Baggage

I want to love you

All of you

Without pretense or filters

Despite what my father did

The men before or after him

I want to believe in you

Even if you aren’t with me

I want to argue with you without it being stereotypical

To be sexual with being a jezebel

To be caring without being a mammy

For my womanhood not to be seen in the masculine form

And for your manhood to be whole enough for my strength not to emasculate

For your manhood to be whole enough that I don’t raise my daughters to believe that the day will come where they too must be both mother and father to children born out of hope in the truth of black love

But punished by the reality of black baggage

Some where deep down I must really believe you are a dog

In the same space where you are sure that I am a chicken head

These images are dangerous

But sometimes the only thing we know

Black men and women hate each other

The phrase rolls off my tongue quite easily most times

It’s a theory that I’ve developed over time

And that I don’t plan to stray from

It’s not to say that we don’t love each other

Just that we love hard

Sometimes too hard

A love that is unconstructive at times

The love of an insecure child

Thrust upon the existence of a defensive being

Chaos and commotion

Unable to detach from each other’s actions

I would love to see you with a white woman and not question my femininity

I would love to see you with a Latina and not wonder if I am beautiful or sexy I would love to see you with a woman that looks nothing like me and not wonder if you saw me as good enough

Even when the thoughts are fleeting they exist

And some how my security rest in your ability

Your willingness to love me

But I have yet to learn how not to see everything you do as a reflection of who I am

Truth is I am surprised we have survived this long

But I’m sure that the turmoil exists because we are often together as the result of pressure and societal norms that we confuse as love

A dedication to a culture over ourselves

Committed to myths of saving a race

More than our own happiness

I want us to not be heavy and full with the weight of the past

To have the privilege to have a genuine love

Pure and untainted by years of bondage or oppression

For those words to never sour our tastebuds

I try running to the place where we exist in peace

Where we are friends

Human

Lovers

And fine when not

But this baggage keeps holding me back

from Niema at Twenty-Something Renaissance

I don't know that much about black people hair, but I feel like this topic, "Good Hair," has been discussed before in pop culture recently. But it may be one of those topics that needs to be constantly addressed, just like being comfortable with your body type.

I was walking across campus with a black girl at seminary yesterday and talking about hair. I told her I feel kind of insecure talking to black people about my dreads. She agreed that some people don't like it when white people get them. Crap. Fears confirmed.

She also said something interesting. For some black women it takes $500 every six weeks to keep up their hair. That's rent.

on 89.1 this morning...

Lions - The Features

"In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth.

Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level we all know this stuff already - it's been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called 'real world' will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called 'real world' of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. the freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of creation."

- David Foster Wallace "This is Water"

thought

I like my job at the florist because I just do what my bosses tell me (tear the petals off of this bucket of roses and stick them in that bucket. ok.) and I can think all day. This one happened in the van, waiting for a wedding to end so we could go back in and grab the flower arrangements.

A conscience works like our immune system does. You can bolster your immune system, drink tea, eat vitamin C, exercise. Most of the time it keeps the bad stuff out. If you don’t take care of yourself your immune system is not as strong.

But every now and then a disease comes along that can make your system attack itself (AIDs, all other auto-immune diseases).

Likewise, some sins or bad ideas can make your conscience attack itself unnecessarily. Like legalism or any other socially acceptable sin. And you don’t even know that you’re being slowly killed.

for matt:

another song sung by someone of whom you can't tell the gender. (is that a correct sentence? I was trying not to end with a preposition - per sharon's grammar lesson the other night).

Man Like You - Patrick Watson

article on geocaching - (here)

hilarious podcast on geocaching from stuff you should know (here)