I wrote this blog on my myspace. and now i want to share it with ya'll because I was influenced in the workshop in San Diego, even though i walked in late. here it is:
self-recovery
bell hooks writes that writing itself is a tool for self-recovery. Being on the path to self-recovery im gonna just try recover me. my friend jesus tells me that problems don't exist. Problems don't exist because they tend to be merely illusions. They tend to be smokey mirrors that distort reality. and then it hit me, that pedagogical praxis are the obsidian flints and obsidian mirrors. they are our tools for action and our tools for reflection. Obsidian is my friend because obsidian tells the truth. And there's no way that i want to fight a struggle or fall in love with out having just that -truth.
truth> trust> respect> love> understanding w/o illusions!
it makes sense right? Then to problematize the humyn condition, i remember Alice Walker describing the notion of contrary instincts in her essay "In Search of our Mother's Garden." So what is contrary instincts? I couldn't understand it as i read her essay but now i think i do. contrary instincts are the conflicts that we breed inside of ourselves because within us are still illusions. see, the thing about being a humyn or being a whole humyn is understanding the parts of who we are. the spirit, the mind, the heart and the body. these are the integral parts of our consciousness. but what happens when we are birthed into this earth and we are never taught to understand or even tap into our very own consciousness -that is our intuition.
What develops is a constant struggle between the false consciousness and the true consciousness. the false consciousness consists of all those things that we are taught even tho we don't know why we need to learn that. consequently, those integral parts of our consciousness (spirit, mind, heart and body) become disconnected and alienated. this is the very essence of the smokey mirror. but the smokey mirror then exists as a method to survive in a world of confusion. we distort our own reality to cope with the distorted reality of society -the mitote.we want life to be simple and to enjoy it, right? but as we long for simplicity our false consciousness cooks up complexities.
another homie told me that colonization is pretty much like an illness we will live with it for the rest of our lives and it's our job to constantly monitor that illness as if it were diabetes. we constantly have to check which consciousness is our true one. and constantly live among an urgent survival climate playing double-agent in the empire. alright now im remembering laura's words: when you lack self-definition, that lack of self-definition spills over into your relationships... your relations...
when you don't know yourself, when your own selves are alienated from each other then everything around you is alienating. the smokey mirror is bigger than hip hop, it's bigger than the elections... it is all that is killing the earth. and the built-in tool for the smokey mirror is still in the eye of the detector to find the lesson. but what happens when lessons are too late? the earth will always be here and we will too in the form of chemical compositions that will create new worlds.
suddenly my problems are all illusions. and i am still left with the task of making me whole again. and unbraiding the trensa that is made up of strands of my contrary instincts. im on my path to truth to dismantle my illusions so please don't come at me with illusions. be real and i will to. let's make ourselves whole again.
2 comments:
what an incredible journey. thanks for sharing. i particularly enjoyed learning about tezcatlipoca, our smokey mirror that consistently reminds us to look within ourselves for the answer, our intuition, our inner wisdom passed on through many generations...
as muxeres, i think we have a special gift of observing our thoughts, actions, ideas, feelings-- particularly when we menstruate. our moon cycles are an incredible gift that allows us to purify from the inside out--- it's taking the time to honor that cycle that matters to continue to develop our intuitions.
i wonder about the male experience (that exists within us as women, too, as we are androgenous beings)-- that helps to strengthen intuition?
i have to say that i found an incredible sense of comfort and hope upon reading your post.
it is so easy to fall into the trap of perceiving our false self as being our true self. what holds us from fully accepting the false self and clinging onto whatever we might feel is left of our true self is our intuition and inner wisdom that dianna was talking about. it is holding onto what makes us who we truly are: our spirituality, our love, our passion, our mentality, etc.
the reason that i found such comfort and hope was because over the last year i personally felt like i was the losing the essence of myself. it was being reflected in my interpersonal interactions and my relationships with people (mirroring what your friend laura said). recently i decided that this was a major aspect of my life that could no longer go on being neglected and would be a point of focus from now on. if we can not find a balance within ourselves then how can we possibly ever expect to move forward as individuals, as families, as coalitions, as a society?
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