This is the Year...

Participants in the 2020 Advanced Practitioner’s Training closed the week together by composing a “This is the Year” poem together.

This is the year we dance, grinning at one another while we tell new stories.

This is the year in which the world of justice we dream with our brains will start going down to live forever in our hearts.

This is the year that our scarred and sacred grandfathers recognize our wounds in theirs and sing songs of healing as our heartbeats join their drums, the year our scarred and sacred grandmothers slip a sipping soup to soothe our voices as their whispers and screams turn to prayers and big-belly laughs. This is the year we make our grandchildren proud.

This is the year through love we achieve a just transformation.

This is the year that this cool collective of hotty-hotties burns it to the ground, raises it back up, and reclaims this space to grow the dopeness.

This is the year families kick cops out of schools instead offering children restorative justice practitioners.

This is the year that finally after so many killings, white people step up to accountability and another way to be. That we all understand and hold how precious our lives are together and build on that foundation.

This is the year when our self-determination transforms a wild daydream to a demand to a reality.

This is the year we come together through radical self-love and collective healing in our communities, and in recognition of those who came before us, and for those who will come after.

This is the year we replace the refineries with butterfly gardens for everyone to visit.

This is the year that bystanders act with justice and the media reports reality not searching for two sides, but rather what’s right and wrong, and that the movement dances like butterflies across the sky, and the children of the movement become superheroes holding the cocoons.

This is the year that black children run through sprinklers, catches light into rainbows, connects to ancestors, history changes and the water blesses the breath. Everyone celebrates black joy.

This is the year that the strength of our ancestors that we carry in our bones embrace us towards collective liberation.

This is the year that our abundant love is fully felt not given in self-sacrifice, that we feel our dignity daily, like the pines, the cypress, the coconut tree of our land.

This is the year Asian Americans will not be used as a racial wedge, but rather as co-conspirators and accomplices to the movement for Black lives. This is the year we will help people see transformative justice is possible. This is the year we will see a new world as possible.

This is the year that the world we dream of becomes the world we’re going to live in.

This is the year we become unafraid and without apology, the demands and dreams and desires of Black people become the reality for our future generations.

This is the year that our loved ones can sleep soundly and without worry.

This is the year that white supremacy and racism are pulled off our backs, the yoke of slavery is lifted from our necks, and we dance in rivers of fairness and oceans of justice.

This is the year if every Black man, woman and child, rose up, and held hands across the globe, creating an impermeable shield, dissolving every chain that has tried to bend and break Black bodies, this is the year.

This is the year our babies stop playing with police cars and instead use their hands to plant seeds 🌱.

This is the year the whole world changes and the new seeds are planted.

This is the year that middle class white folks abandon their dreams of safety and take to the streets to save our humanity.

This is the year that black people get the generations of rest we are owed, which in itself will be revolution🌀.