Adrienne Maree Brown Quotes

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I believe that all organizing is science fiction - that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good)
Your no makes the way for your yes. Boundaries create the container within which your yes is authentic. Being able to say no makes yes a choice.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
I think it is healing behavior, to look at something so broken and see the possibility and wholeness in it.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds)
Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
I touch my own skin, and it tells me that before there was any harm, there was miracle.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good)
There is no way to repress pleasure and expect liberation, satisfaction, or joy.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good)
We are socialized to see what is wrong, missing, off, to tear down the ideas of others and uplift our own. To a certain degree, our entire future may depend on learning to listen, listen without assumptions or defenses.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds)
Pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
Liberated relationships are one of the ways we actually create abundant justice, the understanding that there is enough attention, care, resource, and connection for all of us to access belonging, to be in our dignity, and to be safe in community
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good)
Matter doesn't disappear, it transforms. Energy is the same way. The Earth is layer upon layer of all that has existed, remembered by the dirt.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
What is easy is sustainable. Birds coast when they can.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
Pleasure is the point. Feeling food is not frivolous, it is freedom.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good)
Do you already know that your existence--who and how you are--is in and of itself a contribution to the people and place around you? Not after or because you do some particular thing, but simply the miracle of your life. And that the people around you, and the place(s), have contributions as well? Do you understand that your quality of life and your survival are tied to how authentic and generous the connections are between you and the people and place you live with and in? Are you actively practicing generosity and vulnerability in order to make the connections between you and others clear, open, available, durable? Generosity here means giving of what you have without strings or expectations attached. Vulnerability means showing your needs.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
Pleasure is not one of the spoils of capitalism. It is what our bodies, our human systems, are structured for; it is the aliveness and awakening, the gratitude and humility, the joy and celebration of being miraculous.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
In a fractal conception, I am a cell-sized unit of the human organism, and I have to use my life to leverage a shift in the system by how I am, as much as with the things I do. This means actually being in my life, and it means bringing my values into my daily decision making. Each day should be lived on purpose.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
I believe our imaginations—particularly the parts of our imaginations that hold what we most desire, what brings us pleasure, what makes us scream yes—are where we must seed the future, turn toward justice and liberation, and reprogram ourselves to desire sexually and erotically empowered lives.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
...it must become an incredible pleasure to be able to be honest, expect to be whole, and to know that we are in a community that will hold us accountable and change with us.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good)
Science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together. i suspect that is what many of you are up to, practicing futures together, practicing justice together, living into new stories. It is our right and responsibility to create a new world.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
Remember you are water. Of course you leave salt trails. Of course you are crying. Flow. P.S. If there happens to be a multitude of griefs upon you, individual and collective, or fast and slow, or small and large, add equal parts of these considerations: that the broken heart can cover more territory. that perhaps love can only be as large as grief demands. that grief is the growing up of the heart that bursts boundaries like an old skin or a finished life. that grief is gratitude. that water seeks scale, that even your tears seek the recognition of community. that the heart is a front line and the fight is to feel in a world of distraction. that death might be the only freedom. that your grief is a worthwhile use of your time. that your body will feel only as much as it is able to. that the ones you grieve may be grieving you. that the sacred comes from the limitations. that you are excellent at loving.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds)
It has meant getting in touch with my body and feelings in real time, and learning to express them. I am learning to engage in generative conflict, to say no, to feel my limits, taking time to feel my heartache when it comes—from living in America, from interpersonal trauma or grief, from movement losses.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
Ultimately, love for the self is the deepest pleasure we deny ourselves. I work daily to be courageous enough to indulge in the purest pleasure of self-love.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
We also learn that love is a limited resource and that the love we want and need is too much, that we are too much. We learn to shrink, to lie about the whole love we need, settling with not quite good enough in order to not be alone.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
We need to learn how to practice love such that care—for ourselves and others—is understood as political resistance and cultivating resilience.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
Science fiction, particularly visionary fiction, is where I go when I need the medicine of possibility applied to the trauma of human behavior.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
No one is special, and everyone is needed.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
I will not be perfect, I will keep learning. I will also not be silent, I will keep learning.
Adrienne Maree Brown (We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice)
We are in an imagination battle. Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown and Renisha McBride and so many others are dead because, in some white imagination, they were dangerous. And that imagination is so respected that those who kill, based on an imagined, radicalized fear of Black people, are rarely held accountable. Imagination has people thinking they can go from being poor to a millionaire as part of a shared American dream. Imagination turns Brown bombers into terrorists and white bombers into mentally ill victims. Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of ability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else's capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone' else's imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
We need radical honesty—learning to speak from our root systems about how we feel and what we want. Speak our needs and listen to others’ needs. To say, “I need to hear that you miss me.” “When you’re high all the time it’s hard for me to feel your presence.” “I lied.” “The way you talked to that man made me feel unseen.” “Your jealousy makes me feel like an object and not a partner.” The result of this kind of speech is that our lives begin to align with our longings, and our lives become a building block for authentic community and ultimately a society that is built around true need and real people, not fake news and bullshit norms.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
In her essay “On the Issue of Roles,” Toni Cade explains that if we want to have a revolution, we have to craft revolutionary relationships, in action, not simply in rhetoric.56 She explains that a revolution cannot be created by conforming to existing roles in relationships already defined by the systems we want to overthrow. We have to practice creating new relationships.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
I believe that we are in an imagination battle, and almost everything about how we orient toward our bodies is shaped by fearful imaginations. Imaginations that fear Blackness, brownness, fatness, queerness, disability, difference. Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
This is relationship building. And this is building trust. And consensually understanding how to be moved and inspired by each other without sometimes assuming that energy has to be sexual. That maybe that’s just an erotic exchange that’s actually about sharing knowledge, memory, power, and that to me is understanding levels of intimacy in relationship to liberation.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
If the goal was to increase the love, rather than winning or dominating a constant opponent, I think we could actually imagine liberation from constant oppression. We would suddenly be seeing everything we do, everyone we meet, not through the tactical eyes of war, but through eyes of love. We would see that there's no such thing as a blank canvas, an empty land or a new idea - but everywhere there is complex, ancient, fertile ground full of potential.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
The plant people have taught me to be generous and not be shy about blossoming, that it is our nature. I think when others see us, it can inspire them to open up and blossom too and we can be a field ablaze with dignity and beauty together.” —Brenda Salgado
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds)
so many of us have been trained into the delusion that we must accumulate excess, even at the cost of vast inequality, in order to view our lives as complete or successful.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
sister” is a verb.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
In other words, I want an erotic that demands space be made for honest bodies that like to also fuck.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good)
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves. 25
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
I have seen, over and over, the connection between tuning in to what brings aliveness into our systems and bring able to access personal, relational and communal power. Conversely, I have seen how denying our full, complex selves—denying our aliveness and our needs as living, sensual beings—increases the chance that we will be at odds with ourselves, our loved ones, our coworkers, and our neighbors on this planet.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good)
E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G—is connected. The soil needs rain, organic matter, air, worms and life in order to do what it needs to do to give and receive life. Each element is an essential component. “Organizing takes humility and selflessness and patience and rhythm while our ultimate goal of liberation will take many expert components. Some of us build and fight for land, healthy bodies, healthy relationships, clean air, water, homes, safety, dignity, and humanizing education. Others of us fight for food and political prisoners and abolition and environmental justice. Our work is intersectional and multifaceted. Nature teaches us that our work has to be nuanced and steadfast. And more than anything, that we need each other—at our highest natural glory—in order to get free.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds)
I believe that we are part of a natural world that is constantly changing, and we need to learn to adapt together and stay in relationship if we hope to survive as a species.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
Art is not neutral. It either upholds or disrupts the status quo, advancing or regressing justice. We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
Are you actively practicing generosity and vulnerability in order to make the connections between you and others clear, open, available, durable? Generosity here means giving of what you have without strings or expectations attached. Vulnerability means showing your needs.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds)
that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
If I can see the ways I am perpetuating systemic oppressions, if I can see where I learned the behavior and how hard it is to unlearn it, I start to have more humility as I see the messiness of the communities I am part of, the world I live in.
Adrienne Maree Brown (We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice)
Fiction that centers those who are currently marginalized—not to be nice, but because those who survive on the margins tend to be the most experientially innovative—practicing survival-based efficiency, doing the most with the least, an important skill area on a planet whose resources are under assault by less marginalized people.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds)
and she noticed who stayed, and it was the same people who had always been there.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements)
I have learned the difference between intolerable feelings and intolerable conditions.
Adrienne Maree Brown (We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice)
When we imagine the world we want to shift towards, are we dreaming of being the winners of the future? Or are we dreaming of a world where winning is no longer necessary because there are no enemies?
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds)
Movements tend to become the practice ground for what we are healing towards, co-creating. Movements are responsible for embodying what we are inviting our people into. We need the people within our movements, all socialized into and by unjust systems, to be on liberators paths. Not already free, but practicing freedom every day. Not already beyond harm, but accountable for doing our individual and internal work to end harm and engage in generative conflict, which includes actively working to gain awareness of the ways we can and have harmed each other, where we have significant political differences, and where we can end cycles of harm and unprincipled struggles in ourselves and our communities.
Adrienne Maree Brown (We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice)
God is one answer to our need to explain ourselves, to make sense of ourselves. But the moment you just accept yourself, then no explanation is needed, and god is everything together and nothing in particular.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements)
Imagination is one of the spoils of colonization, which in many ways is claiming who gets to imagine the future for a given geography. Losing our imagination is a symptom of trauma. Reclaiming the right to dream the future, strengthening the muscle to imagine together as Black people, is a revolutionary decolonizing activity.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
The additional truth is, even though we want to help the survivor, we love obsessing over and punishing “villains.” We end up putting more of our collective attention on punishing those accused of causing harm than supporting and centering the healing of survivors, and/or building pathways for those who are in cycles of causing harm to change.
Adrienne Maree Brown (We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice)
She felt the night air on her, pretending she was somewhere else, in some other time. She often did this before she did something reckless. Her hope was that, if she died, her soul would travel to the last beautiful place she imagined.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements)
My intentions for readers of this book are that you recognize that pleasure is a measure of freedom; notice what makes you feel good and what you are curious about; learn ways you can increase the amount of feeling-good time in your life, to have abundant pleasure; decrease any internal or projected shame or scarcity thinking around the pursuit of pleasure, quieting any voices of trauma that keep you from your full sacred sensual life; create more room for joy, wholeness, and aliveness (and less room for oppression, repression, self-denial and unnecessary suffering) in your life; identify strategies beyond denial or repression for navigating pleasure in relationship to others; and begin to understand the liberation possible when we collectively orient around pleasure and longing. Bonus: realize you are a pleasure activist!
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
People try to shame me for being fat. When I am walking down the street, men lean out of their car windows and shout vulgar things at me about my body, how they see it and how it upsets them that I am not catering to their gaze and their preferences and desires. I try not to take these men seriously because what they are really saying is, ‘I am not attracted to you. I do not want to fuck you and this confuses my understanding of masculinity, entitlement, and place in this world.’ It is not my job to please them with my body.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good)
We have experienced what it's like to release any assumption that one person has all the skills needed to lead and support the work.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
Ursula Le Guin recently said, "It's up to authors to spark the imagination of their readers and to help them envision alternatives to how we live.".
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
and mushrooms—the resilience in these structures, which we think of as weeds and fungi, the incomprehensible scale, the clarity of identity, excites me.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds)
until they faced Detroit like gods, or Canadians, seeing the city spiral up and away from them, from the river.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Maroons (Black Dawn #2))
Most of the time it felt like she had too much happening in her head to get it coherent in her mouth.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Grievers: (Grievers Trilogy, Book 1) (Black Dawn))
we can offer each other tools and education to make sure sex, desire, drugs, connection, and other pleasures aren’t life-threatening or harming but life-enriching.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
Don't sit this out. It has room for you. Find out, start, or help shape what is happening in your town.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
We presume our power, not our powerlessness. We are agents, not victims. We spend more time building than attacking.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
destroying a person doesn’t destroy all of the systems that allow harmful people to do harm
Adrienne Maree Brown (We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice)
Accountability isn’t punishment, though it is frequently wielded as such.
Adrienne Maree Brown (We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice)
While all harms are not equal, even the most heinous require a way home.
Adrienne Maree Brown (We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice)
the fractal nature of our sacred design teaches us that our smallest choices today will become our next norms.
Adrienne Maree Brown (We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice)
I want our movement to feel like a vibrant, accountable space where causing harm does not mean you are excluded immediately and eternally from healing, justice, community, or belonging.
Adrienne Maree Brown (We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice)
Adapting allows you to know and name current needs and capacity, to be in relationship in real time, as opposed to any cycle of wishing and/or resenting what others do or don’t give you.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds)
What we need is a culture where the common experience of trauma leads to a normalization of healing. Being able to say I have good reasons to be scared of the dark, of raised voices, of being swallowed up by love, of being alone. And being able to offer each other: I know a healer for you. I'll hold your hand in the dark. Let's begin a meditation practice. Perhaps talk therapy is not enough. We should celebrate love in our community as a measure of healing. The expectation should be -- I know we are all in need of healing -- so how are we doing our healing work?
Adrienne Maree Brown (All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger, and the Female Body)
There are so many formations I am not a part of—my non-participation is all I need to say. When I do offer critique, it si from a space of relationship, partnership, and advancing a solution.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
Humans are unique because we compete when it isn't necessary. We could reason our way to more sustainable processes, but we use our intelligence to outsmart each other. We compete for fun, for ego.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
[...] "all organizing is science fiction," by which we mean that social justice work is about creating systems of justice and equity in the future, creating conditions that we have never experienced.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
We call it "transformative justice" when we're throwing knives and insults, exposing each other's worst mistakes, reducing each other to moments of failure. We call it "holding each other accountable.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
Visionary fiction” is a term we developed to distinguish science fiction that has relevance toward building new, freer worlds from the mainstream strain of science fiction, which most often reinforces dominant narratives of power. Visionary fiction encompasses all of the fantastic, with the arc always bending toward justice. We believe this space is vital for any process of decolonization, because the decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive form there is: for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born. Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements)
Knee-jerk call outs say: those who cause harm or mess up or disagree with us cannot change and cannot belong. They must be eradicated. The bad things in the world cannot change, we must disappear the bad until there is only good left. But one layer under that, what I hear is: We cannot change. We do not believe we can create compelling pathways from being harm doers to being healed, to growing. We do not believe we can hold the complexity of a gray situation. We do not believe in our own complexity. We do not believe we can navigate conflict and struggle in principled ways. We can only handle binary thinking: good/bad, innocent/guilty, angel/abuser, black/white, etc.
Adrienne Maree Brown (We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice)
But if we want to create a world in which conflict and trauma aren’t the center of our collective existence, we have to practice something new, ask different questions, access again our curiosity about each other as a species.
Adrienne Maree Brown (We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice)
We need to move from competitive ideation, trying to push our individual ideas, to collective ideation, collaborative ideation. It isn’t about having the number one best idea, but having ideas that come from, and work for, more people.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
The call outs generally share one side of what’s happened and then call for immediate consequences. And within a day, the call out is everywhere, the cycle of blame and shame activated, and whoever was called out has begun being publicly punished. Sometimes, there are consequences—loss of job, community, reputation, platform. Sometimes there is just derision, and calls for disappearance. The details of the offense blur or compound as others add their own opinions and experiences to the story.
Adrienne Maree Brown (We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice)
We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future. All organizing is science fiction.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
look at the anatomy of trees as one of nature’s examples of successful organizing that realizes that our power is in our ability to both be fiercely centered and grounded but also infinitely reaching towards our unique sources of energy, light, and growth. Each tree’s elements are reliant on one another but totally unique in form and function. There is no competition or pressure to be the root or the trunk or the buds that bloom. Each tree is a universe, a master delegator, a puzzle and a puzzle piece. They have encouraged me to not worry so much about making everyone ‘feel important’ and to focus on how to create systems and support efforts where everyone is important and clear on how their work is unique, crucial and totally interconnected.” —Morgan Mann Willis
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds)
We are afraid of being hurt, afraid because we have been hurt, afraid because we have caused hurt, afraid because we live in a world that wants to hurt us whether we have hurt others or not, just based on who we are, on any otherness from some long-ago determined norm.
Adrienne Maree Brown (We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice)
the more I learn to feel, the less time it takes a time-traveling emotion to catch me. years instead of decades, hours instead of months, seconds instead of weeks. I am even learning, sometimes/more often, to feel in real time. and to survive feeling a whole emotion in real time.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
Audre Lorde taught us that caring for ourselves is “not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”52 And although we know how to meme and tweet those words, living into them is harder. We have a deeper socialization to overcome, one that tells us that most of us don’t matter—our health, our votes, our work, our safety, our families, our lives don’t matter—not as much as those of white men. We need to learn how to practice love such that care—for ourselves and others—is understood as political resistance and cultivating resilience.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
b) ‘A Muslim is like a date palm tree whose leaves do not fall, always beneficial and never harmful.’ “This influences my organizing by reminding me that my core responsibility is to be a benefit to whatever I’m engaged in. I may not always know HOW that will happen but it has to be my aim. I want peoples’ lives to have been better (even in very tiny ways) from having participated with me in this work. This means to me that I bring beautiful words, actions, ideas, and behaviors into spaces. At the end of it all even if we don’t see the fruits of our labor, shouldn’t we be able to say we loved and enjoyed each other? That’s why I want to act and be like a palm tree, providing shade, covering my comrades (instead of throwing shade lol). I want to provide food (dates). I want to be what they can lean on. I want to be a resource, sustaining our work.” —Aisha Shillingford “I
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds)
We had to begin to practice deep, authentic collaboration. This meant a shift in how we move financial and human resources—there are enough people out there to support the movement(s) we need, but currently, organizations are pitted against each other to access money (less and less money), rather than creating and investing together to maximize a diversity of resources from money, to people, to spaces, to skills. Because we are not investing in a shared network of resources, it is easy to let structural and ideological particularities create deep splits throughout the non-profit sphere, rendering much of our work useless.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds)
But lately, as the attacks grow faster and more vicious, I wonder: is this what we’re here for? To cultivate a fear-based adherence to reductive common values? What can this lead to in an imperfect world full of sloppy, complex humans? Is it possible we will call each other out until there’s no one left beside us?
Adrienne Maree Brown (We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice)
I want us to ask who benefits from our hopelessness, and to deny our oppressors the satisfaction of getting to see our pain. I want them to wonder how we foment such consistent and deep solidarity and unlearning. I want our infiltrators to be astounded into their own transformations, having failed to tear us apart.
Adrienne Maree Brown (We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice)
Identifying what your group can do well, is passionate about, and is needed—that's the sweet spot. That's your mission. Your mission should be brief and clear, so that you can refer to it at moments of decision, at forks in your organizational road. It should resonate with everyone in the organization, a compelling statement that makes everyone want to show up and kick ass.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
We stumble, we trip, we fall down, we get up. We stumble, we trip, we fall down, we get up. The body transforms, the mind transforms, everything transforms. Some people start with the mind, some people start with the body, some people start with communities. Whatever the case is, where you start and witness transformation—take it into all aspects of your life. Let it seep in.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
We are touching the future, reaching out across boundaries and post-apocalyptic conditions to touch each other, to call each other out as family, as beloveds. “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.” we are making ourselves vulnerable enough to be changed, which will of course change what Black existence means. Octavia Butler, who gave us that philosophical spirit poem “Earthseed” that I just quoted, is a bridge for many of us, between this world, and the narratives that pull us through to the next realm, or the parallel universe, or the future in which we are the protagonists. We are creating a world we have never seen. We are whispering it to each other cuddled in the dark, and we are screaming it at people who are so scared of it that they dress themselves in war regalia to turn and face us.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
Here are some reasons we swallow our truths: - Capitalism: we are taught that love is about belonging to one person or community, and we must contort in order to ensure continued belonging. We are taught that our value is in what we can produce, and emotions impede production. - The oppression of supremacy: we are taught that, if we are not white, male, straight, able, wealthy, adult, etc., our truths don't matter. This starts very early, we are taught that our feelings and thoughts as children are unimportant, that we are to "be seen and not heard". - The oppression of false peace: we are taught that our truths are disruptive, and that disruption is a negative act. This one is particularly insidious, and ties back into capitalism—only those moving towards profit can adds would create disruption, everyone else should be complacent consumers.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
Gibrán Rivera once articulated a question to me: "What is the next most elegant step?" [...] An elegant step is one that acknowledges what is known and unknown, and what the capacity of this group actually is. An elegant step allows humility, allows people to say "Actually we need to do some research" or "Actually we need to talk to some folks not in this room" or "Actually we need a full day to build this plan out into something realistic and attainable.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
central aspect of pleasure activism is tapping into the natural abundance that exists within and between us, and between our species and this planet. Pleasure is not one of the spoils of capitalism. It is what our bodies, our human systems, are structured for; it is the aliveness and awakening, the gratitude and humility, the joy and celebration of being miraculous. So rather than encouraging moderation over and over, I want to ask you to relinquish your own longing for excess and to stay mindful of your relationship to enough.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
The natural world manifests life in ecosystems, not monocultures. One of my favorite ways of understanding nature creating more possibilities, is to watch water move through the world. Water creates the ways for itself, moving with gravity, moving around obstacles, wearing down obstacles, reshaping the world. When there isn't an overt way forward, water seeps into the land, becomes a vapor in the sky, freezes into ice. When the time comes, water moves over the land in cloud form and nourishes elsewhere. And, of course, we humans are mostly water. And look how many ways we manifest.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
I have been in movement spaces for a long time and we have a way of doing things that is so steeped in critique that I have often wondered if we would strangle movement before it could blossom. Sometimes I think we put up the critiques to excuse ourselves from getting involved, and sometimes I think we do it to protect our hearts from getting broken if it doesn't work out. Critique, alone, can keep us from having to pick up the responsibility of figuring out solutions. Sometimes I think we need to liberate ourselves from critique, both internal and external, to truly give change a chance.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
Pleasure Principles What you pay attention to grows. This will be familiar to those who have read Emergent Strategy. Actually, all the emergent strategy principles also apply here! (Insert eggplant emoji). Tune into happiness, what satisfies you, what brings you joy. We become what we practice. I learned this through studying somatics! In his book The Leadership Dojo, Richard Strozzi-Heckler shares that “300 repetitions produce body memory … [and] 3,000 repetitions creates embodiment.”12 Yes is the way. When it was time to move to Detroit, when it was time to leave my last job, when it was time to pick up a meditation practice, time to swim, time to eat healthier, I knew because it gave me pleasure when I made and lived into the decision. Now I am letting that guide my choices for how I organize and for what I am aiming toward with my work—pleasure in the processes of my existence and states of my being. Yes is a future. When I feel pleasure, I know I am on the right track. Puerto Rican pleasure elder Idelisse Malave shared with me that her pleasure principle is “If it pleases me, I will.” When I am happy, it is good for the world.13 The deepest pleasure comes from riding the line between commitment and detachment.14 Commit yourself fully to the process, the journey, to bringing the best you can bring. Detach yourself from ego and outcomes. Make justice and liberation feel good. Your no makes the way for your yes. Boundaries create the container within which your yes is authentic. Being able to say no makes yes a choice. Moderation is key.15 The idea is not to be in a heady state of ecstasy at all times, but rather to learn how to sense when something is good for you, to be able to feel what enough is. Related: pleasure is not money. Pleasure is not even related to money, at least not in a positive way. Having resources to buy unlimited amounts of pleasure leads to excess, and excess totally destroys the spiritual experience of pleasure.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
Nature vs. nurture is part of this—and then there is what I think of as anti-nurturing—the ways we in a western/US context are socialized to work against respecting the emergent processes of the world and each other: We learn to disrespect Indigenous and direct ties to land. We learn to be quiet, polite, indirect, and submissive, not to disturb the status quo. We learn facts out of context of application in school. How will this history, science, math show up in our lives, in the work of growing community and home? We learn that tests and deadlines are the reasons to take action. This puts those with good short-term memories and a positive response to pressure in leadership positions, leading to urgency-based thinking, regardless of the circumstance. We learn to compete with each other in a scarcity-based economy that denies and destroys the abundant world we actually live in. We learn to deny our longings and our skills, and to do work that occupies our hours without inspiring our greatness. We learn to manipulate each other and sell things to each other, rather than learning to collaborate and evolve together. We learn that the natural world is to be manicured, controlled, or pillaged to support our consumerist lives. Even the natural lives of our bodies get medicated, pathologized, shaved or improved upon with cosmetic adjustments. We learn that factors beyond our control determine the quality of our lives—something as random as which skin, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, or belief system we are born into sets a path for survival and quality of life. In the United States specifically, though I see this most places I travel, we learn that we only have value if we can produce—only then do we earn food, home, health care, education. Similarly, we learn our organizations are only as successful as our fundraising results, whether the community impact is powerful or not. We learn as children to swallow our tears and any other inconvenient emotions, and as adults that translates into working through red flags, value differences, pain, and exhaustion. We learn to bond through gossip, venting, and destroying, rather than cultivating solutions together. Perhaps the most egregious thing we are taught is that we should just be really good at what’s already possible, to leave the impossible alone.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds)
Another metaphor I use for mediation is the "river of time". I often find that people's attention is flowing along the river of time. One person or group's attention is flowing towards the past, towards what has already happened. They can't see the present, or turn towards the future. Meanwhile the other person or group's attention is flowing towards the future, and they don't understand why things can't move forward. Everyone generally thinks they are standing still, being present, in the present. Once people come into awareness of which way their attention is flowing, they have increased agency. There is usually stuff in the past that needs to be resolved to be able to look towards the future. Or their river needs to diverge into two or more channels of water. It's ok...it's all flowing towards the sea anyway.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Emergent Strategy, #0))
It's sacred work, love. It's an altar." Dune hesitated to own that. "I've been seeing it as a research project. I mean Kama used to make altars. But we never had some clear lineage. I don't want to be..." Dune paused, then made a gesture of grabbing things all around her. "You can't, Don't worry." "Yes, I can. I don't belong to anything, it doesn't belong to me." "Well that's just the thing," Elouise turned to Dune with soft eyes. "When everything has been taken, filling that emptiness ain't appropriation. It's something else. It ain't pure, none of it. I think of these practices, my Orisha, my altars, my prayers and chants, and all this accumulation of spiritual armor, as something to comfort me when my ancestral ghost limbs hurt. Because I need Spirit so much! I answer what calls me ­­­­­- Spirit is bigger than any lineage! It comes through all these channels. It's complicated, beautifully complicated. But it ain't appropriation, not amongst displaced and denied peoples. It's different.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Grievers (Grievers, #1))