a sweet, erotic emergence
Darlings, a few things first:
FEBRUARY 11, 2024 (SUN) • 12:00-3:00 PM EST: IDHA is hosting a virtual series called Topographies of {Dis}Connection: re-membering self, community, and land. One of my dear friends Chloe Calderon Chotrani and I are teaching a class on the Physiology of Body-Mind-Spirit. You may register and find the class description here. 2.75 CE credits will be available for this class.
FEBRUARY 21, 2024 (WED) • 3:00PM UK: I’ll be teaching the class Colonialism & Spirituality: Appropriation, Tokenisation, and Spirituality Across Borders as part of advaya’s online teaching series, Contemporary Spirituality: Meaning and Mysticism in the Modern Age. You may use the code TEACH-CS-TORRES to get 15% off from enrolling in the course.
MARCH 7, 2024 (THURS) • 8:00-9:30PM ET: The Pacific, Asian, and North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry (PANAAWTM) is having their 38th Annual Virtual Conference called "Where Streams Join: Resignifying Complexity, Mutuality, and Healing." I’ll be joining their panel on "Intergenerational Trauma: Collective Trauma, Collective Hatred, and Collective Care."
Are you a psychologist or psychotherapist who might be interested in working with human rights defenders? Civil Rights Defenders: "We need specialists familiar with activist contexts and working in Spanish, Arabic (and maybe French), as well as someone based in East Africa (first and foremost, but also other regions) for offline sessions. Our organisation works in some countries in Asia, Africa (East and Horn of Africa mostly), Europe (Serbia, West Balkans mostly), Latin America (Colombia and Venezuela), and Eurasia (Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova)." Contact: daria.zheleznova@civilrightsdefenders.org or defendersdays@civilrightsdefenders.org.
The Oscillation Guidebook is now available. Yay. I’m quite proud of this model for sustainability in social change movements. Please share this guide with your community, especially those who are doing community organizing and frontline work. Please consider monetarily supporting our grassroots peer support network here in the Global South. The guide is free, and we’re receiving donations for our own sustainability.
After a month of moving through my grief and organizer fatigue, I have emerged.
It really does feel like new life.
No shame, but I did use my Oscillation model to move through the exhaustion and stored trauma last December (more on that in last post). Even though it wasn’t perfect and I still flail at times, I’ve been receiving much of life’s sweetness, which has included new and rekindled connections—ones that feel more attuned to my becoming. These are connections I wouldn’t be receptive to, had I not endured and lost what I did in November - December. The wound became a portal. Into otherworlds, greater intimacies, a higher capacity for love, and more profound spiritual and community-based practices.
This all might sound cute and nice and all, but dude, the sequence of events that led up to this time of renewal was so. fckn. brutal.
I’ve been thinking more intently about the tendency to romanticize new life or the inevitability of endings and beginnings. Such natural cycles do carry joy and excitement, but if we are to re-frame and look at these cycles from a literal angle (memorials, grief, birthing, labor, etc.), they are chaotic and intensely painful and smelly and crowded and demand an almost-impossible stretch of our tenacity.
And here we are. I feel like I am arriving, yet again.
I have decided that my word of the year 2024 is lush, which is inspired by Lucille Clifton’s words: “It is your own lush self you hunger for.”
And I know this, too, that my lush is fortified by yours. With that, I thank you.