thank you for this. i feel very held by your language about grief, especially about embodied and community grief. grief work is a sacred offering, vital to revolution.💓🇵🇸
I read Alice Sparkly Kat's newsletter (her November horoscope) right before reading this, and I'm gonna quote a long piece of it below, because I think it responds beautifully what you wrote on hope in the last section of this newsletter. They make a differentiation between faith and hope, which I found particularly resonant.
"We fight for faith, not for fear. Fear makes us shrink, makes us suffer in silence and worry too much about things that we don't have control over. We acknowledge fear but we don't fight for it. We fight for faith, for the inevitable survivors whose lives and futures are inevitable enough to believe in.
I don't think that faith is the same as hope. There's a reality to faith. Time never stops and that's certain. People will always survive genocide. Life isn't guaranteed and, in the words of Audre Lorde, many of us were never meant to survive but, to really live, we have to live as though survival were guaranteed. We have to live as though we are going to triumph.
There's an inevitability to faith. I'm not sure that you need hope to develop vision but I'm sure that you need faith. To have faith, you simply need to remember that life is too powerful and too unruly for policy to permanently shape.
Let's demand a ceasefire on the armageddon that our fear fools us into thinking is inevitable. Let's do it with the faith that life will continue to survive after all of the armageddons that imperialism tries to narrate as meaningful."
this letter is so rich
thank you for this. i feel very held by your language about grief, especially about embodied and community grief. grief work is a sacred offering, vital to revolution.💓🇵🇸
I read Alice Sparkly Kat's newsletter (her November horoscope) right before reading this, and I'm gonna quote a long piece of it below, because I think it responds beautifully what you wrote on hope in the last section of this newsletter. They make a differentiation between faith and hope, which I found particularly resonant.
"We fight for faith, not for fear. Fear makes us shrink, makes us suffer in silence and worry too much about things that we don't have control over. We acknowledge fear but we don't fight for it. We fight for faith, for the inevitable survivors whose lives and futures are inevitable enough to believe in.
I don't think that faith is the same as hope. There's a reality to faith. Time never stops and that's certain. People will always survive genocide. Life isn't guaranteed and, in the words of Audre Lorde, many of us were never meant to survive but, to really live, we have to live as though survival were guaranteed. We have to live as though we are going to triumph.
There's an inevitability to faith. I'm not sure that you need hope to develop vision but I'm sure that you need faith. To have faith, you simply need to remember that life is too powerful and too unruly for policy to permanently shape.
Let's demand a ceasefire on the armageddon that our fear fools us into thinking is inevitable. Let's do it with the faith that life will continue to survive after all of the armageddons that imperialism tries to narrate as meaningful."
If you wanna look at the original : https://www.alicesparklykat.com/articles/477/November_2023_Horoscopes/
And also, thank you for this piece. <3
🌹🌹🌹