Grief sneaks up on you. It also plays havoc with time, shattering any semblance of linearity. And suddenly, some significant date hurls you backward on a calendar that didn’t make sense to begin with. For how can you measure absence? Much less ever really believe it? Today, May 16, 2023, is somehow, inexplicably, ten years since my bio dad exhaled his last breath. A day much like today, with so much abundance of the breath of life all around me in the form of spring flowers, just like May 16, 2013, when it seemed spring had never birthed such spectacularly vibrant and lush beauty, even as I w ..read more

Such a blessing to be an accomplice yesterday at the #Nakba75 rally and march on the stolen lands of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, not only alongside generations of resistance, but alongside Palestinians youths calling to free all lands and free all peoples as part of what liberation looks like. Such a blessing to be in a space of solidarity where no one’s pain and suffering, losses and grief, rage and trauma, are pitted against each other. A space where our particular histories are held as both distinct and in ways intertwined. Where solidarity is marked by organizing as if social relations and mutua ..read more

“Climate grief” is a daily companion of late. And not just in the narrow (albeit enormous) sense of capitalist-fueled ecological catastrophe. Like the fact that it’s snowing in May while the oceans are warmer than ever. No, there’s a much more expansive, insidiously everyday grief that most people hardly seem to even take conscious note of because it feels so “normal.” Or shall we say “normalized.” Grief is stirred up continually by the whole climate—social, cultural, political—that surrounds people 24/7 these fascist days and nights, but it’s introduced in such bits and pieces that people be ..read more

“After” and “before”: a tale of two sides in the present-day US uncivil war. After spotting some transphobic, homophobic, and fascist tags alongside a well-traveled foot+bike path, some folks decided to take antifascist action. But instead of doing it under the cover of night, they engaged in “queer joy” during a sunny day on stolen Anishinaabeg lands. When the first can of spray paint came out of the bag, they hesitated for a moment, seeing a passersby headed toward them. Yet the passersby instantly thanked them, saying how much the hateful graffiti had bothered them, too, when they’d notice ..read more

“How’s your covid grief these days?” Those words, which traveled across an ocean and many borders as a DM, supplied a recognition that’s too rare in this so-called post-pandemic world: someone else feels stuck in mourning. For without collective reckoning of what humanity has gone and is still going through … Without collective processing of the innumerable losses as our sacred shared duty … Without public do-it-ourselves altars, memorials, and other pandemic grief spaces woven into the public landscape, acknowledging the immensity of the collective and individual trauma and myriad absences ..read more

Since I seem to be in a space of not feeling inspired to write my usual picture-prose pieces for social media—call it winter or perhaps pandemic numbness—and as a way to encourage myself to do so again, I’m catching up on sharing some old writing. Or rather, some old talking that Sarah Lawrance kindly curated into a zine years ago, and then Kai Schmidt stumbled across it years later and surprised me by creating a new edition of the zine. Truth be told, I haven’t had the heart to read my old words here, in the new and improved “Educating for Freedom” zine. Since I gave the talk that became the ..read more

May I be so “forward” as to say how proud I am of my friend, and writer-editor-baker and caring human being extraordinaire, @wrenawry for publishing their first book—an amazing edited anthology filled with “nourishing resistance” (PM Press)! And how proud I am to be a part of it in the form of my first-ever “foreword” to a book! So it felt deliciously nice to now get my copy in the mail and hold this beauty in my hands. I remember taking a walk with Wren in the stunning Sonora Desert in January 2020 during which Wren dreamed of curating such a book, and then offering what encouragement and su ..read more

Grief rituals, one could argue, are part of the essential grounding for millennia-old cultures that orient toward far more ecological relations with the whole of this earth, including each other. For loss is part of the seasons of life, which ancient—and yet still here—cultures recognize needs to be honored through ceremony so as to remember what is loved and cherished, and continually reaffirm a duty to love and defend life. It is little wonder that as colonialism and capitalism, heteropatriarchy and white Christian supremacy, grew into hegemonic death machines over the centuries, they tried ..read more

There are no safe spaces. But there are sacred spaces. At this moment in history, like other particularly brutal epochs, there is no separating that sacredness from the unsafeness. That’s what this sacrilegious world order has forged over more than five hundred years of conquest, plunder, displacement, genocide, and ecological destruction. Its theft of land and lives, lifeways and ecosystems, has desecrated every corner of the globe. Yet time and again, those who would defend land and freedom create brave spaces. Meaning despite the risks, often impossibly heavy ones, they find strength in th ..read more

On my #FuckThePolice walks, I visit with a small forest of trees perched on a hilly embankment on Anishinabeeg lands above a river flowing from one side of so-called Michigan to the other. There, especially now that the leafless branches are expressively etched against the winter sky, I commune with these trees, silently or with my human words. I notice how they care for each other (and me too) through the seasons of life. How they move at a pace that allows them to see each other through disruptions to and losses with their ecosystem. They quite literally “stand by each other,” but more then ..read more