Lakshmi Quotes

Do more than:Stop self-destructing. Save each other. Not have a nervous breakdown or six by twenty five. Decolonize our minds, our hair, our hearts. Transform into the phoenixes we were all meant to be.

I find, that, in general, alliances based on friendship are the only things that last. Not alliances based on words and letters.

It [i.e. disability justice] means we are not left behind; we are beloved, kindred, needed.

When you find yourself in one of those mystical/devotional frames of mind or in am emergency and you feel you want to pray, then pray. Don’t ever be ashamed to pray or feel prevented by thinking yourself unworthy in any way. Fact is whatever terrible thing you may have done, praying will always turn your energy around for the better. Pray to whomever, whatever, and whenever you choose. Pray to the mountain, pray to the ancestors, pray to the Earth, pray to the Tao (but it won’t listen!), pray to the Great Mother, pray to Jehovah, Allah, Buddha, Jesus, Lakshmi, Siva, pray to the Great Spirit, it makes no difference. Praying is merely a device for realigning the mind, energy, and passion of your local self with the mind, energy and passion of your universal self. When you pray, you are praying to the god or goddess within you. This has an effect on your energy field, which in turn translates into a positive charge that makes something good happen.

Misunderstanding is one of the worst of ill feelings which can spoil many lives.

Life is but a play of chance in the game of choice.

Inclusion without power or leadership is tokenism.

A Disability Justice framework understands that all bodies are unique and essential, that all bodies have strengths and needs that must be met.

Is understanding that disabled people have a full-time job managing their disabilities and the medical-industrial complex and the world—so regular expectations about work, energy, and life can go right out the window.

I said I loved her. That was when all the problems started

I was told that Ganesha sat between Lakshmi and Saraswati. My quest to attain the blessings of both goddesses explains my physique.

We can't be responsible for other people's reactions to us, Lakshmi," she said. "We can only make sure our intentions are good.

A "matriarchal world" does not mean matrilineal or that one queen shall rule the world. It simply means "a world in which a Mother's Heart leads all social institutions, corporations, and governments." All humans-men, women, or transgender-can embody a mother's heart if they so choose. We are destined for extinction as a human race unless a mother's heart assumes leadership of the world.

I realize how much I have wanted this and not gotten it [good love], realize how much it is branded in my heart that, to be happy, alone, and childless is a fucking gift that most women get brainwashed into relinquishing.

Lakshmi massages Vishnu’s feet. Is this male domination? Kali stands on Shiva’s chest. Is this female domination? Shiva is half a woman. Is this gender equality? Why then is Shakti never half a man?

To me, one quality of disability justice culture is that it is simultaneously beautiful and practical. Poetry and dance are as valuable as a blog post about access hacks - because they're equally important and interdependent.

Simply being born female in our society is to grow up being told your worth as a person is tied to how slim and attractive you are. Even for those of us lucky enough to have evolved parents, the message is still driven home by the world at large.

Women have been looking for a cape and have been handed an apron for centuries. But here was a man who wanted to help women swing their apron around, let it flutter down their backs and watch them soar through the clear blue skies

It's dark because you're trying too hard," said Susila. "Dark because you want it to be light. Remember what you used to tell me when I was a little girl. 'Lightly, child, lightly. You've got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you're feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.' I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly—it was the best advice ever given me. Well, now I'm going to say the same thing to you, Lakshmi . . . Lightly, my darling, lightly. Even when it comes to dying. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self-conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Goethe or Little Nell. And, of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the Clear Light. So throw away all your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That's why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling. On tiptoes; and no luggage, not even a sponge bag. Completely unencumbered.

Disabled people caring for each other can be a place of deep healing,” says Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice.

Brynne Tvarika Lakshmi Balamuralikrishna Rao had always been strong. Like, so strong that even her shadow bristled with muscles and other shadows would wither away in its presence.

Janaka gave his daughters to the sons of Dashratha, saying, ‘I give you Lakshmi, wealth, who will bring you pleasure and prosperity. Grant me Saraswati, wisdom. Let me learn the joy of letting go.’ This ritual came to be known as kanya-daan,

People’s fear of accessing care didn’t come out of nowhere. It came out of generations and centuries where needed care meant being locked up, losing your human and civil rights, and being subject to abuse.

In the morning stillness, when the world is just waking up and your conscious mind hasn't fully taken over, you may feel a connection or passageway to another world, and a feeling that something is about to happen in yours. It's like a quiet storm is coming. You can feel the distant rumble of thunder on the horizon, yet you have no idea of the deluge your life is about to experience.

Sometimes surviving abuse isn't terrible. Sometimes, when you leave your whole life behind, it feels blissfully free. Stepping away from everything you've known. The bliss of your very first door that shuts all the way. Wind between your legs. Stopping everything that happened for seven generations. Free. Free. Free.

We're sistas. We treat each other like sistas. That's the blessin'. That's the problem. We come together cause we're both bein' fucked over by the same people. We get close. And then we fall in love with each other cause us third world diva gals are beautiful and blessed like none other.

The thing I always wanted to say is that surviving abuse sucks. But it's also a choose-your-own-adventure story.

we eat for our stomachs, but we hunger with our hearts.

Too often self-care in our organizational cultures gets translated to our individual responsibility to leave work early, go home - alone - and go take a bath, go to the gym, eat some food and go to sleep. So we do all of that 'self-care' to return to organizational cultures where we reproduce the systems we are trying to break.

Nonetheless, with tears coming to her eyes she was also recalling every time that she had been cruelly teased and bullied for no reason that she could relate to. None of it had ever been physical, yet somehow the names she had been called, and the remarks made about her family, had scarred Lakshmi far deeper and more perpetually then any hand could have inflicted.

Mainstream ideas of “healing” deeply believe in ableist ideas that you’re either sick or well, fixed or broken, and that nobody would want to be in a disabled or sick or mad bodymind. Unsurprisingly and unfortunately, these ableist ideas often carry over into healing spaces that call themselves “alternative” or “liberatory.” The healing may be acupuncture and herbs, not pills and surgery, but assumptions in both places abound that disabled and sick folks are sad people longing to be “normal,” that cure is always the goal, and that disabled people are objects who have no knowledge of our bodies. And deep in both the medical-industrial complex and “alternative” forms of healing that have not confronted their ableism is the idea that disabled people can’t be healers.

After meticulously analyzing videos of 185 venture capital presentations — looking at both verbal and nonverbal behavior — Lakshmi ended up with results that surprised her: the strongest predictor of who got the money was not the person’s credentials or the content of the pitch. The strongest predictors of who got the money were these traits: confidence, comfort level, and passionate enthusiasm.

It’s not about self-care—it’s about collective care. Collective care means shifting our organizations to be ones where people feel fine if they get sick, cry, have needs, start late because the bus broke down, move slower, ones where there’s food at meetings, people work from home—and these aren’t things we apologize for. It is the way we do the work, which centers disabled-femme-of-color ways of being in the world, where many of us have often worked from our sickbeds, our kid beds, or our too-crazy-to-go-out-today beds. Where we actually care for each other and don’t leave each other behind. Which is what we started with, right?

Brynne Tvarika Lakshmi Balamuralikrishna Rao was a lot of things. She was an amazing cook, and a fierce wrestler. She had an awful temper and once tried to crack a cinder block just by barreling into it headfirst. Granted, she got knocked out for an hour, but the cinder block definitely had a line through it, so that was pretty much a win. Brynne was even fairly decent at playing the harp, though she hated admitting that her uncles, Gunky and Funky, had signed her up for lessons on that instrument. But if there was one thing she was known for, it was never giving up. She absolutely, flat-out refused.

Things have a way of turning up when they want to be found, though they may not always be the things you actually want to find.

Cooking was something women did to nourish and nurture their families, whereas for men it was largely something they did professionally to gain money and status.

Like many immigrants, I had always kept my Eastern and Western lives compartmentalized.

And so I was left with a mantra, a sort of haiku version of our relationship: I don’t regret one day I spent with him, nor did I leave a moment too soon.

Honest wealth (Devi Lakshmi) can’t come and stay in a home where someone is infected with the Asurrah of lust.

Diwali is about setting goals, not accumulating gold. As Lakshmi comes from Lakshya, meaning Goal.

Access is complex. It is more than just having a ramp or getting disabled folks/crips into the meeting. Access is a constant process that doesn’t stop. It is hard and even when you have help, it can be impossible to figure out alone.

Durga is the strength and protective power in nature, Lakshmi is its beauty. As Kali is the darkness of night and the great dissolve into nirvana, Lakshmi is the brightness of day and the expansiveness of teeming life. She can be found in rich soil and flowing waters, in streams and lakes that teem with fish. She is one of those goddesses whose signature energy is most accessible through the senses. You can detect her in the fragrance of flowers or of healthy soil. You can see her in the leafed-out trees of June and hear her voice in morning birdsong. If Durga is military band music and Kali heavy metal, Lakshmi is Mozart. She’s chocolate mousse, satiny sheets, the soft feeling of water slipping through your fingers. Lakshmi is growth, renewal, sweetness.

Many of us who are disabled are not particularly likable or popular in general or amid the abled. Ableism means that we—with our panic attacks, our trauma, our triggers, our nagging need for fat seating or wheelchair access, our crankiness at inaccessibility, again, our staying home—are seen as pains in the ass, not particularly cool or sexy or interesting. Ableism, again, insists on either the supercrip (able to keep up with able-bodied club spaces, meetings, and jobs with little or no access needs) or the pathetic cripple. Ableism and poverty and racism mean that many of us are indeed in bad moods. Psychic difference and neurodivergence also mean that we may be blunt, depressed, or “hard to deal with” by the tenants of an ableist world.

While motherhood and warship were associated with Parvati and Durga, Tantra was associated to Kali, food and agriculture to Annapurna, knowledge and education to Saraswati and, of course, luck and money to Lakshmi.

Disability Justice allowed me to understand that me writing from my sickbed wasn't me being week or uncool or not a real writer but a time-honoured crip creative practice. And that understanding allowed me to finally write from a disabled space, for and about sick and disabled people, including myself, without feeling like I was writing about boring, private things that no one would understand.

How anguished must be the ocean, to sigh in waves

Everything that smells sweet, doesn't taste sweet!!

Ethical use of anything sets everything right, and also makes space for more.

Commitment is easy before a relationship requires compromise and obligation.

I could worry about his health but somehow not about my own. We throw ourselves away a little each day.

Every woman has a record of her body—a closet full of jeans and bras of various sizes, albums full of photographs revealing periods of weight gain and loss.

Memory can move very swiftly. Words do not possess the same swiftness.

Diwali (Lakshmi Pujan/Amavasya) is the darkest night of the year. And our ancestors have taught us to overcome darkness with light. When the moon is not shining, neither the sun, sky is dark; India glitters. Proud of being part of such a wise and one of the finest tradition. Diwali is practicing "तमसोमा जोतिर्गमय" . . . Happy Diwali to all. May der b light in your life. . .

Recently, Stacey Milbern brought up the concept of “crip doulas”—other disabled people who help bring you into disability community or into a different kind of disability than you may have experienced before. The more seasoned disabled person who comes and sits with your new crip self and lets you know the hacks you might need, holds space for your feelings, and shares the community’s stories. She mentioned that it’s telling that there’s not even a word for this in mainstream English. We wondered together: How would it change people’s experiences of disability and their fear of becoming disabled if this were a word, and a way of being? What if this was a rite of passage, a form of emotional labor folks knew of—this space of helping people transition? I have done this with hundreds of people. What if this is something we could all do for each other? How would our movements change? Our lives? Our beliefs about what we can do?

Perhaps I didn’t voice my unhappiness soon enough; rather, I spent more time feeling like a disappointment and scrambling to patch our cracks than I did considering whether he required an unreasonable level of tending.

If white healers slap “healing justice” on their work but are still using the healing traditions of some folks’ cultures that aren’t their own, are primarily working and treating white middle-class and upper-class people, are unaware or don’t recognize that HJ was created by Black and brown femmes, are not working with a critical stance and understanding of how colonization, racism, and ableism are healing issues … it ain’t healing justice.

I always thought that what Rajima did with those cast-off peels was a metaphor for how she dealt with her arranged marriage. She transformed those peels, with palm sugar for sweetness and tamarind for tang, into something precious.

It's not about self-care - it's about collective care. Collective care means shifting our organizations to be ones where people feel fine if they get sick, cry, have needs, start late because the bus broke down, more slower, ones where there's food at meetings, people work from home - and these aren't things we apologize for.

But our focus is less on civil rights legislation as the only solution to ableism and more on a vision of liberation that understands that the state was built on racist, colonialist ableism and will not save us, because it was created to kill us.

Everyone I know longs for healing. It’s just hard to get. The good kind of healing: healing that is affordable, has childcare and no stairs, doesn’t misgender us or disrespect our disabilities or sex work, believes us when we’re hurt and listens when we say what we need, understands that we are the first and last authority on our own bodies and minds.

To enter the corporate rat race, you need to become a rat.

Maybe that old adage about not being able to have a good apartment, a good relationship, and a good job at the same time is true.

Hearing doctors tell you that you can’t get pregnant does not extinguish the hope.

It is well to love beautiful things, but do not let them possess you.

I cannot remember what we talked about except that we never stopped talking.

He was everything I wasn’t. He was a lot of what I wanted to be.

I once asked her if she was happy. “That depends on what I am able to get done today,” she said, laughing.

And somewhere in that sweaty brown hot box of brown gay, I found myself.

When you’re angry you act according to your emotions, not with your mind.

Dont just rest in ur nest, spread your wings and find your zest!!

At the end of a marriage, no one wins. There is only anger, sorrow, guilt, emptiness, and defeat.

At first, I was grateful to be the object of such intense desire. Yet what’s flattering in the first year can be suffocating in the eighth.

We throw ourselves away a little each day.

A name is a marker of identity but there are markers we cannot change, like the color of our bodies.

Sick and disabled and neurodivergent folks aren’t supposed to dream, especially if we are queer and Black or brown—we’re just supposed to be grateful the “normals” let us live.

Tell me, comes the song, have you brought me the moon?

You don’t need to be a writer to be a storyteller. Your story is enough. —Padma Lakshmi

Lakshmi, goddess of wealth,

As Indra’s wife, Lakshmi is known as Sachi and Indra is known as Sachin.

As we walked to the T, Lakshmi spoke with despair about Isabelle's cardigan, about how smart it was, and how effortlessly Isabelle trod the fine line between sexy and angelic.

If Lakshmi brings wealth, then Saraswati brings peace. The two are rarely seen together. Only Ganesha is able to bring them together. He removes the obstacle to wisdom.

If Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, one day favours me bountifully, Oxford is fifth on the list of cities I would like to visit before I pass on, after Mecca, Varanasi, Jerusalem and Paris.

Short aggressive men kept dancing up close to Lakshmi, who had found a way to incorporate rejection into her dancing, rolling her eyes and tossing her hair and angling her lovely shoulders away.

For years awaiting this apocalypse, I have worried that as sick and disabled people, we will be the ones abandoned when our cities flood. But I am dreaming the biggest disabled dream of my life—dreaming not just of a revolutionary movement in which we are not abandoned but of a movement in which we lead the way. With all of our crazy, adaptive-deviced, loving kinship and commitment to each other, we will leave no one behind as we roll, limp, stim, sign, and move in a million ways towards cocreating the decolonial living future. I am dreaming like my life depends on it. Because it does.

Understanding that it’s a sacred task to not shame each other for being in bed in a world where completing the Ironman or going to Zumba is shoved down everyone’s throats with no understanding of how “healthy” can hurt.

Dialogues with such inspiring idols as Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou, E E Cummings, Rabindranath Tagore, Lakshmi Prasad Devkota, Ernest Hemingway in one's imagination is a way to keep the creative fire burning within the artist's soul.

But now I was home. In my home, home home, once and for all. I had had various apartments before in quite a few cities over the course of my life, but this was the first one I owned, and it felt good. A roof over my head and a place to be private, to cry, to laugh, to gorge, to hope, to dream, to wallow, and to pray for things was a salve to my soul.

Fair trade emotional economics are consensual. In a fair trade femme care emotional labor economy, there would no unconsensual expectations of automatic caretaking/mommying. People would ask first and be prepared to receive a yes, no, or maybe. I ask if you can offer care or support; you think about whether you’ve got spoons and offer an honest yes, no, or maybe. In this paradigm, it’s the person offering care’s job to figure out and keep figuring out what kind of care and support they can offer. It’s the person receiving care’s job to figure out what they need and what they can accept, under what circumstances.

I've given my best, but I've been used. Delphine said I have to move past it. Lakshmi moved past her betrayals. So did Victorine. Isn't that the look she's giving us in Manet's paining? There will always be a Ferdie in our lives. We have to do our best despite them.

Disabled Cherokee scholar Qwo-Li Driskill has remarked that in precontact Cherokee, there are many words for people with different kinds of bodies, illnesses, and what would be seen as impairments; none of those words are negative or view those sick or disabled people as defective or not as good as normatively bodied people.9 With the arrival of white settler colonialism, things changed, and not in a good way. For many sick and disabled Black, Indigenous, and brown people under transatlantic enslavement, colonial invasion, and forced labor, there was no such thing as state-funded care. Instead, if we were too sick or disabled to work, we were often killed, sold, or left to die, because we were not making factory or plantation owners money. Sick, disabled, Mad, Deaf, and neurodivergent people’s care and treatment varied according to our race, class, gender, and location, but for the most part, at best, we were able to evade capture and find ways of caring for ourselves or being cared for by our families, nations, or communities—from our Black and brown communities to disabled communities.

One of the central loves of my life is coaching and supporting other writers. Specifically, writers who identify as BIPOC, sick/Mad/disabled, queer/trans, femme, working-class/poor, or some or all of the above. I want marginalized writers to get our writing in the world, and I believe in sharing the skills I’ve gained over the past two decades of being a working writer, writing teacher and editor to help us get there.

From Brahma Puran ब्राह्मीं च वैष्णवीं भद्रां, षड्-भुजां च चतुर्मुखीम्। त्रि-नेत्रां खड्ग-त्रिशूल-पद्म-चक्र-गदा-धराम्॥ पीताम्बर-धरां देवीं, नानाऽलंकार-भूषिताम्। तेजः-पुञ्ज-धरीं श्रेष्ठां, ध्यायेद् बाल-कुमारिकाम्॥ Meditate on youthful Brahmi* and Vaishnavi* surely, With six hands, four faces, three eyes gives safety, With sword, trident, lotus, wheel, globe, mace be, Greatest – yellow dressed, well decorated elegantly.

Grief is an important part of the work. So many of the movements I’ve been a part of in my lifetime—the movements against wars in Afghanistan/Iraq and against Islamophobic racist violence here on Turtle Island, movements for sex work justice and for missing and murdered Indigenous women, movements led by and for trans women of color, movements for Black lives, movements by and for disabled folks and for survivors of abuse—involve a lot of grieving and remembering people we love who have been murdered, died, or been hurt/abused/gone through really horrible shit.

5. When Begging Ends I love the idea of Divine Source. It reminds us that everything, the fulfillment of every need, always emanates from the One. So if you learn how to keep your vibration high and attuned to That, whatever is needed to sustain you can always occur, often in surprising and delightful ways. Your Source is never a particular person, place, or thing, but God Herself. You never have to beg. Furthermore, Divine Source says that whatever resonates with you will always find you. That which does not, will fall away. It’s that simple. When Outrageous Openness first came out, I experienced this as I took the book around—some stores were simply not drawn to it. But knowing about Divine Source and resonance, I didn’t care. I remember taking it to a spiritual bookstore in downtown San Francisco. The desultory manager sort of half-growled, “Oh, we have a long, long wait here. You can leave a copy for our ‘pile’ in the back room. Then you could call a ton and plead with us. If you get lucky, maybe one day we’ll stock it. Just keep hoping.” “Oh, my God, no!” I shuddered. “Why would I keep twisting your arm? It’ll go easily to the places that are right. You never have to convince someone. The people who are right will just know.” He looked stunned when I thanked him, smiling, and left. And sure enough, other store clerks were so excited, even from the cover alone. They nearly ripped the book out of my hands as I walked in. When I brought it to the main bookstore in San Francisco’s Castro district, I noticed the manager striding toward me was wearing a baseball cap with an image of the goddess Lakshmi. “Great sign,” I mused. He held the book for a second without even cracking it open, then showed the cover to a coworker, yelling, “Hey, let’s give this baby a coming-out party!” So a few weeks later, they did. Sake, fortune cookies, and all. Because you see, what’s meant for you will always, always find you. You never have to be bothered by the people who aren’t meant to understand. And anyway, sometimes years later, they are ready . . . and they do. Change me Divine Beloved into One who knows that You alone are my Source. Let me trust that You fling open every door at the right time. Free me from the illusion of rejection, competition, and scarcity. Fill me with confidence and faith, knowing I never have to beg, just gratefully receive.

शान्ताकारं भुजगशयनं पद्मनाभं सुरेशं विश्वाधारं गगनसदृश्यं मेघवर्णं शुभाङ्गम्। लक्ष्मीकान्तं कमलनयनं योगिभिर्ध्यानगम्यं वन्दे विष्णु भवभयहरं सर्वलोकैकनाथम्। I bow to Vishnu, Master of Universe unquestionably, Who rests on great serpent bed, peaceful perpetually, From His navel sprouts Lotus of Creative Power surely, He the Supreme Lord of cosmos undeniably does be. - 146 - He supports the entire universe and all-pervading be, He dark as clouds with beautiful Lakshmi form glowingly, He the lotus-eyed, whom yogis see by meditation only, He destroyer of `Samsar’ fear – the Lord of all `loks’ be. - 147 -

Is understanding that there are a million ways to be sexual (if one is sexual), and some of them live in phones, don’t ever involve genitals, happen once a year. Is understanding that all movement is movement, and counts, including when someone can only move three fingers and part of their forehead. All sex is sex.

I’ve noticed tons of abled activists will happily add “ableism” to the list of stuff they’re against (you know, like that big sign in front of the club in my town that says “No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism”) or throw around the word “disability justice” in the list of “justices” in their manifesto. But then nothing else changes: all their organizing is still run the exact same inaccessible way, with the ten-mile-long marches, workshops that urge people to “get out of your seats and move!” and lack of inclusion of any disabled issues or organizing strategies. And of course none of them think they’re ableist.

There was only one editor I recognized, Lakshmi, who was also a freshman and lived in my building. All I knew about her was that she was beautiful, did drugs, spoke with a British accent, and had grown up in different foreign countries. She seemed really impressed that I had won this prize. “Still waters run deep,” she kept saying.

And I never thought this day would come, but here I am, sitting in front of the ritual fire, repeating Sanskrit mantras I don’t understand. He’s looking at me now, and I can feel it on my skin. We are getting married. Damini is locked away somewhere in a room, Lakshmi is at Lord Krishna’s feet in the heavens, and I’m going to be his wife.

Everything in my family has taught me that it's safer to be a happy spinster than to try and love anybody. And, let's be real, when you look at the entire white colonialist capitalist ableist patriarchy, you don't see a whole lot that looks that great in terms of love and romance for surviving queer Black and brown femmes. Not a whole lot.

This prayer in praise of Lord Vishnu be, His incarnations graced earth constantly. शान्ताकारं भुजगशयनं पद्मनाभं सुरेशं विश्वाधारं गगनसदृश्यं मेघवर्णं शुभाङ्गम्। लक्ष्मीकान्तं कमलनयनं योगिभिर्ध्यानगम्यं वन्दे विष्णु भवभयहरं सर्वलोकैकनाथम्। I bow to Vishnu, Master of Universe unquestionably, Who rests on great serpent bed, peaceful perpetually, From His navel sprouts Lotus of Creative Power surely, He the Supreme Lord of cosmos undeniably does be. - 146 - He supports the entire universe and all-pervading be, He dark as clouds with beautiful Lakshmi form glowingly, He the lotus-eyed, whom yogis see by meditation only, He destroyer of `Samsar’ fear – the Lord of all `loks’ be. - 147 -

There are official statistics now that show that at least half of the racialized people murdered by law enforcement are also physically or mentally disabled, Deaf, and/or autistic.

Because the revolution starts at home, as they say. The revolution starts in your house, in your own relationships, in your bedroom. The revolution starts in your heart.

It's like that quote I've seen on the Internet lately: 'Trauma creates change you don't choose. Healing is about creating change you do choose.

just because a point is well made, doesn’t mean it’s right.

When there is little you can do, you do what you can.

I didn’t wholly identify with the collective experiences of children in either place. I had one foot in each culture, but no firm footing in either of them. At

I could worry about his health but somehow not about my own. We throw ourselves away a little each day. Dr.

When we emerge from our mind into body, from word into action, from love into love.

They mate in the open, under the watch of eagles. Horses come. Fires happen. They are born like an ancient sound, and they dance and wake the dust.

My grandfather was a closet feminist. So,

I once asked her if she was happy. “That depends on what I am able to get done

Do not let others drive that vehicle, called life, for you. Grab that steering wheel and discover unexplored destinations.

The poorest of women is the one without close girlfriends

What Matters!! Is Grey Matter!

Life can be a beautiful journey if you accept who you are and accept the people around you for what they are.

She had sculpted the mist, the way those who have no choice do. She had willed a life for the two of us in a new land.

Foods are like men: some are good, some are bad, and some are okay only in small doses. But most should be tried at least once.

We do shit we're not supposed to do, when people are staring and when ableism makes us so invisible we could rob a bank and they'd miss it.

Sometimes we kid ourselves when we imagine our lives, expecting that everything will neatly fall into place.

like slicing a coconut fully expecting its milk, the curved inner cumulus of its belly virginal - for the teeth of an anonymous sickle

We have ancestral shame to heal. We have disabled lineages to honor. Let’s get to it.

As oppressed people, we don’t control a lot of things. But one thing we can sometimes control is the stage. The stage can be prefigurative politics.

Three things shine before the world and cannot be hidden. They are the moon, the sun, and the truth proclaimed by the Tathagata.

Lakshmi had assured me, when I pointed it out, that the insufferability of clubs was widely acknowledged. Why else did I think everyone was on drugs the whole time? My reluctance to talk to the guy you had to talk to to get the drugs was exceeded only by my mistrust of the drugs themselves. If I messed up my brain, what else did I have? Why wasn’t Lakshmi scared?

I once asked her if she was happy. “That depends on what I am able to get done today,” she said, laughing. She told me that the completion of her daily tasks was the only thing she felt she had control over. They were a form of meditation, of salve. Kept busy, she had no time to ruminate and no time for opinions, certainly not feminist ones. I pressed her: “I mean, are you happy with your life, Rajima?” “I don’t know,” she said uncomfortably, as if she’d never really considered such a question. “When there is little you can do, you do what you can.” Happiness for my grandmother seemed to be a verb rather than a noun. She had so little control over her own life. Yet she took control, out of thin air for herself, when she could.

Teddy taught me about kindness, about love that is unconditional; a sentiment not dependent on acceptance, approval, or the expectation of something in return. It was the first time I would ever feel this from a man who wasn’t my grandfather. And I didn’t know what to do with it at all. If only I’d embraced our differences sooner. I didn’t know it then, but we had so little time left.

At the risk of seeming like a Christian, or a Che Guevara poster, love is bigger, huger, more complex, and more ultimate than petty fucked-up desirability politics. We all deserve love. Love as an action verb. Love in full inclusion, in centrality, in not being forgotten. Being loved for our disabilities, our weirdness, not despite them. Love in action is when we strategize to create cross-disability access spaces. When we refuse to abandon each other. When we, as disabled people, fight for the access needs of sibling crips. I’ve seen able-bodied organizers be confused by this. Why am I fighting so hard for fragrance-free space or a ramp, if it’s not something I personally need? When disabled people get free, everyone gets free. More access makes everything more accessible for everybody.

In time-honoured fashion, this is really the eldest daughter-in-law’s investiture as the earthly, domestic symbol of the goddess. It is she who channels Lakshmi’s blessings on the family. In her is vested, by an understanding of priestly transference, the household’s economic prosperity, well-being and harmonious daily life. Beside it, her other daily chores as eldest daughter-in-law –supervising the cook and cleaners and servants and household accounts, caring for her elderly parents-in-law, looking after their meals and medication, deciding which tasks can be ceded to the wives of her three brothers-in-law, keeping a family of twenty (including the servants) ticking over without hiccups or mishaps –all these appear as milk-and-rice, as uncomplicated, bland and digestible as infant fare.

I don’t think there is any one single answer to the need for care. I just want, to echo my friend Dori, more care, more of the time. I want us to dream mutual aid in our postapocalyptic revolutionary societies where everyone gets to access many kinds of care—from friends and internet strangers, from disabled community centers, and from some kind of non-fucked-up non-state state that would pay caregivers well and give them health benefits and time off and enshrine sick and disabled autonomy and choice. I want us to keep dreaming and experimenting with all these big, ambitious ways we dream care for each other into being.

Although containing and denying grief is a time-honored activist practice that works for some people, I would argue that feelings of grief and trauma are not a distraction from the struggle. For example, transformative justice work—strategies that create justice, healing, and safety for survivors of abuse without predominantly relying on the state—is hard as hell! What would it be like if we built healing justice practices into it from the beginning? Everything from praying to the goddesses of transformation to help us hold these giant processes and help someone acting abusively choose to change to having cleansing ceremonies along the way.

Many people have told us that when they think of transformative justice, they think it is "a really long process where people talk about what happened, cry, get overwhelmed, and eventually stop answering their emails.

But as much as I'll always have this place imprinted on me, little bits of grit rubbed into my plush skin ... I was also poised to to get out. I was always walking around with that hum in my hips, preparing for flight.

I was happiest when I didn't have a body. I had been all body, all gender for a while. I needed some time off from having a body in order to figure out what kind of relationship I would have with one when I got back to it.

The Ugly Laws, on the books in the United States from the mid-1700s to the 1970s, stated that many disabled people were “too ugly” to be in public and legally prevented disabled people from being able to take up space in public.

In the car inching its way down Fifth Avenue, toward Bergdorf Goodman and this glamorous party, I looked back on my past with a new understanding. This sickness, the “endo-whatever,” had stained so much—my sense of self, my womanhood, my marriage, my ability to be present. I had effectively missed one week of each month every year of my life since I was thirteen, because of the chronic pain and hormonal fluctuations I suffered during my period. I had lain in bed, with heating pads and hot-water bottles, using acupuncture, drinking teas, taking various pain medications and suffering the collateral effects of them. I thought of all the many tests I missed in various classes throughout my education, the school dances, the jobs I knew I couldn’t take as a model, because of the bleeding and bloating as well as the pain (especially the bathing suit and lingerie shoots, which paid the most). How many family occasions was I absent from? How many second or third dates did I not go on? How many times had I not been able to be there for others or for myself? How many of my reactions to stress or emotional strife had been colored through the lens of chronic pain? My sense of self was defined by this handicap. The impediment of expected pain would shackle my days and any plans I made. I did not see my own womanhood as something positive or to be celebrated, but as a curse that I had to constantly make room for and muddle through. Like the scar on my arm, my reproductive system was a liability. The disease, developing part and parcel with my womanhood starting at puberty with my menses, affected my own self-esteem and the way I felt about my body. No one likes to get her period, but when your femininity carries with it such pain and consistent physical and emotional strife, it’s hard not to feel that your body is betraying you. The very relationship you have with yourself and your person is tainted by these ever-present problems. I now finally knew my struggles were due to this condition. I wasn’t high-strung or fickle and I wasn’t overreacting.

Disability justice, when it’s really happening, is too messy and wild to really fit into traditional movement and nonprofit industrial complex structures, because our bodies and minds are too wild to fit into those structures. Which is no surprise, because nonprofits, while created in the ’60s to manage dissent, in many ways overlap with “charities”—the network of well-meaning institutions designed on purpose to lock up, institutionalize, and “help the handicapped.” Foundations have rarely ever given disabled people money to run our own shit. Nonprofits need us as clients and get nervous about us running the show. Disability justice means the show has to change—or get out of the way.

The making of disability justice lives in the realm of thinking and talking and knowledge making, in art and sky. But it also lives in how to rent an accessible porta potty for an accessible-except-the-bathroom event space, how to mix coconut oil and aloe to make a fragrance-free hair lotion that works for curly and kinky BIPOC hair, how to learn to care for each other when everyone is sick, tired, crazy, and brilliant. And neither is possible without the other.

The most unnecessary lesson however, in my memory as I realize it now, was a Sanskrit lyric, not in praise of God, but defining the perfect woman - it said the perfect woman must work like a slave, advise like a Mantri (Minister), look like Goddess Lakshmi, be patient like Mother Earth and courtesan-like in the bed chamber - this I had to recite on certain days of the week. After the lessons she released me and served food. (Book: Grandmother's Tale in Antaeus #70: Special Fiction Issue)

Lakshmi’s father sometimes joked about women who married for love: how much they must value themselves, to think they were more attractive than the sum total of all other women—to think they were enough, without the institution of marriage, to keep a man faithful to them. He teased Lakshmi, asking if she thought of herself that way. I felt a wave of gratitude toward my parents, who would never have thought or said anything like that about me. On the other hand . . . that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

If collective access is revolutionary love without charity, how do we learn to love each other? How do we learn to do this love work of collective care that lifts us instead of abandons us, that grapples with all the deep ways in which care is complicated?

I don’t want to be fixed, if being fixed means being bleached of memory, untaught by what I have learned through this miracle of surviving. My survivorhood is not an individual problem. I want the communion of all of us who have survived, and the knowledge.

Part of our process of learning to love ourselves and each other means doing the incredibly risky work of tapping back into the disabled body/mind we have been taught to suppress and abandon, to learn what our boundaries are, what we want, need, and desire.

The histories of white supremacy and ableism are inextricably entwined, both forged in the crucible of colonial conquest and capitalist domination. One cannot look at the history of US slavery, the stealing of indigenous lands, and US imperialism without seeing the way that white supremacy leverages ableism to create a subjugated ‘other’ that is deemed less worthy/abled/smart/capable … We cannot comprehend ableism without grasping its interrelations with heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism.

What does it mean to shift our ideas of access and care (whether it’s disability, childcare, economic access, or many more) from an individual chore, an unfortunate cost of having an unfortunate body, to a collective responsibility that’s maybe even deeply joyful?

Lakshmi said that, according to French feminist theory, you couldn’t ignore the men, because their views on women were baked into culture at such a deep level. Just by using words, you were perpetuating their ideas, because they were the ones who had made up language. “So what are you supposed to do? Not use words?” “Well, they say that women have to make up their own language, and their own kind of writing, outside of the patriarchal hegemony.” I stared at her. “You’re joking.” “No, not at all. It’s called écriture féminine.

If ever since I was a kid, all I wanted was to be alone and happy with my own apartment with a door that locked, if all I could remember was the locked box, closed windows, pulled blinds, and trap of their marriage, how could I also dare to dream love? Being free was enough of a miracle.

On hearing this story, Yuvanashva told his mother, ‘That was a clever answer. But was it a correct answer? Who is really more beautiful? Lakshmi or Alakshmi?’ Shilavati replied, ‘There are no correct answers. There are only appropriate answers. And it all depends on one’s point of view. If I was Shiva, it would not matter who walked towards me and who walked away from me. Shiva is a hermit, indifferent to peace, prosperity, strife and poverty. Vishnu, however, is a guardian of society. A householder’s god. For him Lakshmi matters. She makes the world bountiful and joyful. Alakshmi, he shuns.

In so many hip queer communities that are not explicitly disabled, it's not okay to not be okay. We pay lip service, but how many times do you ask someone how they're doing at a party and hear anything but how great things are going, or feel like you can be honest about how things are really going for you?

As Mia Mingus wrote in her essay “You Are Not Entitled to Our Deaths”: “We know the state has failed us. We are currently witnessing the pandemic state-sanctioned violence of murder, eugenics, abuse and bone-chilling neglect in the face of mass suffering, illness, and death.29 In my and many others’ nightmares, this is a final solution for disabled people: all COVID mitigation strategies are thrown out the window so abled people can shop, work, and watch football, and disabled people either die or stay within our immune-safer bubbles for the rest of our lives. I believe in disabled resilience, but my suicidal ideation popped up again when I thought about that. I don’t want a future where I never get to have in-person communion with people I love again, where I get harassed for wearing my N95 in the supermarket, and/or where most of the people I love are living with even more disability from long COVID with no government support, or are dead.

When abled people get ASL and ramps and fragrance-free lotion but haven’t built relationships with any disabled people, it just comes off like the charity model once again—Look at what we’re doing for you people! Aren’t you grateful? No one likes to be included as a favor. Inclusion without power or leadership is tokenism.

Most sick and disabled people I know approach healing wanting specific things—less pain, less anxiety, more flexibility—but not usually to become able-bodied. And many of us don’t feel automatically comfortable going to healing spaces at all because of our histories of being seen as freaks, scrutinized, infantilized, patronized with “What happened?” prayed over, and asked, “Have you tried acupuncture?” and a million other “miracle cures.” Able-bodied practitioners without an anti-ableist analysis—including Reiki providers and anti-oppression therapists—often see us as objects of disgust, fascination, and/or inspiration porn. Mostly, these practitioners dismiss our lived expertise about our bodyminds and their needs, or on the flip side, they tell us we’re “not really disabled!” when we insist on the realities of our lives. This carries over into organizing, where, even in HJ spaces, often when the crips aren’t there, there’s no access info and no accessibility.

Disabled Cherokee scholar Qwo-Li Driskill has remarked that in precontact Cherokee, there are many words for people with different kinds of bodies, illnesses, and what would be seen as impairments; none of those words are negative or view those sick or disabled people as defective or not as good as normatively bodied people.

We are so often kept apart, we disabled people, and kept from knowing each other's names. We are told not to hang out with the other kid with cerebral palsy, told to deny or downplay our disabilities or Deafness or ND [neurodivergence]. We often grow up not learning disabled history, Deaf literature, or that those are even a thing.

Each time a daughter is born, we will celebrate and plant ten Jardalu trees for her and they will belong to her forever. Every year her trees will bear fruit and the money will be saved for her, for her education, and for her marriage. Ten trees like the ten fingers with which we women can hold our own destinies firmly in our hands.

When I went to the sage Aravana adigal I was heartbroken and distraught. The words he gave me then were these: "Know these — to be born in this world is to experience sorrow. To end the cycle of birth is to achieve happiness. The first of these is the result of desire; the second is achieved by those who no longer are ensnared by desire.

The eighth level of empowerment and law of manifestation is to call on the Planetary Ascended Masters for help for your every personal spiritual desire and need in your spiritual mission. The inner plane Ascended Masters will be an unseeing source of guidance and supply in ways you cannot possibly imagine. Some of the Planetary Masters I call upon are: El Morya, Kuthumi, Djwhal Khul, Serapis Bey, Paul the Venetian, Hilarion, Sananda, Saint Germain, Lord Maitreya, Lord Buddha, Sanat Kumara, Allah Gobi, Lanto, Portia, Mother Mary, Quan Yin, Isis, Lakshmi, Vywamus, Helios and Vesta, Melchior, and the Lord of Sirius, to name just a few. If it is a really important prayer, call in all of them.

I do not need to dictate the strategies surviving family members should use. Instead, I find ways to support them that are in line with my politics because I know that just as punishment does not transform behavior, neither does judgment. When we make judgment into one of our primary organizing strategies, we reduce the trust needed to create safety.

Me home, the weird older daughter, back in my room. Hanging out with my mother. Taking care of my mother. Bargaining for an evening out now and then. Still no driver's license. Never leaving. It would be like when I was sixteen, insisting that I was an adult, except that I wasn't, in some ways. Was I an adult? Or was I something else? Would I ever grow up?

I love the care and mutual aid we give each other in queer, trans, sick and disabled and working class and queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and people of color (QTBIPOC) communities. As a sick and disabled, working-class, brown femme, I wouldn’t be alive without communities of care, and neither would most people I love. Some of my fiercest love is reserved for how femmes and sick and disabled queers show up for each other when every able-bodied person “forgets” about us. Sick and disabled folks will get up from where we’ve been projectile vomiting for the past eight hours to drive a spare Effexor to their friend’s house who just ran out. We do this because we love each other, and because we often have a sacred trust not to forget about each other. Able-bodied people who think we are “weak” have no idea; every day of our disabled lives is like an Ironman triathlon. Disabled, sick, poor, working-class, sex-working and Black and brown femmes are some of the toughest and most resilient folks I know. You have to develop complex strengths to survive this world as us.

In Loree’s care collective, her need for access is posited as something she both needs and deserves, and as a chance to build community, hang out with Loree, and have fun—not as a chore. This is drastically different from most ways care is thought of in the world, as an isolated, begrudgingly done task that is never a site of pleasure, joy, or community building.

You will live alone,' said their mother. 'But why?' asked the white bear, then just a cub. 'Because there isn't enough anymore,' she said. 'Of what?' 'Of anything. There isn't enough ice. There isn't enough food. There aren't enough bears.' She stood with them at the edge of the ice as the three of them peered into the sea. 'You must learn how to hunt. And you will do this alone.

And maybe this is the story we need to write. If the story of surviving abuse, of being queer, isn’t about getting to normal as the end goal. Isn’t just sheets and towels and a long, quiet, Valium calm. Isn’t disaster and death and everything we ran from either. Isn’t anything we could’ve predicted, isn’t anything predictable. What comes after the disaster we keep surviving every day?

For years I thought, a femme bottom – what is more common, what is more despised? Than a girl with her legs open. Wanting something. Just wanting. I didn't come up with this idea on my own. The whole world told me it was true. The whole world told me that there is nothing more common and stupid than someone feminine of center with their legs open, wanting something more than a kick or a curse.

Real time is slower than social media time, where everything feels urgent. Real time often includes periods of silence, reflection, growth, space, self-forgiveness, processing with loved ones, rest, and responsibility. Real time transformation requires stating your needs and setting functional boundaries. Transformative justice requires us at minimum to ask ourselves questions like these before we jump, teeth bared, for the jugular. I think this is some of the hardest work. It's not about pack hunting an external enemy, it's about deep shifts in our own ways of being. 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.

Where is this place our baby bodies sprinted towards even when we were holding still for as long as possible? Flight gave birth to birth. Fragment genius comes down to this                    heaven of ass thwack, the miracle of taking it the miracle of sweet good girl best girl good girl finally made it               made it home We don’t always know where this place is. We stumble looking for the light switch, the exit sign.

Disability is both apparent and nonapparent. Disability is pain, struggle, brilliance, abundance, and joy. Disability is sociopo- litical, cultural, and biological. Being visible and claiming a disabled identity brings risks as much as it brings pride. The peculiar drama of my life has placed me in a world that by and large thinks it would be better if people like me did not exist. My fight has been for accommodation, the world to me and me to the world. -Harriet McBryde Johnson Taking up space as a disabled person is always revolutionary. -Sandy Ho There is so much that able-bodied people could learn from the wisdom that often comes with dis- ability. But space needs to be made. Hands need to be reached out. People need to be lifted up. -A. H. Reaume Disability justice exists every place two disabled people meet-at a kitchen table, on heating pads in bed talking to our loves. -Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Crip doula, a term created by disability justice organizer Stacey Park Milbern to describe the ways disabled people support/mentor newly disabled people in learning disabled skills (how to live on very low spoons, drive a wheelchair, have sex/redefine sexuality, etc.). A doula supports someone doing the work of childbirth; a crip doula is a disabled person supporting another disabled person as they do the work of becoming disabled, or differently disabled, of dreaming a new disabled life/world into being.

My artistic expression initially started out as revenge, a wound that unraveled and revealed itself in the unloved corners of houses, in yellowing pages. I settled into being creature of shadow and light, stealthy and secretly furious, almost like I believed that I was fated for a glorious future, and my meekness was a form of asking. I was passionately and decidedly isolated, alone was an artform. Any art I create, in any medium, is a reflection of that faint anger: of having believed in glory, and having lived instead.

It’s funny to me that most of the cooking in the world is done by women, and yet when you look at modern Western cuisine, it’s largely based on what a few dead Frenchmen have opined to be the correct way of doing things. It’s funny how these old European men used a label like “mother sauce” when there were no women to be found anywhere near those old professional kitchens. Cooking was something women did to nourish and nurture their families, whereas for men it was largely something they did professionally to gain money and status.

What days! I took a bicycle to the edge of the world! Takes much for my memory to coax out these strands of thought. The secret? That is why I cut the hair. It made me remember. Made me remember how it is like to love. Especially when the songbirds come. The heat of summer, it’s elusive promise. I’d much rather be in a woolen shawl, much more like me. Hair grey. Eyes gentle. A giant hound to look after. My herbs and plants. A well-read, well-traveled grandmother with a published book and a fellowship or two. Aha, one can dream, that is all.

There is no one disabled future. But in mine, there is guaranteed income, housing, access, food, water, and education for all—or money has been abolished. I get paid to write from my bed. The births of disabled, Autistic, Mad, Neurodivergent, Deaf, and sick kids are celebrated, and there are memorials and healing and reparation sites on every psych ward, institution, nursing home, youth lockup, and “autistic treatment center” where our people have been locked up and abused. Anyone who needs care gets it, with respect and autonomy, not abuse. Caregivers are paid well for the work we do and are often disabled ourselves. Disabled folks are the ones teaching medical school students about our bodies. Schools have been taken apart and remade so that there’s not one idea of “smart” and “stupid,” but many ways of learning. There is a disability justice section in every bookstore and a million examples of sick and disabled and Deaf and autistic and Mad folks thriving. I have a really sick lipstick-red spiral ramp curving around my house. Because it’s beautiful. Because I want it. Because I get to live free. -LEAH

I mean more. I mean things like the radical notion that everyone deserves basic income, care, and access. Everyone. Including people you don’t like. Including people who are not that likable. I can think of people who have, frankly, acted like assholes and hurt people in my life, or me. Some of them I have still sent twenty dollars, when I had it, to their Indiegogos when they got disabled and needed money for rent, food, housing, or to move to a more accessible apartment or city. Because nobody deserves to die or suffer from lack of access, even if they’ve been an asshole.

At the 2010 USSF Healing Justice People’s Movement Assembly, one of many large scale gatherings on topics to occur at the USSF to draft resolutions and visionary future plans, I heard Cara say something that has stuck with me ever since: “Our movements themselves need to be healing, or there is no point to them.” This shook me. The idea that movements themselves could and should be spaces of healing, that care didn’t have to be a sideline to “the real work” but could be the work, was like a deep drink of clear water. It was something I’d been longing for for years. I think healing justice is a space of longing.

The insidious reasons for a brown girl’s self-loathing won’t be surprising to any woman of color. I cannot rightly compare my own struggles to those of another minority, as each ethnicity comes with its own baggage and the South Asian experience is just one variation on the experience of dark-skinned people everywhere. As parents and grandparents often do in Asian countries, my extended family urged me to avoid the sun, not out of fear that heatstroke would sicken me or that UV rays would lead to cancer, but more, I think, out of fear that my skin would darken to the shade of an Untouchable, a person from the lowest caste in Indian society, someone who toils in the fields. The judgments implicit in these exhortations—and what they mean about your worth—might not dawn on you while you’re playing cricket in the sand. What’s at stake might not dawn on you while, as a girl, you clutch fast to yourself your blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll named Helen. But all along, the message that lighter skin is equivalent to a more attractive, worthier self is getting beamed deep into your subconscious. Western ideals of beauty do not stop at ocean shores. They pervade the world and mingle with those of your own country to create mutant, unachievable standards.

It doesn’t have to be either healing or organizing: it’s both. Someone asked me at a talk I was giving at Portland State University’s Take Back the Night how we choose between healing and activism. I tried to tell them that healing justice is not a spa vacation where we recover from organizing and then throw ourselves back into the grind. To me, it means a fundamental—and anti-ableist—shift in how we think of movement organizing work to think of it as a place where building in many pauses, where building in healing, where building in space for grief and trauma to be held makes the movements more flexible and longer lasting.

If movements got it together about ableism, there is so much we could win—movement spaces where elders, parents, and sick and disabled folks (a huge amount of the planet) could be present—strength in numbers! We could create movement spaces where people don’t “age out” of being able to be involved after turning forty or feel ashamed of admitting any disability, Crazyness, or chronic illness. We could create visions of revolutionary futures that don’t replicate eugenics—where disabled people exist and are thriving, not, as often happens in abled revolutionary imaginations, revolutionary futures where winning the rev means we don’t exist anymore because everyone has health care.

food has played a central role not only in my professional but also in my emotional life, in all of my dealings with loved ones and most of all in my relationship to myself and my body. I am what feeds me. And how I feed myself at any given moment says a lot about what I’m going through or what I need. I don’t believe I am alone. Yes, we eat for our stomachs, but we hunger with our hearts. Like most people and many women, I think about what to eat all the time. I am constantly plotting my next meal, planning how and what I will shop for, and ever hatching new plans to avoid the foods I know will undermine my well-being. Foods are like men: some are good, some are bad, and some are okay only in small doses. But most should be tried at least once.

Ass up is our best position No one could have told us              we never would’ve believed that someday we would kneel in this place, worshipped We use each other’s raw bodies to remind ourselves how to pray.   Where is this place our baby bodies sprinted towards even when we were holding still for as long as possible? Flight gave birth to birth. Fragment genius comes down to this                    heaven of ass thwack, the miracle of taking it the miracle of sweet good girl best girl good girl finally made it               made it home We don’t always know where this place is. We stumble looking for the light switch, the exit sign. Can we really just relax? When does this get pulled away? Did we finally make it home? Queer grief is a blueprint. We got this shit wired tight.

Fair trade care webs draw on sick and disabled knowledge about care. Sick and disabled folks have many superpowers: one of them is that many of us have sophisticated, highly developed skills around negotiating and organizing care. Many sick and disabled people have experienced receiving shitty, condescending, “poor you!” charity-based care that’s worse than no care at all—whether it’s from medical staff or our friends and families. Many disabled people also face receiving abusive or coercive care, in medical facilities and nursing homes and from our families and personal care assistants. We’re also offered unsolicited medical advice, from doctors and strangers on the street (who are totally sure carrot juice will cure our MS) every day of our lives. All of those offers are “well meaning,” but they’re also intrusive, unasked for, and mostly coming from a place of discomfort with disability and wanting to “fix” us.

When we do disability justice work, it becomes impossible to look at disability and not examine how colonialism created it. It becomes a priority to look at Indigenous ways of perceiving and understanding disability, for example. It becomes a space where we see that disability is all up in Black and brown/queer and trans communities—from Henrietta Lacks to Harriet Tubman, from the Black Panther Party’s active support for disabled organizers’ two-month occupation of the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation to force the passage of Section 504, the law mandating disabled access to public spaces and transportation to the chronic illness and disability stories of second-wave queer feminists of color like Sylvia Rivera, June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, and Barbara Cameron, whose lives are marked by bodily difference, trauma-surviving brilliance, and chronic illness but who mostly never used the term “disabled” to refer to themselves.

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.

Isis Astarte Diana Hecate Demeter Kali Inanna Over and over their voices filled the air calling in these Ancient ones, their energies, magic and wisdom, their rage and righteous anger as shouts of No More and Never Again filled the air.   Asherah Erishkigal Cerridwen Brigid Maat Hathor Freya Skadi Sigyn Voices invoked the battle energies as the Warrior Goddesses arrived. Lilith Andraste Durga Athena Hel Mami Wata Pele Ixchel Freya An’ Morrighan Boudicca of the Iceni Zenobia of Palmyra Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi Through the night they chanted the invocation “show us another way” to the ancient Mothers, Queens, Warrioresses, Witches. Voices raising power and raised IN power as both Queen Boudicca and An’ Morrighan held the circle, swords in hand symbols of both peace and truth as well as strength and protection. Eyes of the night still held vigil for this sacred activist work as each woman plucked her part of the web weaving new threads of hope and spinning the wheel of change. Fox, wolf and coyote opossum, turtle and deer bear, raccoon and hare held vigil as the moths danced, spiders wove webs, and serpents shed skins no longer needed, all while the calls of the owls and night birds echoed in synchronous harmony. As the darkness of night gave way to the light of a new dawn, the Ravens and Crows and birds of the day arrived calling out as the women prayed their work had been enough to alter the events of this day... They prayed it was enough to alter the events of the Coming Days. As they walked back through the woods, sunlight streaming through the trees and with eyes still watching, the women held the Rim of the Eternal Circle safely in their hearts and womb space, encased in a deep knowing that Whatever this new day held... Whatever and Whomever was to come... Their work, the ancient ways and this Rim of Power would always continue For the Circle never ends and the Weaver always weaves. Excerpt from "Holding the Rim", featured in Asherah: Roots of the Mother Tree

The idea of consent in care labor is radical and comes from our experiences receiving these kinds of clusterfucks of so-called care. On sick and disabled internet gathering places I hang out in, it’s a common practice for folks to ask before they offer advice, or to specify when they’re not asking for solutions or tips—or, when they are, what specific kinds of information they’re open to. For many, it’s mind-blowing that disabled and sick people get to decide for ourselves the kind of care we want and need, and say no to the rest. Ableism mandates that disabled and sick people are always “patients,” broken people waiting to be fixed by medicine or God, and that we’re supposed to be grateful for anything anyone offers at any time. It is a radical disability justice stance that turns the ableist world on its ear, to instead work from a place where disabled folks are the experts on our own bodies and lives, and we get to consent, or not. We’re the bosses of our own bodyminds. This has juicy implications for everyone, including abled people.

Indeed, food and femininity were intertwined for me from very early on. Cooking was the domain not of girls, but of women. You weren’t actually allowed to cook until you mastered the basics of preparing the vegetables and dry-roasting and grinding the spices. You only assisted by preparing these mise en places for the older women until you graduated and were finally allowed to stand at the stove for more than boiling tea. Just as the French kitchens had their hierarchy of sous-chefs and commis, my grandmother’s kitchen also had its own codes. The secrets of the kitchen were revealed to you in stages, on a need-to-know basis, just like the secrets of womanhood. You started wearing bras; you started handling the pressure cooker for lentils. You went from wearing skirts and half saris to wearing full saris, and at about the same time you got to make the rice-batter crepes called dosas for everyone’s tiffin. You did not get told the secret ratio of spices for the house-made sambar curry powder until you came of marriageable age. And to truly have a womanly figure, you had to eat, to be voluptuously full of food.

Disability is a set of innovative, virtuosic skills. When abled people fuss about how hard it is to make access happen, I laugh and think about the times I’ve stage-managed a show while having a panic attack, or the time the accessible van with three wheelchair-using performers and staff inside broke and we just brainstormed for two hours—Maybe if we pull another van up and lower their ramp onto the busted ramp folks can get out? Who has plywood? If we go to the bike shop, will they have welding tools?—until we figured out a way to fix the ramp so they could get out. If we can do this, why can’t anybody? And this innovation, this persistence, this commitment to not leaving each other behind, the power of a march where you move as slowly as the slowest member and put us in the front, the power of a lockdown of scooter users in front of police headquarters, the power of movements that know how to bring each other food and medicine and organize from tired without apology and with a sense that tired people catch things people moving fast miss—all of these are skills we have. I want us to know that—abled and disabled.

The secrets of the kitchen were revealed to you in stages, on a need-to-know basis, just like the secrets of womanhood. You started wearing bras; you started handling the pressure cooker for lentils. You went from wearing skirts and half saris to wearing full saris, and at about the same time you got to make the rice-batter crepes called dosas for everyone’s tiffin. You did not get told the secret ratio of spices for the house-made sambar curry powder until you came of marriageable age. And to truly have a womanly figure, you had to eat, to be voluptuously full of food. This, of course, was in stark contrast to what was considered womanly or desirable in the West, especially when I started modeling. To look good in Western clothes you had to be extremely thin. Prior to this, I never thought about my weight except to think it wasn’t ever enough. Then, with modeling, I started depending on my looks to feed myself (though my profession didn’t allow me to actually eat very much). When I started hosting food shows, my career went from fashion to food, from not eating to really eating a lot, to put it mildly. Only this time the opposing demands of having to eat all this food and still look good by Western standards of beauty were off the charts. This tug-of-war was something I would struggle with for most of a decade.

Sometimes I feel impatient about how much ableism has forced us to emphasize accessibility to get people to pay even a modicum of attention to it. Collective access is revolutionary because disabled people of color (and disabled people in general) choosing each other is revolutionary. And, in many ways access should not be a revolutionary concept. It is the routine, every day part of the work. It is only the first step in movement building. People talk about access as the outcome, not the process, as if having spaces be accessible is enough to get us all free. Disabled people are so much more than our access needs; we can’t have a movement without safety and access, and yet there is so much more still waiting for us collectively once we build this skillset of negotiating access needs with each other. Tonight I am taking time to appreciate and enjoy access as a communication of our deepest desires. When my new friend makes their house wheelchair accessible so I can come over, a whole new level of safety and trust opens up. When a love takes initiative to reach out to event organizers to make sure my buds and I can fully participate, that’s thoughtfulness, and also political commitment in practice. When I eat dinner with dear ones and they know which spoon or cup to grab, that’s attunement. When I can ask a friend to move my body, it’s because I know they want me to be comfortable out in the world. When I can do the impairment-related parts of my routine around someone, that’s intimacy, a gift of letting each other into our most private worlds. Feeling thankful for access—and interdependence—as an opportunity for us to show up for one another, and also for crip spaces that give us a taste of what can take place when we have each other. I am so hungry for us to be together. I am so ready for what is around the corner. —STACEY PARK

A future where disability justice won looks like queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, folks of colour, and women, girls, and nonbinary humans are living in a world where disability is the norm, and where access is no longer a question but a fait accompli. Gone are the days where our disabled bodies and minds are compared to the able-bodied and able-minded. We’ve flipped the script. We still like our non-queer, non–people of colour, non-disabled friends and we’ll have them at our fully accessible dance parties (which include comfy chairs and couches for our aches and pains, subwoofers that make you feel the vibrations, active listeners, and personal support workers, so we can fully enjoy our time out, and plenty of room as well as fully accessible bathrooms for wheelchair-users to dance, dance, and dance as well as pee with ease, and no stairs in sight and clear paths to sway or rest as we please). Because, please, did you really think this could go on, this able-bodied and -minded domination? It’s not that we’ve flipped the script to exert power and replicate oppressions on our able-bodied and able-minded friends, they just over time learned to not take up so much space and not be offended or feel left out if we don’t organize with them in mind. Actually, in our accessible/disabled future, binaries are broken. We fully live on and in the spectrum of possibilities of non-stigmatized minds and bodies. In this spectrum, we are fully connected to one another, which means that decolonization has happened and is still happening and that patriarchy has been toppled and much more. This interconnectedness that we now live daily means that sometimes our able-bodied and able-minded friends are learning every day, including from their mistakes, and are understanding in how many ways our differences and disabilities manifest. This also means that we have collectively built this future and thus have learned and understood differences and disabilities, and all of us are still doing that important work even when it is hard because this future world is ours! -KARINE MYRGIANIE JEAN-FRANÇOIS AND NELLY BASSILY, DAWN (DISABLED WOMEN’S NETWORK) CANADA

Vishnu maintains the worlds and upholds the dharma, or universal law, but he is also the deity of statecraft, rulership, and politics. That means he is a master of expediency. One of his gifts is the discernment to know when a righteous end justifies unusual means. His Shakti consort is Lakshmi, goddess of abundance, fertility, and wealth. She is the power of attraction that holds life together. Powered by Lakshmi’s Shakti, Vishnu represents both the love that upholds the worlds and the social mores that resonate with divine law. He is a deity of the enlightened public sphere, embodying classical virtues like detachment, generosity, and forbearance as well as the powers of governance, royal authority, and strategy.

An ivory statuette was excavated from the ruins of Pompeii in 1930s. Made in typical Indian style with ornaments and bangles, it was identified as Pompeii Lakshmi. Later research however identified it with a Yakshi. The statuette dates back to early years of the Common Era and must have reached Pompeii with either the Roman seafaring traders or over land via the Kushan territories.

My counselor was trying, as best she could, to convey what I would later learn through years of listening to and shape-shifting chronic pain: our experiences of pain and trauma can completely transform when we have access to community, tools, support, and different stories and narratives.

We sit in legacies of scarcity, survival, and deep, unpacked grief that sometimes make people bitter and enraged when they see someone asking, as if they have a goddamn right to, for a chair, a moment, a bathroom that works.

think about the need for care that can be accessed when you’re isolated, disliked, and without social capital—which many disabled people are.

If care labor is, well, labor, and we participate in an emotional economy all the time, what would a just care labor economy look and feel like?

Dear Lakshmi, this is lord Vishnu ... Your love pours the rain in my world.

When a couple was destined to be together—like Lakshmi and Narayana—they simply saw each other, knew they belonged to each other and immediately united. It had been a long time since there was a great love story between a deva and a devi.

As divine dancer and herbinger of auspiciousness, the devadasi was the devotee's conduit to God. She was in a sense the high priestess, end out with powers to sanctify everything she touched. While ancient queens are supposed to have been brave warriors, and even scholars, the truly evolved and educated women emerged with the Bhakti movement of medieval India. They were the devadasis. They were the women of pride.

Francisco's personal story is complex. Like my family, he lived through the brutal U.S.-backed civil war in El Salvador, experiencing imperialist political terror up close, watching his loved ones killed. Francisco has his own painful history, his own harmful patterns, his own demons to unpack, but also his own strengths. He is a powerful speaker and storyteller; he is funny, smart, and charismatic. When he has put his talents in service of his organizing and advocacy work, he is strikingly passionate and effective. On one level, he has harmed and betrayed people who trusted him. Yet on another he has demonstrated that he is willing to work to build a better world. He is a complex person, like all people, full of contradictions. I believe in a path back. I believe accountability can be a step toward greater wholeness, personally and as a movement.

After leaving that police station I knew. I knew that the police, prison, a judge would never help me find what I was looking for. I would never be allowed to be a full person and neither would he. We would both be blamed and that blame could never move toward accountability.