Ismatu I have had a long day of listening to the voices of my friends, including my editor and my soon-to-retire mentor… and I can’t say enough how lovely it is to hear your voice and hear how you’re doing. Always grateful for your transparency and always praying for your family & your health !! Love to Sierra Leone from Denver CO
Hi, ismatu 👋🏻 It is encouraging to know you are well. Thank you for checking in. I pray the impending acceleration carries you smoothly to your next period of extended rest. This world will not strip away our love and humanity, and we will use those to tend the garden of the next.
hi ismatu! prayers and love to you and your loved ones. thanks for the hey (via ricky the icon). i hope you are drinking a nice pistachio or peppermint tea, or something with vanilla. i love you
Thank you for sharing Ismatu! I’m so excited to read your work when you’re ready to share it with us. I also relate so heavily to the experience of being told you will choose dismemberment and it’s something I’ve been struggling with heavily through my early 20s - your thoughts really gave me some perspective and peace. I’m starting how to go mad without losing your mind this week on your recommendation. Praying for your protection and peace. With love, kat
Thank you for checking in. Listening to you gives me a sense of meaning that I struggle to find elsewhere. You have changed me so much in such a short time, and I cannot imagine the butterfly effect your existence creates. With much love ✌🏻💗
Míle beannachtaí - many blessings. There's such a simple and profound wisdom in that phrase "life is beautiful and people die." And how Interdependent those two truths are. Sacred paradox.
I witness and honor your deep devotion to the transformative vision and day to day disciplines of liberation. Your voice has been a beacon for me in continuing to forge my own liberation path.
We may not know each other, but I'm struck by the parallels and resonance I feel with your path and feel called to share a bit of my own.
I'm also 25. I was radicalized around 19. The condescension levied at young radicals is so pervasive. I've learned to witness it as a projection of the hopeless "realism" that older generations (at least within the imperial core) have fallen into. That "I tried to believe things could be better and then gave up." And they can't believe you're onto something, that it's genuine, because then they'd have to recognize their own despair, apathy, and culpability.
They have to believe it's some passing passion, so they can convince themselves it was for them. That what they felt in the 70s, that surge of change and magic and freedom, was simply a fiction brought on by too many drugs and a naive young mind.
Yet at 25 I've taken vows of lifelong devotion to the spiritual, communal, collective way of liberation.
I have outlined in detail the core values I am devoted to maintaining and empowering, and the new world we will sow with those seeds.
This is not a passing phase. And it wasn't for them either. It was a calling. And they may have stuffed their ears with "realism" and money and the traumas of oppression. But I will die before I deafen myself to nature's cry for liberation.
I was also held by a community whose systemic dispossession and abandonment horrified and transformed me. It struck me that they were connected—to their own emotions, to each other, to the reality of the world, to deeper meaning and Spirit— in a way that I had never witnessed in the privileged suburban environments much of my family occupied.
My whole life I had been told this community was lost, violent, hopeless. And yet there I found the deepest hope, the deepest compassion, the deepest clarity of Truth and meaning and purpose. It comes out in their art, in their worship, in their day to day existence. There is something Alive, something Free in them that those in the gilded cell of privilege cannot imagine.
And empire teaches us to fear and hate what is beyond our knowing. So they are brutalized. Criminalized. Imprisoned. Trapped in systemic poverty. Their families are torn apart and turned against each other.
They are why I can never silence myself. They lit the spark within me that no amount of oppression or privilege can stamp down. They are living in the True world. They nurture the Roots of the free worlds that came before us.
The people who belittled us for our naivety will watch their "realist" world shatter, revealing itself as a colonial illusion. A gilded prison tower.
Those at the roots know the true world. Nature's world. And her storm is coming for that tower.
Here's to the EarthSeeds we're planting at the roots. They may call us naive, crazy, criminal for leaping from the tower of civilization, of the world we're taught to believe is all we have. But new worlds do not grow in concrete. They grow in relationship with the earth.
I witness you sowing those seeds. Go raibh míle maith agat, many many thanks for the work you do in nurturing those EarthSeeds. It may be hard to see their growth now, as they germinate beneath the ground this season of death and abolition and rapid painful transformation. But spring is coming. And with the sun we will rise anew. 🌱🌅
Ismatu I have had a long day of listening to the voices of my friends, including my editor and my soon-to-retire mentor… and I can’t say enough how lovely it is to hear your voice and hear how you’re doing. Always grateful for your transparency and always praying for your family & your health !! Love to Sierra Leone from Denver CO
I am glad you're not here to be useful, thanks for the update.
Ps. Enjoy your sleep, we all stand with you, and hold you in our prayers.
Hi, ismatu 👋🏻 It is encouraging to know you are well. Thank you for checking in. I pray the impending acceleration carries you smoothly to your next period of extended rest. This world will not strip away our love and humanity, and we will use those to tend the garden of the next.
You have my love and solidarity,
Mav
thank you for this. sending the utmost love to you and all those you hold dear.
hi ismatu! prayers and love to you and your loved ones. thanks for the hey (via ricky the icon). i hope you are drinking a nice pistachio or peppermint tea, or something with vanilla. i love you
This is my first time listening to your voice rather than reading your words and it was so lovely!
This is my first time listening to your voice rather than reading your words and it was so lovely!
Thank you for sharing Ismatu! I’m so excited to read your work when you’re ready to share it with us. I also relate so heavily to the experience of being told you will choose dismemberment and it’s something I’ve been struggling with heavily through my early 20s - your thoughts really gave me some perspective and peace. I’m starting how to go mad without losing your mind this week on your recommendation. Praying for your protection and peace. With love, kat
Thank you for checking in with us🫶🫶 Sending love
Sending you love.
Thank you for checking in. Listening to you gives me a sense of meaning that I struggle to find elsewhere. You have changed me so much in such a short time, and I cannot imagine the butterfly effect your existence creates. With much love ✌🏻💗
Míle beannachtaí - many blessings. There's such a simple and profound wisdom in that phrase "life is beautiful and people die." And how Interdependent those two truths are. Sacred paradox.
I witness and honor your deep devotion to the transformative vision and day to day disciplines of liberation. Your voice has been a beacon for me in continuing to forge my own liberation path.
We may not know each other, but I'm struck by the parallels and resonance I feel with your path and feel called to share a bit of my own.
I'm also 25. I was radicalized around 19. The condescension levied at young radicals is so pervasive. I've learned to witness it as a projection of the hopeless "realism" that older generations (at least within the imperial core) have fallen into. That "I tried to believe things could be better and then gave up." And they can't believe you're onto something, that it's genuine, because then they'd have to recognize their own despair, apathy, and culpability.
They have to believe it's some passing passion, so they can convince themselves it was for them. That what they felt in the 70s, that surge of change and magic and freedom, was simply a fiction brought on by too many drugs and a naive young mind.
Yet at 25 I've taken vows of lifelong devotion to the spiritual, communal, collective way of liberation.
I have outlined in detail the core values I am devoted to maintaining and empowering, and the new world we will sow with those seeds.
This is not a passing phase. And it wasn't for them either. It was a calling. And they may have stuffed their ears with "realism" and money and the traumas of oppression. But I will die before I deafen myself to nature's cry for liberation.
I was also held by a community whose systemic dispossession and abandonment horrified and transformed me. It struck me that they were connected—to their own emotions, to each other, to the reality of the world, to deeper meaning and Spirit— in a way that I had never witnessed in the privileged suburban environments much of my family occupied.
My whole life I had been told this community was lost, violent, hopeless. And yet there I found the deepest hope, the deepest compassion, the deepest clarity of Truth and meaning and purpose. It comes out in their art, in their worship, in their day to day existence. There is something Alive, something Free in them that those in the gilded cell of privilege cannot imagine.
And empire teaches us to fear and hate what is beyond our knowing. So they are brutalized. Criminalized. Imprisoned. Trapped in systemic poverty. Their families are torn apart and turned against each other.
They are why I can never silence myself. They lit the spark within me that no amount of oppression or privilege can stamp down. They are living in the True world. They nurture the Roots of the free worlds that came before us.
The people who belittled us for our naivety will watch their "realist" world shatter, revealing itself as a colonial illusion. A gilded prison tower.
Those at the roots know the true world. Nature's world. And her storm is coming for that tower.
Here's to the EarthSeeds we're planting at the roots. They may call us naive, crazy, criminal for leaping from the tower of civilization, of the world we're taught to believe is all we have. But new worlds do not grow in concrete. They grow in relationship with the earth.
I witness you sowing those seeds. Go raibh míle maith agat, many many thanks for the work you do in nurturing those EarthSeeds. It may be hard to see their growth now, as they germinate beneath the ground this season of death and abolition and rapid painful transformation. But spring is coming. And with the sun we will rise anew. 🌱🌅
Grá agus Saoirse - Love and Liberation.
exactly this right down to the projection of the hopeless "realism"!! yes i love the life is beautiful and people die.
&.I know that there are people building these worlds too. May all the seeds planted in love and liberation do their thing.
May we build worlds and revolutions centered around rest, joy and care!