Post movement existence

If you don’t know Adrienne Maree Brown and her incredible organizing, writing, facilitating, envisioning, then you should. Here’s just a little taste of the sort of stuff that slips off of her tongue and keyboard on the regs:

the ideas of a liberated life, of a system aligned with the needs of the planet, of economy based on relationships and people rather than profit and greed, of meaningful survival…these ideas excite me, they are swelling all around me. i think all political work should be tugging us away from the shore of current corporate systems, and towards a post-profit existence.

even, perhaps, a post movement existence. movements entail…containment. two sides, inside and out…that there is content, ideas, people within and then content, ideas, and people without – or opposed to. but the existence i am thinking of – it’s an all-encompassing thing. no person, nothing alive would be outside of it. its LIVING, being fully present to your life and communities, and learning, knowing, how to live the right way.

It reminded me of another quotation I ran across this week, this one by Thomas Merton: “You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.”

Don’t worry. I’m not throwing my feminist ideology out with the Thursday recycling, but I do think there’s something really profound about shifting our focus from our tightly-held opinions (rigid, fixed, and sometimes indeed, angrily clenched) to beliefs more grounded in daily experience, real people, our own wellness and sustainability. I think that’s part of what Adrienne was getting at…movements are inherently bordered. Some people are allowed in, some aren’t. Ideas become propaganda, whether we like it or not. Passion is calcified and packaged.

Food for thought.