Read MoreTheir way of speaking as important as their quips. If I give you the details, you’d get distracted because tone and feelings were primary. Feelings I remember now: sad, humor, giggles, sliced thin truth, clever melancholy, thick sadness.
All of that in one-liner feelings. Eight minutes, 23 seconds.
Read MoreSu forma de hablar es tan importante como sus bromas. Si te doy los detalles, te distraerías porque el tono y los sentimientos eran primordiales. Sentimientos que recuerdo ahora: tristeza, humor, risas, verdad finamente cortada, melancolía inteligente, tristeza espesa.
Todo eso en sentimientos de una sola línea. Ocho minutos, 23 segundos.
Read MoreCommunity isn't just the physical neighborhood, homes, and streets - it's the people. Justice isn't just the laws, rules, and punishment - it's the treatment; it's how a community and society function and operate. For decades and even centuries, the United States has been working (and at many times struggling) to become more united. The idealism of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" written into the Declaration of Independence and the aim to be "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" from our school-aged pledges, are baked into this American Pie.
Read MoreLike Edmund, we ate the Turkish delight offered by the system, relying on their forms, processes, hoping thier procedural laws built to oppress us would do something other. Our stories cemented in stones, the scars on our skin, un-dead, and un-done.
Read MoreMichelle Obama says, “When they go low, we go high.” My dear African American colleague reminds me that supremacy creates a false dichotomy of the choices you have in a scenario – creating false equivalencies which are rarely true.
Why would DEI interventions be any different? Healing comes through an integrated experience of multiple emotions, body sensations, combined with imagination ignited on a cellular level – including our hearts, arms, fingers, thighs, spirits, guts, and yes, the prefrontal cortex thinking/processing brain.
Read MoreThe thought of Christmas brings me both joy and grief. Every. Single. Year. And every single year I pull out Christmas music and gravitate to “Oh Holy Night” by Mariah Carey. As a teenager, I discovered her Christmas album and had one of those ancient cassette tapes - connected to a wire - connected to my CD player. Am I even remembering that right? It was a sort-of-conversion device to play compact discs in my car. (That’s a clue to just how old I am.)
Read MoreRead Moreibrancy and beauty will come around again.
Did you know, Revelation 5:8 paints a celestial picture of the prayers of the saints as the incense filling golden bowls, brought before the Lamb? Our prayers are not forgotten.
Read MoreHope is,
Hope is a spark.
Shooting out from my fingers,
Pow, pow, pow!
Hitting the powder on the ground,
Blasting like fireworks to the dark.
It screams,
I (boom) am (crash) here (pow).
Esperanza is the treasure found in the faces of resiliency of our tias y tios, abuelas, the heroes in our village and the ones we’ve only heard about. Those that have sung a soundtrack of peace through the night.
Read MoreCruel mysteries surround us
About a plundered earth
Where people are pillaged,
Possessions cherished,
And cravings for power, insatiable.
With certain skin shades despised
While another is idolized.
Where there are wars and walls,
Image bearers banished to cages.
Read MoreGod doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t grow tired or weary. My burdens or the burdens of those I love are never too much for him.
Instead, Jesus invites us to allow him to carry all that weighs heavily on us.
Read MoreOn one hand hope fuels me to meet creative deadlines, stirred by the notion that my words will fall on ears to hear and eyes to see. Hope ignites passion to sit with clients who are filled with rumblings of despair as they look over the debris of trauma in their lives. Hope gives birth to desire and longing for repaired relationships.
Read MoreHope is like believing someone. A feeling of trust or something like that. Hope is hmmmmm.
Read More2020 is covered by a dark cloud of hopelessness. A cloud that threatens to suffocate us. A cloud that shows no signs of dissipating.
This overwhelming presence of hopelessness continues to creep toward us and pound on the door to our mind, body, and soul wanting us to give up and let it come pouring in.
Read MoreA candle flickers
in the night
And the breather of breath
purses her lips
letting out
a slow and gentle
lifeline.
Read MoreI hope you would see me
Before a hashtag precedes my name
Before my face is a mural on a brick façade
I hope you would see me
Read More
