AUGUST

The Hopi Remember the Trees

Because I love trees it makes me happy to know they were once big as mountains.  This Hopi elder’s teaching also reminds me of a tree I once dreamed, or tried to dream.  I say “tried” because it was too large to fit inside my dream.  In the Amazon I asked an Ayahauscha shaman about this and he assured me that in his tradition also there were memories of trees so enormous a modern mind could not, even asleep, accept their size.  One way of thinking about this is: suppose the oceans dried up and became rivers.  Eternities later no one would be able to imagine them.  ~aw

                     Faithful:  Happy Birthday Fidel!

So you would have been a hundred  today, August 13, 2026.  But in el futuro you will be hundreds! Imagine. Like heroes of earlier revolutions the people will think of your love for them.  They will tell stories and sing songs and wave the flag that your eyes also rested upon. They will  remember also this present calamity, as well as all the others, that Cuba has been reeling from. So many! So deliberately contrived! True remembrance leaves nothing out.  Honesty matters.  After all, liberation is not a small thing. Pursuit of it is, apparently, endless. Here is where I, and perhaps others, come down to the elementary gain:  Your persistence, and truthfulness, your comprehension of our global situation, your staunchness and even your super long speeches, brought courage and joy to us, we whose destiny had seemed not to matter to anyone in power. Those who would destroy the earth in order to own it.

And now I think of my concern that neither you nor Che knew how to dance! Realizing that you danced with words, cutting sugar cane with the workers, editing novels, even as you read them. That Che, a doctor, danced medicine into his patients by deeply seeing and caring about them.

And so, on this date of your birth, I think of your mother, because of whose life the revolution was no doubt ultimately inspired; a revolution perhaps envisioned as you comprehended her true position with your father, a man like too many others; seduced by excess of ownership, and love of control.

Who knows what makes a revolutionary? The courage to see and feel suffering. The willingness to endure hard labor. The impudence to feel equal, if not superior, to one’s detractors.  I see us all standing with you what feels like a lifetime ago.  Many of us have passed on. But what a moment! To stand smiling and laughing together, under siege! ~aw

I’ve noticed that since DNA testing the Native American grandmother has, more often than not, been relegated to myth. Or even to amusement.  So I am glad my grandmother’s mother, a Cherokee woman, left her name embedded in my own mother’s name.  That, and the mound of stones, is all we have.  But is it?

I remember a friend sneering at my choosing- at a multi-cultural event – the somewhat monotonous Native drumming – a circle of men (until I asked to join) – pounding on a huge ceremonial drum, over the much more lively and intricate African/African-American, drumming.  I did not “know” why I was drawn to this drumbeat, yet it seemed inevitable that it would synchronize with my heart.  It did.  And, it seemed, with memory itself.

Never abandoning my love of my African roots, for many years I was also drawn into the American Indian resistance. And felt completely at home there. The  Native American and African American struggles complimented each other powerfully.

Bill Wahpepah, a Native American resistance leader and Medicine man, and his wife Carol, a talented sculptor, became special friends.  So that it seems now, inevitable, that I would find my way to this cookbook by his niece, Crystal Wahpepah, and that I would sit in her restaurant, Wahpepah’s Kitchen, in Oakland, and taste something else that I had feared lost in my herstory.~aw

We are children of the sun. Sculpture by Carol Wahpepah.

JULY

On Nolan

Nolan Xavier Wells was a seriously good-looking young man. A perfect blend of his handsome dark father and his very cute, curly haired, bright-skinned mother.  He was already integrated, as most people of color are, and so the leap to having white companions must have seemed barely a bump to him. Most black people in America have integrated the world within their own families, and so it is a challenge, sometimes, while young, to understand why not all people have access to this experience.  We didn’t choose it, but we’ve had cause to work with it long enough to know that living together peacefully, whatever the colors, can be done.  A gift we offer to the world.

I have been weeping right along with the black, brown, red, yellow, and white integrated people of Mississippi.  Glad that Rev. Ed King, who died last week, and who had worked most of his life to inspire love and hope in the people of Mississippi, was not, as he died – “comfortably” according to reports (a description I treasure) – required to witness a scene that looks very much like the part of the play many of us who lived and worked in the Mississippi Movement in the Sixties came to know by heart. Many have heard of “the three missing Civil Rights Workers” who were eventually found buried in a dam, but of the countless other bodies found while looking for them, there has seemed little point.  Most had already decomposed and become unrecognizable.

My favorite brother, William Walker, “Bill,” left the South as a teen-ager and never returned, though both of his sons now reside in Atlanta.  I count this as a victory.  That though I also cannot live in the South, after seven years in Mississippi, there are black people who can, and do, and should.  It is beautiful, for the most part, and our Indigenous roots are there. Not to mention our blood, sweat and tears. Also our brave and beautiful dead. But Bill, he could never return. Because he had witnessed a murder.  I did not know this, for many years. And I am not entirely sure I received the story – in bits and pieces over decades – exactly straight.  What I gleaned was enough to help me understand my brother better and since he was my favorite brother and as close to me as my own heart, I was thankful to know what was to him, a heavy burden; and for too long a secret.

Why a secret?  Because some observations about human beings can damage us.  Which is a bind many parents are caught in.  The story was: These white men, Klansmen without their robes, had severely beaten a black man, but having no rope with which to hang him, they devised the perfect solution to make his death seem an accident.  Loggers, with a dumping device on their logging truck, they placed him where the load was to be dumped and pulled the lever. I do not know how my brother came to witness this.  I do not know the depth of his fear and trauma. What I do know is that “the great migration” of earlier black people from the South to the North was sparked by events such as this.

I think there are probably secret societies, today, in the Southern States, whose members are devoted to “honoring” their horrific past of destruction of black life.  That parents, both black and white, and red, should make themselves aware of this possibility.  Evil does not die easily and it certainly has a known track record of ignoring laws.

How to teach our children whom to trust?

What I remember from my own childhood within a black community is that I was not afraid of the occasional white person I saw, though mystified that they were all the same color, never yellow or beige or brown. If my parents feared the white landowners they were bound to obey, they made a great effort to conceal it.  So that white people – always beings clearly outside our community and ignorant of it on many levels, remained until my own teen-age confrontations with them, almost ghostly. Existing behind a screen they themselves had erected but which my parents and other black people respected absolutely. White people did not seem real.

They did not seem even to have a scent. Now I realize this lack of scent was partly because black people were the ones sweating and doing all the work.  But as a child, what a mystery!

And so, Nolan.  Go on, my handsome young brother, son, child, ache of my aging heart. We who love you have travelled this road before. The road of communal sorrow.  If there is consciousness after death, in any form – and who knows what awaits us after we leave Earth’s wonderland – know we see what it was that marked you: beauty, graciousness, friendliness. An openness of spirit that we pray will be recognized and cherished in whatever new world you find yourself.  Perhaps our embodied time on Earth is but preparation for the deeper journey into Forever. I feel this way, often.

I send my love to your parents. And an embrace that encircles all of us; for as long as forever might be. ~aw

All children are our responsibility, the Adults of the planet.  Bless the people of Iran, your leaders, your teachers, your families and the land of Iran itself.  All precious in the eyes of The Most High, which is Love. ~aw

Saving Menzie, in The Polygamist, a story/series on Netflix. Book by Sue Nyathi

It is perhaps ironic that after much rumination about the indelible Netflix production “The Polygamist” in which three, maybe four, women suffer the indignities of being married or almost married to a man (the same man) whose heart, i.e. sensitivity and compassion, seems completely checked out, my concern has landed mostly on the two young men of the story, Menzie and Freedom; which I consider part of the genius of this story, and of the writer.  How are we to raise our young men not to become Jonas, the too familiar villain/monster of this story?

As women, our battle against sexism has been uphill for at least six thousand years. There are still debates in some cultures about whether we can keep our own clitoris. Oddly, I know we will survive our oppression and go on to raise our daughters and our sons (and grandsons) to be worthy of this great Earth on which they may flower naturally, like any other creation.  I do not despair that insensitive and ignorant people make laws that, for instance, ban kissing.  Though not weapons.  If our world survives, as it might not, for an eternity of reasons, it will be one in which there will be an honored place for all of us; uniqueness will be prized.  Difference celebrated and enjoyed!

Those of us who can, move into this world now!

I see a beginning of this as two of the wives who’ve spent (wasted) much time fighting each other sit together at Jonas’s funeral.  That is the truth of it, as women naturally rise from the depths of indignity male rule has designated for us, look at each other as sister-sufferers, and drop the animosity that for so long has held us back.

The earth is burning.  It is because (primarily) male greed has sucked the blood of the Mother and burned it for dubious, surely insufficient, reasons.  No more water, the fire next time. It is simply astonishing how the riddles of prophets are coming into focus. The meek shall inherit the earth.  Meekness. Doesn’t that sound like most of us, for centuries? And so on. ~aw

SALVANDO A MENZIE, EN “THE POLYGAMIST” (EL POLÍGAMO), UNA HISTORIA/SERIE DE NETFLIX. LIBRO DE SUE NYATHI.

Tal vez sea irónico que, tras mucho meditar sobre la inolvidable producción de Netflix *The Polygamist*, en la que tres, tal vez cuatro, mujeres sufren las humillaciones de estar casadas, o prácticamente casadas, con un hombre (el mismo hombre) cuyo corazón –o sea, su sensibilidad y compasión– parece totalmente ausente, mi preocupación se ha enfocado principalmente en los dos jóvenes de la historia: Menzie y Freedom; esto lo considero como parte de la genialidad de la historia y de su autora. ¿Cómo debemos educar a nuestros jóvenes para que no se conviertan en Jonás, ese villano o monstruo demasiado familiar de esta historia?

Como mujeres, nuestra lucha contra el sexismo se ha hecho cuesta arriba durante al menos seis mil años. Todavía en algunos culturas hay debates sobre si podemos mantener nuestro propio clítoris. Aunque parezca extraño, sé que sobreviviremos a nuestra opresión y seguiremos criando a nuestras hijas e hijos (y nietos) para que sean merecedores de esta gran Tierra donde puedan florecer con naturalidad, como cualquier otra creación. No me desespera que personas insensibles e ignorantes proclamen leyes que, por ejemplo, prohíben besarse. Aunque no las armas. Si nuestro mundo sobrevive, lo que podría no suceder por una enormidad de razones, será un mundo en el que habrá un lugar digno para cada uno de nosotros; la singularidad será enaltecida. ¡La diferencia será celebrada y disfrutada!

¡Aquellos que podamos, avancemos hacia ese mundo desde ahora mismo!

Veo el inicio de esto cuando dos de las esposas que han pasado (malgastado) tanto tiempo peleando una con otra se sientan juntas en el velorio de Jonás. He aquí la verdad de esto: a medida que las mujeres naturalmente nos levantamos desde las profundidades de la indignidad que el dominio masculino nos ha establecido, nos miramos unas a otras como hermanas sufrientes y dejamos atrás el rencor que durante tanto tiempo nos ha sofrenado.

La Tierra está ardiendo. Se debe (principalmente) a que la avaricia masculina ha sorbido la sangre de la Madre y la ha quemado por turbias y, sin dudas insuficientes, razones. No habrá más agua; fuego la próxima vez. Resulta simplemente asombroso cómo los enigmas de los profetas empiezan a cobrar sentido. Los mansos heredarán la Tierra. Mansedumbre. ¿No suena eso a la mayoría de nosotras durante siglos? Y así sucesivamente. ~aw  (Translated by Manuel Verdecia)

June

This important book by Ilyasah  Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X, is a medicine for all who set out on journeys of depth, of soul questioning, of the most elemental inquiry into one’s own unknowing.  This painting of him, where he looks like Van Gogh, reminds us of the mystery, in many ways, that he was.  Someone who  endured immense tragedy and suffering, someone intense and profoundly singular, and someone who, though wounded by Life,  held an inner core responsive to enlightenment and trust.  He loved poetry! Reading this was, for me, a major blessing of this book.  There is an actual poem, that he wrote while in prison.  As a poet myself I have a sense of what this means: he was not to be easily captured by anything that was, to his spirit, a misfit.  And so of course he would leave any “home” his spirit had outgrown.

What can open before us when this happens but a solitude?  Vast and depthless.  The desert, literally, in Malcolm’s case, where he would find his spiritual kin among Muslims in the desert of Saudi Arabia, and his soul nourishment in the realization that we may, if we keep the faith, outgrow whatever aims to keep us narrow.  As he did. Spreading the wings of his great intelligence and sometimes humor to cover all of us as we struggle to stand in our truth, of whatever color or kind.

We, as a people, have been rich in loss. This thought might weigh us down, beyond recovery, except for a worthy realization that I have learned to lean on as an affirmation of faith.  It is this:  The Daughters Will Take Care of It.  To read this daughter’s interrogation of and reclamation of Malcolm’s intellectual and soul journey affirms my own belief that some of the offspring, though weeping, will grasp the gift their parents intended to pass on, and share it with the world, which is another way of saying, with everyone who needs it. ~aw

¿Qué se puede abrir ante nosotros cuando esto ocurre sino una soledad? Vasta y sin fondo. El desierto, literalmente en el caso de Malcolm, donde encontraría a sus hermanos espirituales entre los musulmanes del desierto de Arabia Saudita, y el alimento para su alma al percibir que, si mantenemos la fe, podemos superar aquello que intenta limitarnos. Como lo hizo él. Desplegando las alas de su gran inteligencia, y a veces de su humor, para cubrirnos a todos mientras luchamos por afirmarnos en nuestra propia verdad, sea cual sea su color o su clase.

Nosotros, como pueblo, hemos sido ricos en pérdida. Este pensamiento podría hundirnos sin remedio, de no ser por una valiosa certeza en la que he aprendido a apoyarme como afirmación de fe. Es esta: las hijas se encargarán de ello. Leer esta interrogación y rescate de la hija sobre el viaje intelectual y espiritual de Malcolm reafirma mi propia certeza de que algunos de los hijos —aun entre llantos— sabrán captar el legado que sus padres quisieron transmitir, y compartirlo con el mundo, que es otro modo de decir con todo aquel que lo necesite. ~aw

Who was Paule Marshall? A fierce, determined, daughter of immigrants from “the islands;” a writer of novels that explore worlds previously unknown, not even guessed at, by this Southerner. We met, truly, in China, where she shepherded our group of diverse women through days of excitement and wonder as we tried to fathom what transformation of a society might look like.  It was the early eighties, and, as I have elsewhere observed, every single Chinese woman we interacted with looked exhausted. The men just looked hunkered down for the long haul.  Both men and women were giving their all to envision and to bring to pass a new society. We were all moved by this: the common facing up to the reality that everything must change.  (I hear this phrase of course in Nina Simone’s voice).  Paule wasn’t exactly secretive, but nobody knew very much about her personal life.  We still don’t know a lot, from Washington’s book, but what shines is Marshall’s various flights from what is expected of the “average” woman.  Which of course she was not.  Sometimes we meet people that we just like. And I adored Paule.  She was funny, subversive of rote behaviors of any kind, and grounded in the reality that as a black woman she was here, on this great earth, to live life as herself; that it was the duty of others, if it was of interest to them, to not let this sometimes quite charming insistence, trouble them. ~aw

Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, Tillie Olsen and others holding tight to the hands of Ding Ling, a fierce, revolutionary intellectual woman writer we all agreed had been all the way there, and back.  Beijing, 1983. ~aw

PAULE MARCHALL

¿Quién fue Paule Marshall? Una mujer terca y decidida, hija de inmigrantes de «las islas»; una escritora de novelas que exploran mundos antes desconocidos, ni siquiera imaginados, por esta sureña. Nos conocimos, en realidad, en China, donde ella guio a nuestro grupo de mujeres diversas a lo largo de días de emoción y asombro, mientras intentábamos comprender cómo sería la transformación de una sociedad. Era 1980 y, como he señalado en otras partes, todas y cada mujer china con la que interactuamos parecía exhausta. Los hombres, en cambio, parecían resignados a un largo trayecto. A todas nos conmovió esto: el hecho en común de enfrentar la realidad de que todo debe cambiar. (Por supuesto, escucho esta frase con la voz de Nina Simone). Paule no era justamente reservada, pero nadie sabía mucho sobre su vida personal. Todavía no sabemos gran cosa —ni por el libro de Washington—, pero lo que reluce es los diversos escapes de Marshall de lo que se espera de la mujer «promedio». Lo que, por supuesto, ella no era. A veces conocemos a personas que simplemente nos caen bien. Y yo adoraba a Paule. Era divertida, rebelde a cualquier comportamiento mecánico y bien plantada en la realidad de que, como mujer negra, estaba aquí, en esta gran Tierra, para vivir la vida como ella misma, y ​​que correspondía a los demás, si era de su interés, no dejar que esa a veces encantadora insistencia los molestara. ~aw

May

                                                                                                        Photo by Alice Walker

Happy Birthday, Robert Allen, May 29th.  Thank you for editing The Black Scholar all those years;  for helping to build housing in Cuba, and encouraging me to visit; for writing amazing books about capitalism and the slow growth of our comprehension about societal transformation.  Thank you for beginning to read and comprehend the suppression of women by falling in love with Janie Crawford.  Thank you for loving having a child. For loving to dance and for sharing a birth month  with Malcolm X whom you admired and whose fate you witnessed as he was taken from us. Thank you for riding the Greyhound bus, over years, to interview the survivors of the Port Chicago Mutiny.  You would have cheered to know the men were cleared of all charges, shortly after you left us. And, perhaps most of all, thank you for co-editing with Herb Boyd the extraordinary anthology Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America. To see where we are going, you taught, we must look at where (and how) we have been. You were a light. ~aw

Robert Allen en su cumpleaños. En el jardín de Alice Walker, 2016

Foto de Alice Walker

Feliz cumpleaños, Robert Allen (29 de mayo). Gracias por editar The Black Scholar (El Estudioso Negro) todos esos años; por ayudar a construir viviendas en Cuba y animarme a visitar el país; por escribir fenomenales libros sobre el capitalismo y el lento avance de nuestra comprensión de la transformación social. Gracias por empezar a leer y comprender la opresión de las mujeres al enamorarte de Janie Crawford. Gracias por amar el tener un hijo. Por amar el baile y por compartir el mes de nacimiento con Malcolm X, a quien admirabas y cuyo destino presenciaste cuando nos fue arrebatado. Gracias por viajar en autobús Greyhound, durante años, para entrevistar a los supervivientes del motín de Port Chicago. Te habrías alegrado al saber que aquellos hombres fueron absueltos de todos los cargos poco después de tú dejarnos. Y, tal vez lo más importante, gracias por coeditar junto a Herb Boyd la extraordinaria antología Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America. (Hermano: la Odisea de los hombres negros en América). Para ver hacia dónde vamos, eso nos enseñaste, debemos mirar a dónde (y cómo) hemos estado. Fuiste una luz. ~aw

Spirit sitting on the porch                                                                                       Photo: by Alice Walker   2020

                                   2015 The Year of Changes

Grace Paley, the writer of great short stories, named two of her collections The Little Disturbances of Man and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.  I think of these titles now as 2015 comes to a close:  how we as humans imagine disturbances in our tiny lives might weigh in on the cosmic scale; also that changes can occur so rapidly we feel a bit breathless trying to keep up with them.

2015 has been a year of clearing the channel, opening up the way.  But it has not been easy.  I have moved from my home and office of over twenty years, some 13 rooms in all, including office and archive, and into two tiny rooms that seem to fit me like my skin.   A decade long relationship that had many wonders, but a few problems resistant to solution, came to a close.  Hurricane Patricia ripped through a retreat I have cherished for decades in the wilds of Mexico, taking down my meditation palapa along with my roof, and making mush of my garden as it uprooted trees.  Especially mango trees I planted years ago that bore sweet, yummy fruit.  A fruit not great for the liver, apparently, but I haven’t told my liver about that yet.

Surprisingly the hurricane brought some gifts:  one is that because of the extensive destruction of vegetation I now have a much more expansive view of the ocean, the other is that I can also see a short mountain (no kidding) way out back over yonder somewhere that I never knew existed.  I have stopped mourning the loss of the palm trees that so gracefully hid the view!

The love of the world, its wonders and changes, is what keeps me going as I witness the incessant battering of it by beings I am convinced could not possibly be from here.  Also my admiration for the tenacity of poets, writers, artists, dancers, who will throw their hats in the ring of hope given the slightest opportunity.  I want to send a shout out here to John Trudell, the Native American Poet who recently died, and with whom I sometimes appeared as we raised funds for the American Indian Movement in the Eighties, and to Aaron Russo whose face I finally saw on You Tube.

A beautiful brother!

Every Christmas I watch Trading Places, a film he made with Eddie Murphy, Dan Ackroyd and Jamie Lee Curtis, all fabulous, about the greed of the 1%.  He died not very long ago.

In fact, as bombs fall (war, like fracking, a huge cause of climate instability that profiteers do not talk about) as people flee, as children, old people, women, are attacked, chased around the globe, and often destroyed, it is the courage of artists of all sorts that shines brightest.

I have written elsewhere of my recent love of the Spanish series Grand Hotel, but also there is Velvet, not as well made, and with a few too many chatty Cathy characters, but definitely exhibiting soulfulness that invigorates spirit.

The most stunning of all productions I viewed in 2015 – and this was a surprise – is Breaking Bad.  A series most folks I talked to had already seen.  At first I didn’t think I could relate: I knew nothing about the making or using of Methamphetamine.  Chemistry didn’t exist either, in my impoverished high school.  In fact, for much of the time I watched the chemistry class in this series, as the Meth making teacher tries to rouse respect in his students for the magic of chemistry, I was incredulous that these bored kids had such a fabulous classroom.

Breaking Bad is exceptional art.  Though as with other deep diving films, Natural Born Killers for instance, viewing it takes a strong stomach.  I “watched” a fair amount of it with my eyes shut and my hands over my ears.  Sometimes a partner and I binge watched until five in the morning because we couldn’t believe what we were seeing or how well what we were seeing and hearing seemed to reflect a huge truth about the culture of America.  And most people’s inability to recognize as the character Jessie, finally does, that there’s a devil in the DNA of the nation.

And so Farewell, 2015!  I woke this morning thinking of poetry and how dear it is to those fortunate enough not to find it scary.  My teacher at Sarah Lawrence, Muriel Rukeyser, once taught for a semester on just this theme: how many people fear poetry. But here is a loving poem by poet Mary Oliver that reaches out tender arms, leading us to the center of things, the sun, and away from whatever resistance to poetry we might discover, fifty or sixty years too late, we should have taken pains to shed.

The Sun
by Mary Oliver

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon
and into the clouds or the hills
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone ___
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upwards on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance_____
and have you ever felt for anything

such wild love_____
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure
that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there
empty-handed ____
or have you too
turned from this world______

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

February/March/Apri

How can we bear this?~aw

Youtube banned this account. These videos are no longer available.

https:// youtu.be/TGQ7oNIztI4?si=Ah2aPsUaQfIKt0zM
https:// youtu.be/FJ2k5bSpxo0?si=k5cEp2AYSqw9UEmn

Here is more information on
PLO Lumumba

They understood the prison of a false “freedom” required a submission they did not possess. ~aw

Gospel in Spanish: The soul has language. It also knows when to stop; unlike scrolling. ~aw

WE WERE NOT BORN TO LIVE LIKE THIS

Reprint
The Weight on Delcy Rodriguez, by Craig Murray – The Unz Review

“As I was leaving the University of the Communes in Tayacito, after a joyful and uplifting visit, an earnest young Professor came up to me and pulled me aside. Very quietly, he asked me what was going to happen. A number of the students were terrified there would be regime change and they, picked as young socialist leaders in the commune movement, would be imprisoned, tortured and executed. “

Read Full article, The Weight on Delcy Rodriguez, by Craig Murray – The Unz Review

  Hugo Chavez’s affection  for his people was a medicine for the world. ~aw.

Bitter Medicine: They Don’t know What Love Is.

Never Go Anywhere With Anyone Who Lies

We must go only where we can be loved. War has never been that place. And this war, especially, is not that place.  Meanwhile, though it might not look that way, so many of you are loved and truly seen, here at home.  No matter how hard this is to believe, because you are suffering deep insecurity and aimlessness here, there are those, like this commentator, whose passionate advocacy speaks of caring so intense it is as if the very Mother of Humanity is awakening, and aiming to protect your precious lives. And may it be so.

Never go anywhere with anyone who lies.~aw

Happy Birthyear, Fidel!

Dear Fidel,

This year we celebrate your 100^th birthday!   As your sister from a suffering America/United States, I can tell you: You are missed.  There was something about your relentless resistance to meanness and stupidity, and yes, the mendacity of politicians, that sat us all up straighter, happier, more determined ourselves to carry on the fight.  The fight for food, justice, equality, freedom of whom to love, and whom to join in battle against the greedy forces devouring us.

Thinking of the things I most admired about you I am reminded first of all of your love of children, and how that love manifested in shoes and schools and food and shelter.  But also how you liked to joke with them.  I remember pictures of you playing a game with them, to demonstrate how the United States leadership assumed they had only to say “jump” for Cubans to ask “how high?”  You turned that around for the children as you had them jump every time one of them said “Yankee!”   And someone else said: “How low?” You were teaching them not to be discouraged by the reality – of Cuba’s small size, compared to the huge United States, and it’s supposed superiority.

You were adept at encouraging the growth of large spirits, around the globe.  Wherever the people felt minimized by the oligarchs devouring them; and it never seemed to occur to you that women were not equals.  There beside you, seemingly always, was Celia Sanchez, as formidable and stalwart apparently as you, as, together, you confronted the menace of child abuse and trafficking, long before the rest of the world comprehended what isolated islands, like yours, could be cover for.

Truthfully, though, it was not your political or social innovations that moved me most.  It was your love of reading.  In particular, your relationship with one of the great literary masters of our time, your friend, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  It amused and delighted me to think of you there in the presidential “palace” (which I’m sure you secretly renamed) with your boots off, spectacles on, pencil in hand, proof-reading and editing the fabulous novels of one of the world’s greatest literary imaginations.  As a writer myself, and someone hopelessly in love with Wonder, I was enchanted.

And so, happy birthdyear, my own revolutionary brother and literary companion.  Cuba continues to suffer the birthing pains of a world struggling to be free. You did your part: with grace, humor, steadfastness, and a handy rifle. History has not only absolved you, it has brought multitudes of the formerly sleeping to the place you stood, so long alone (except for the handful that included Celia and Che) and proved you could indeed fight the just fight and still die with your boots on, regardless of hundreds, if not thousands of years, of solitude.

Your sister, Alicia,  Mexico, 2026

Fidel’s birthday: August 13, 1926

ALICE WALKER / CARTA, Querido Fidel

Where the Dog Is – a Poem

Where the Dog Is
©2026 by Alice Walker

In this insanity
Who has kept their dignity
More than dogs?
You are evolved Beings
If you never
Find the cure for cancer
Or of any malady at all.
If you don’t discover
An America
Or know where Russia
Actually is.
You are the standard
Of what some think of as human
Behavior.
Never bombing anyone.
Never starving anyone.
Never withholding love
Or food.
And can we even mention
Forgiveness?
You are the champion
Of that.  Say a kind human word
Or offer a pat
And the war
Whatever nonsense
it was
Is over.
Thank you
For showing us
How to live
A worthwhile life.
For teaching us the way
To love
And in the loving
Self-acceptance
Of the exact Being
We happen to be
To find

happiness. ~aw

Teachers of resistance are maligned and vilified.  This is not new.  What is new is that from continent to continent we can affirm or disavow egregious slander, quickly; communicating with each other across mountains and seas.  I will never believe the Dalai Lama is guilty of anything sinister; and from this account, he is not.  It is heartbreaking to be reminded in this talk of China’s mistreatment of the Tibetan people,  however, who have been teachers, via Tibetan trained monks, of so many of us.  I admire China for innumerable compassionate moves in Africa and especially, recently, in Cuba. Every grain of rice has been noted from afar, as a blessing of the Chinese government and its people.  In my own view, China is so amazing a country it did not even need to colonize Tibet.  Just as Trump does not need to attempt to colonize Greenland.  

Let the people flourish in all their odd ways, all over the world, as long as none are harmful to the people. 

As we enter “an end time” on the planet as we have known it, when human beings are incinerated from the air and even the weather is not free, it is tempting to despair. But there is still such a thing as solidarity with the truth, whatever it is, and whoever is speaking it.  We must make up our own minds – in this time of widespread evil, so incomprehensible even to those who’ve stood before and looked it in the face – about what story to trust and who and what to believe.  And we must defend the truth.  The one light that will always be left standing.~aw

LOS MAESTROS DE LA RESISTENCIA

February 11th.  The birthday of society healing filmmaker, Pratibha Parmar. And here it is in action, the spirit of love that ignores fear: monks moving the world.  

Happy birthday. ~aw

Brother Waters, thank you for teaching with your whole self. Happy Birthday Bob Marley.  February 6th.   The spirit goes on. ~aw

The world is full of students and teachers. The beauty of teaching, of learning, is immense, satisfying, transformative and potentially life saving.  This teacher, David Icke, is so modest about the gift he brings, it is a joy to witness the affection and respect of his student.~aw

Stars. All three.  Bowing. ~aw

   January

https://youtu.be/MUXO4Y1xLE4?si=zpgQch6zN8nsvIjS

What it feels like to want to go home. ~aw

https://youtu.be/wr58KUcfTcI?si=9m28HmUZsnGYck7v

There are no words. The history, the creativity,  the exuberance.  Even so, Happy Birthday, Martin Luther King, Jr. born January 15th.  This is some of what we feel for you, every day. ~aw

Documentary: The Story of S. Brian Willson

Code Pink:  Media Statement  Venezuela

Other ways of coming home.  American*/ African. ~aw

*Turtle Island.

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