AAMET-certified EFT Trainer, a certified NLP hypnotherapist and a resilient and thriving trauma survivor.

Victor Lewis is one of those unassuming folks that you might run into at the bank or at a coffee shop and not think twice about it. He’s got good, even energy and a kindliness about him, so much so you can almost imagine him placing a hand on your shoulder and offering heartfelt advice, which works out well because he’s deep in the healing business.

From the age of six, in fact, he’s been intrigued by the spiritual world–not the one shaped by our ideas, religions, moral doctrines and such, but by the one that can’t ever be fully grasped so much as it can be appreciated, given in to–felt. His curiosities about the mysteries of life, which took root when he was a child, put him in the way of learning about true healing and justice and he never stepped off that path.

He says, “My conscious obsessions and life direction, since at least age six or seven, has been social justice, healing, and spirituality. And I think spirituality is where social justice and healing can overlap.” These days Victor calls himself a “Holy Ghost Buddhist” for his embrace of Buddhist philosophy and for his spiritual Baptist roots.

For those of you who don’t know, Victor was in the 1994 classic multicultural film, the Color of Fear directed by Lee Mun Wah, a documentary that explored the inner lives of 8 men from different ethnic backgrounds, 2 Black, 2 White, 2 Asian, and 2 Latino. The film shows how race has impacted their worlds and how they impacted one another’s worlds both directly, in the film, and on the whole.

Since then Victor’s done many, many things some of which have to do with race (leading conferences, workshops, and courses all over the country) and a lot of which have to do with EFT and his work as an EFT practitioner, but most of which have to do with helping others see–social justice folks in particular–that they are bigger and more fearless than they can believe. Victor encourages the social justice folks that he works with to release the reactive mind.  In this way activists can learn to come from a place that’s about, not beating down the competition, but convincing the competition that there is something fundamentally flawed about the system we have ALL bought into. In his view, “success in social justice work should lead to happiness and health, otherwise even [social justice work] is just oppression.”

Based on Victor’s philosophy “We are all always influencing one another much in the same way as sub-elements in a body. We are radically interdependent creatures who have yet to figure out what it means to be human beings.” Our push toward separating ourselves, he says, is not something we can afford to do and his own contribution toward unity is through his work with EFT. He says that in order for us to save the planet, save the environment, and save ourselves, we’re going to need to recognize our oneness, and use our “whole brain wisdom or [what we do] will always be worse.”

A couple of the social justice folks that Victor has worked with (he began his work in EFT deciding to bring his work to social justice folks) have reflected the idea of oneness in their work. One woman, who was doing anti-racist work for white activists in California–a region of the country where she could do the work, feel effective, and more importantly appear effective– decided that the best thing for her to do was to step into the fire. Or to put it another way, she decided to go where she could have the biggest affect on people (which was not something she was considering prior to her work with Victor) and moved to Alabama to work her anti-racist program there. For this woman her work became about something far bigger than herself and her ideas of herself.

Victor’s own healing experience through EFT work was brought about after having studied in a one-hour workshop. His search for the mystery of life, for spiritual answers, for the truth stemmed from the tragic early passing of his older sister, a story which he recounts on his Web site. After trying many other healing modalities, he began using EFT to tap out the trauma and after 90 minutes of tapping it was gone. This was an experience that he recounted to me as being extraordinarily profound, and one which allowed him to have deep compassion for everyone who was involved in the incident, himself included.

“I often tell people this story with them actually looking at me, because I want them to be able to calibrate that the trauma is actually gone. I often have people say, ‘Oh I understand that this is something that you might never get over.’”  But it’s very clear he has. One could say he’s transcended the entire event.

But that’s what we’re here for, isn’t it? to be bigger than who we think we are.

 

Learn more about Victor Lewis

Learn more about Radical Resilience

Learn more about EFT

Clips from the Color of Fear: Clip One, Clip Two

Original text from USCDornSife posted October 2011, written by Manuel Pastor, Jennifer Ito, and Rachel Rosner.

University of Southern California (USC) has a report out that addresses the value of organizing especially as a way to build movements further and in substantial, transformative ways. In tandem, they look at how funders have begun looking to movements as ways to broaden their capacity to support social change.

Their report, “Transactions – Transformations – Translations: Metrics That Matter for Building, Scaling, and Funding Social Movements, from USC Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE), provides an evaluative framework and key milestones to gauge movement building. Aiming to bridge the gap between the field of community organizing that relies on the one-on-one epiphanies of leaders and the growing philanthropic emphasis on evidence-based giving, the report stresses three main insights:

“The first is that any good set of movement metrics should capture quantity and quality, numbers and nuance, transactions and transformations. They are related – an energized leader with a clear power analysis (a transformative measure) may turn out more members for a coalition rally (a transactional measure) – and the report offers a matrix that weaves together both types of metrics across ten different movement-building strategies.

“The second is that a movement is more than one organization – and if the whole is to be greater than the sum of its parts, we must measure accordingly. While report includes measures of success at the organizational level, it attempts to move beyond and focus on whether groups can align and work together to create a more powerful force for social change – suggesting that in the same way that movements need to scale up to face the challenges of our times, metrics, too, must expand to capture the whole.

“The third is that metrics must be co-created, not imposed. Recognizing the gravity of the times and hoping to gauge their effectiveness, movement builders are eager to come up with a common language and framework for themselves – and are developing the tools and capacities to do so. The report suggests that the funder-grantee relationship can build on this wisdom in the field and develop a set of evaluative measures that are not onerous requirements but tools for mutual accountability.

“The report also offers a set of recommendations to funders and the field, ranging from practical steps (like building a new toolbox of measures, improving the capacity to use them, and documenting innovation and experimentation) to more far-reaching suggestions about leadership development, the connection of policy outcomes with broader social change, and the need to generate movement-level measures. [Those] at USC PERE, hope this report contributes to a conversation about how to best capture transformations as well as transactions in social movement organizing, and how to build the broader public and philanthropic support necessary to realize the promise of a more inclusive America.”

Download Transactions, Transformations, and Translations

There’s a fairly old joke among Black folks that says we were given February to celebrate our heritage because it’s the shortest month of the year. Meaning, of course, that’s about as much as we could expect.

I often consider the juxtaposition of Black History Month and St. Valentine’s Day. When I think about the ill-mended and broken hearts of Black folks through slavery, sharecropping, Civil Rights, and now, I think February is oddly appropriate; there is St. Valentine’s Day on the 14th, the day of love and relationship, and there’s Black History Month for twenty-eight days. For me, February reflects the unspoken, complex relationship America tends to have with Black people, an imbalance of love and aversion which reflects America’s own imbalanced relationship with itself. This month transform. is focusing on both relationship–especially our relationship with ourselves–and Black History Month.

This month also celebrate: LGBT History Month (UK), Independence of Sri Lanka  & Dominican Republic (Feb 4 & Feb 27), and in the Philippines, People Power Revolution (Feb 25).

Dave Moore, born in 1912, marched, and was an organizer, for civil rights and working people. During the 1930s he helped organized the Ford Hunger strike against Ford Motor Company in Detroit, an event that changed his life. He was also part of a delegation that helped get Black pilots and Black stewardesses jobs in the 1950s. This video recounts the many triumphs against oppression he participated in during his life.

Watch Ageless Warrior

In this dharma talk, we’re asked to focus on what’s hiding in the closets we call compassion, relationship, friendliness and joy.  Using Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra as a platform, this talk asks if we are truly connecting with others or hiding behind a façade of actions and words and therefore living out of balance with ourselves and others.

“If we don’t do this [cultivate balance]–not in a cave, but out there with the rest of the world–we have not a single chance of having any real relationship, because when a relationship is out of balance it simply cannot be sustained. Any relationship that has imbalance will eventually fall apart. On the one hand, one person will be resentful and on the other hand, the other person will feel disrespected…

“And all relationships can go out of balance, all of them, for some period of time, but they must find balance in order to be sustained. Imbalance in relationship cannot be sustained. Imbalance in yourself cannot be sustained. If you are out of relationship with yourself, you will be out of relationship with everything and everyone around you. If you are out of relationship with everyone and everything around you, well, you know, you just might as well go home.”

Listen to Wholeness Through Relationship

Read Wholeness Through Relationship

Myself and three other community members signed up to take Norma Wong Roshi’s class on kado, the way of the flower, a 2000-year-old Chinese art form often practiced by folks on a spiritual path. Kado at first sounds like it might be about flower arranging, but kado is more about you than it is about flowers. It’s a practice that helps you see yourself as well as appreciate the finer aspects of nature. So how you place daffodils in a vase reflects how you show up in the world. If they’re a little too close together, too far apart, leaning or angular, what does that say about you? The idea is to let the flowers speak for themselves–this means, more or less, that our own intuitive voices guide us through the process.

We met at the ACRJ offices in downtown Oakland and for about six hours, minus lunch, we concentrated intently on what each flower had to say for itself. There were, by the way, buckets of flowers everywhere, tulips, irises, daffodils, daisies, horsetail, bear grass, curly willow and a slew of others.

Working with each flower presented its own challenges, some had mushy stems, others tended to be upright, floppy, you name it. And still we kept to our purpose, which was to arrange flowers based on a few specifics: Flowers could not be symmetrical, could not be set in the same plane, and all of them had to look as though they were originating from a central place on the kenzan, or sword mountain in Japanese, a small circular metal plate with pointed “nails” that hold the stems of the flowers. In the West, we know it as a frog.

The simplest arrangement we made used only three flowers, each of which took on a role (for lack of a better word) that reflected nature: heaven, man, and earth. What each flower does in the arrangement is based largely on its presence. The more presence it has, the more significant its placement in the arrangement. And to be clear, the least significant placement is for man. In kado, man is a part of nature, not above it. And in nature man is small. And as much as we try to control it, we are more influenced by nature than most of us are willing to admit.

In the end, the arrangements reflected our own natures as well as the fragility and beauty of our world.

Learn more about kado