Community is the salve we all need!
The importance of community in the pursuit of liberation
It has been 70 days.
70 days of non stop horror. 70 days of calling of a ceasefire. 70 days of witnessing a genocide being posted, shared, live streaming, tweeted and tik toked before our eyes.
70 days of trying to wrap our heads around levels of depravity, dehumanization and destruction co-signed by our world leaders.
70 days that has set our lives, relationships, worlds and belief systems into a spiral.
It is now, more than ever, that your lessons in liberation and decolonization must be put into practice, not just to care for yourselves but to be able to maintain the on going fight for liberation! Supremacy culture and dominance ideology work most effectively by separating us from each other, breeding hopelessness and despair, and making us feel powerless.
Liberation ideology teaches us to enter into right reciprocal relationship with ourselves, with others and with nature. It teaches us to reject supremacy culture narratives that live inside of us for our liberation means the liberation of the collective. It teaches us interconnectedness that leads to a tenderness for and with self and others. Liberation truly teaches is love, in it’s purest, simplest most beautiful forms.
This is why liberation is so scary for those who practice dominance culture. It requires no literal tools. It doesn’t require funding or access to the world’s resources. Instead, liberation is accessible to each of us because it is within us!
Being rooted in liberation doesn’t mean that you don’t have moments where you feel overwhelm, despair, hopelessness etc. What it does mean is that you have a relationship with yourself ad others that allows you to feel all of those things, move through them and step out on the other side.
Supremacy culture teaches us not to feel our feelings at all or that feeling and expressing them is somehow a negative characteristic, as though allowing ourselves to experience the full scope and depth of our humanity should be vilified! (This is intentional to disconnect us from our own humanity).
Liberation culture teaches us to feel deeply, to share honestly and vulnerably, and to connect authentically through our human experiences. We teaches us and allows us to experience the wave of grief, pain, sadness etc in a way that creates space in ourselves to not be pulled away by the rip tide but instead, to ride the wave in a way that always finds you back on the shore.
The key to all of this is community. Community allows us to be seen, to connect, to witness, to share our full selves in a way that allows us to release emotions and give permission for others to do the same. Community creates a space where we can hand off the baton of liberation work so that some can rest which others march on. Community is the very salve we all need to stay connected to ourselves, the collective and our pursuit of liberation!
The reality is that together we are powerful. In community we are strong, not just in our social and political desires but in our healing and spirit health.
If you have just begun your liberation journey I urge you to find community. Find community to cry with, laugh with, share joy and hopelessness. Find community to lift you up, to make you feel connected and tethered, to make you feel powerful. Find community to hold you in the midst of relationship strain/loss and for all of the grief you need to share and process as a result. Find community to simple be with….to simply not be alone!
Find Community. Be in it.
Yours in liberation,
Weeze
Resources for more learning:
(all levels have access to telegram community group chat - Squad has access to live calls)
Thank you for this message, Weeze. Also really grateful for the space of The Collective.
I can't speak for others, but I myself have a really difficult time not giving in to despair, because most of the people in my life do not seem to care as deeply (if at all) about these things. It's made it very difficult to keep fighting, but I know I can't give up; people's lives are depending on it.