Alexis Pauline Gumbs Quotes

May you study the pink of yourself. Know yourself riverine and coast. May you taste the fresh and the saltwater of yourself and know what only you can know. May you live in the mouth of the river, meeting place of the tides, may all blessings flow through you.

and when you love. you let it go. you put it down. you show your shoulders what to do with sky. and love is how. and love is when. and love is why.

I respect you as so much bigger than my own understanding. And me too. I don't have to be available to be eligible for breath. I don't have to be measurable in a market of memes. I don't have to be visible to be viable on my path. I don't have to be shy to be sacred about my time. There are only two things I have to do, my mom taught me, and I can do them in the company of my choosing. The company of myself, my living, my dead, my folks, my dreams. 1. Stay Black. 2. Breathe.

My love to my pod in all directions. The smooth and the not quite so smooth. Those of you showing your back and those showing your belly. Those of you breaking through the surface and those staying in the deep. It's an honor to be in the midst of you. Look around, listen out. Here we are.

There are at least three ways to love you: as you were, as you are, as you will be. I love you. That means I choose all three. The baby Weddell seal has not grown into her flippers.

Our definition of queer is that which fundamentally transforms our state of being and the possibilities for life. That which is queer is that which does not reproduce the status quo.

Could we communicate more like manatees, who stay in communication in all kinds of emergencies, place their bodies in a way that protects children, touch each other to remember and know?

I do know that sometimes people have seen a part of themselves in me too messy to bear. Do I cherish my wildness more than I fear their rejection?

What are your dorsal practices? What evolutionary repetitions have you cultivated to move through oceans? What are the ones you need to cultivate for the waves moving you now?

I think often about the consequences of colonialism within a threatened group. The cost of losing almost everything. The impact of military normalcy. The multiple violences we endure. What if the path to conservation of any of species remaining on the planet is demilitarization? What is the solidarity, evolutionary sistering, ancestral imperative called for in this moment where US colonial territories are in active refusal? What does it look like to be intolerant of colonialism? What life would spring up, what recovery is possible if the colonial force actually shuts down? I’m asking for a sister of mine, wherever she is now. Three million years ago she taught me something about us. I haven’t forgotten. We deserve to be free.

What do we need to remember that will push back against the forgetting encouraged by consumer culture and linear time? What can we remember that will surround us in oceans of history and potential? And how?

Breathe deep, baby girl, we won. Now life, though not exactly easier, is life all the time. Not chopped down into billable minutes, not narrowed into excuses to hurt and forget each other. I am writing you from the future to remind you to act on your behalf, to live your life as a tribute to our victory and not as a stifling reaction to the past. I am here with so many people that you love and their children and we are eating together and we are tired from full days of working and loving but never too tired to remember where we come from. never exhausted past passion and writing. So I am writing you now.

Where do you think you are going so fast? [Marine mammals] offer slowing down as a strategic intervention in a world on speed, and an appropriate response to the exact urgencies that made us feel we cannot slow down. It is the speed, the speed boats, the momentum of capitalism, the expediency of pollution that threatens the ocean, our marine mammal mentors, and our own lives. What if we could release ourselves from an internalized time clock and remember that slow is efficient, slow is effective, slow is beautiful?

disability justice asserts that ableism helps make racism, christian supremacy, sexism, and queer- and transphobia possible, and that all those systems of oppression are locked up tight. It insists that we organize from our sick, disabled, “brokenbeautiful” (as Alexis Pauline Gumbs5 puts it) bodies’ wisdom, need, and desire.

disability justice asserts that ableism helps make racism, christian supremacy, sexism, and queer- and transphobia possible, and that all those systems of oppression are locked up tight. It insists that we organize from our sick, disabled, “brokenbeautiful” (as Alexis Pauline Gumbs5 puts it) bodies’ wisdom, need, and desire. It means looking at how Indigenous and Black and brown traditions value sick and disabled folks (not as magical cripples but as people of difference whose bodyspirits have valuable smarts), at how in BIPOC communities being sick or disabled can just be “life,” and also at how sick and disabled BIPOC are criminalized. It means asserting a vision of liberation in which destroying ableism is part of social justice. It means the hotness, smarts, and value of our sick and disabled bodies. It means we are not left behind; we are beloved, kindred, needed.

Crip writing is a piece of driftwood I grabbed and hung on to that stopped me from going under, this pandemic two years when everyone died, my best, most-needed beloveds, the ones the world needed the most. By crip writing I mean the crip poetry and writing I read, from PDF online zines and Twitter and blogs and Instagram and more and more and more books every year we made with all our world-changing crip-lit labor. I mean writing it to make meaning out of the rage and empty, the crip bitter and fried of our friends being stolen from us. I mean writing that saves our lives and makes new ones. Every line I write is a nocked arrow, the string pulled back, the exhale of release, the deep c*nt feeling of yes as it hits the mark, as it goes farther than we have before, to the place we knew we needed named. Alexis Pauline Gumbs once wrote, "Our future deserves a present where our truths were written," and we are writing down our crip everyday, and out of that, writing our future.

Yesterday I learned that the breathing of whales is as crucial to our own breathing in the carbon cycle of the planet as are the forests of the world. Researchers say, if whales returned to their pre-commercial whaling numbers, their gigantic breathing would store as much carbon is 110,000 hectares of forest, or a forest the size of Rocky Mountain National Park.

Reproductive Justice is (1) The human right to not have a child; (2) The human right to have a child; and (3) The human right to parent in safe and healthy environments.

The ethos of mothering involves valuing in and of itself a commitment to the survival and thriving of other bodies. It presents a fundamental contradiction to the logic of capitalism, which un-moors us from each other.

It is telling that communal mothering, childcare, and caregiving continue to be one of the most neglected interventions in revolutionary struggle by virtue of their being considered mundane and cumbersome, unlike “real” political work. When this happens, the message poor mothers and their children receive is essentially that their presence and participation in revolutionary struggle do not matter, that they have nothing to contribute.