💓The Great Shaking & Global Eco Intifada

“The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.”—Murray Bookchin

We know every intact culture has reverential practices around the turning of the season and honoring light and darkness.

One way of holding the Solstice, this turn of the season, is the way the world is continuously evolving itself out of the husk of the old. As Bayo Akomolafe might suggest, the World is an ongoing promiscuous exploration of itself, Life constantly shapeshifting, hiding, and revealing itself to itself, and while these shenanigans include us, they don’t center us.

This solstice, I’m leaning into what that means for the collective and Life’s longing for liberation from regimes of domination and disconnection. This longest day of the year shining light into every dark corner of my/our being that still carries death and supremacy scripts.

I take inspiration from Krista Franklin, “Call”: “If You find Your imagination cannot stop itself from churning out the scripts of the Death Machines, pull its plug. Dismantle it. Reprogram it. Dream Daylight. Manufacture Daylight. We are the Magicians. Make Magic.”

We are in the midst of a Great Shaking, a global Earth-rooted Intifada. In Arabic, Intifada means uprising, from the root for shaking, like a dog shaking off a flea.

When in doubt, Shake. Shake your body.
Shake your head. Shake all the dust off your quivering heart. (See poem Below)

We’re Shaking off inherited imaginings, those that keep us incarcerated

, keep us in trauma loops, keep us numb. We’re Shaking off the big lie of separation. Shaking off stuck energy and stuck stories. We’re shook to the core. We’re Shaking to the cure. Shaking in grief, shaking in rage. Shaking off our possession by hungry ghosts. Shaking off Illusions in a delicious dis-illusionment. Shaking off binaries and bullshit.

Rupa Marya, author of Inflamed, says, “Climate change is the Earth’s intifada—a literal shaking off of a socioeconomic system that is contrary to surviving and thriving.” The last 12 months have been the hottest in 100,00 years. What is clear is the Great Shaking is global, it is as much human as non-human, and what we’ve known is being shook up.

Nothing is fixed. As Dr. Lara Sheehi says, “Fixed-ness is the antithesis of decoloniality.” The world we inherited is considered “normal” – yet our souls and bodies know of “another possible world” as Arundhati Roy puts it. October 7 and the non-stop genocide since is a shaking off of “fixed normalcy” – a shattering disruption of deforrmed normativity, revealing what is too oft hidden. Today is also Juneteenth, a reminder of the shattering of the chains of enslavement the so-called United States was founded upon, a process that is still unfolding.

This Great Shaking is inviting new movements, a re-enchantment, going off-script together, becoming comfortable with discomfort, taking risks, decentering the human, growing eyes in the dark, cultivating regenerative disruptions.

As we do this, we become pollinators, joining the larger Pollination Party of Life. So let’s keep shaking off, sloughing off, molting, and turning the season towards Life. By doing so, we become Transitional (transformational) characters, as Prentis Hemphill calls those who break the stranglehold of past patterns in her new book ‘What it Takes to Heal.”

That doesn’t mean we necessarily know what the path looks like, because it’s all new experiments. As she says on the first powerful episode of her new podcast ‘Becoming the People’ (see below) in conversation with adrienne maree brown, “It is alright to say ‘I don’t know how to do it – we’re figuring it out, we’re trying.”

On thing is sure: this is no time for the cages of the habitual. Both paradoxes and flittering feathered birds be strolling straight up and nesting into our hearts, and perhaps if we relax the tight-fist of the Familiar, liberatory worlds will begin spilling out.

See you under the simmering summer sun. Wishing you an embodied, emboldened, empassioned, and emergent week!

with spontaneous emergences and the slow growth forest of us,
Ryan

When in Doubt, Shake
by Ryan Van Lenning

𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘢𝘥𝘢 – 𝘯. (𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘪-𝘧𝘢•𝘥𝘢)
: 𝘜𝘗𝘙𝘐𝘚𝘐𝘕𝘎, 𝘙𝘌𝘉𝘌𝘓𝘓𝘐𝘖𝘕
𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘢𝘣𝘪𝘤 𝘳𝘰𝘰𝘵 𝘫𝘰-𝘪-𝘪 (𝘯-𝘧-𝘥), 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 “𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘬𝘦” 𝘰𝘳 “𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘰𝘧𝘧”

When in doubt, Shake.

Shake your body.
Shake your head.
Shake all the dust off your quivering heart.

Rattle the status quo
of your partitioned soul

letting fear fall
like the smallest of pebbles
into the sea of deep time.

Shake the story.
Shake the globe.
Shake this imperial nightmare off like a flea.

Become traitor to Empire
and re-join Life.

Remember: you are not only you.

You are a pulsing star and the one
beneath the rubble.

You are mud and cosmic love.

Swing sacred scimitars in widening orbits,
cast lassos of threaded purpose.

Capture all the thick nows
in your beauty basket
to serve this Great Shaking.