 Teaching is an act of love. When you are willing to lay in the gap so that others can get across the bridge, that is your back. To the side that knows more and knows better. When you are willing to put aside your own thoughts, to listen to the thoughts of the student that rarely speaks, your listening intently inspires her to voice her thoughts. They are worthy of being spoken. Her words are worth being listened to. Her thoughts are worth the time spent thinking them. She will come to love her voice. Another piece that speaks to some of the challenges that we educators deal with is called the drop in the ocean. In the beginning, mindset, setting heart and mind straight. Be here now. No time like now. The present is all there is. Soy presente. Expect the unexpected. La vida te da sorpresa. Aproveche al momento. Advice, gestos, guidance from culture mentors, life and elder wisdom. Not surprising how by paying attention, being totally present to the infinity in the moment, miracles are happening. Comprehension happens through the confusion thinking sometimes causes. Overtrying to make sense when there was none to be made. Not until the moment attached to, detached from, uncalled for by the mind. Finally able to see how everything is connected. And, but on bone, coincidence, ha! Synchronicity, serendipity, blessings, epiphanies, zoned in reflex, all things that could happen in that moment. Maybe an empty pause in someone else's dream. Maybe it means nothing to nobody else. Everything vital to this one. Action, reaction, reflection, all at once. Moving forward with the same attention to and awareness of my horizons. Building capacity to respond in the moment to the moment. So community, tribe, clan, village, people, family will thrive as you do. Falling happens coincidentally. No such thing coincidence. To remind you to fall forward. Rolling with it, riding life like a sandworm rider, surfing the sands, adept at riding on any wave, flowing ever forward with or without you. Hope fully with. Life in control of nothing, free to respond with your best effort ever for our collective sake. Your proverbial drop in the ocean changes the volume and depth of the ocean immeasurably. Rage, rage you can listen to. I wrote this piece with my mother in mind. Self-phonicate or intercourse yourself. Terms I'd have to use, modeled over years of proper public behavior, displayed in the white-dominated cultural minefields of 20s, 30s, 40s, and always. When faced with that cheeto smirk in response to anything coming out of that lie hole, have intimate communication with your innermost thoughts has to be the subliminal message, while you, of course, intend to mean, fuck your motherfucking self, motherfucker. Yeah, no. You don't want to become a distracting focus, nor a fugitive from the next Twitter skirmish wars of this phony government, sent away to an ignorant, non-reality, hyper-insecure, misdirected, unaware land with no counterplans on the horizon. And you're going to be insulted by this one, free-to-speak voice, because your vituperative language threatens your abusive oppressive privilege to not emphasize with anyone you can see. Fuck y'all, lock them up, kick them out, edicts that cheer your asshole, I mean, anal orifice base. Shaking your ass off of that limb you've backed us onto in front of you is a fall we have to absorb and a risk we must take. The tree is falling apart and the splinters are falling between civil, I don't give half a fuck, and uncivil. Civil better get ready for unbelievable truths, told as lies and brandable black and white divisions, rolling in George Orwellian and Octavia butlerian predictions of how it's going to be. Them's that striving, better catch up with them's that surviving this rainy day we've been saving for. Fucking me? You talking to me? This jumped out at me as I was riding the subway in New York. Walking in the wrong direction against the human current, flowing upstairs, upstream, against gravity, no escalator, no handrails, easy to fall downstairs, letting default and privilege hit the bottom of poverty. Looking up now at the soles of bare feet, trying to stay in touch with Mother Earth, treading tears in a pool of regurgitated undigested nightmares, blank looks pitched against cold stairs trying to make sense of the questioning silence. How many shoulders rub me the wrong way? No need to excuse me, plugged in to avoid unwanted human contact. This is not a conversation we didn't have. I'm having a dialogue with myself. Mind your business. So this is one of the pieces that I consider the concept in my math instruction. This is called looking for balance, algebra in my life. I want for you what I want for me. There should be an equal sign between us. Getting to a common truth is a multi-step equation. I listen to you, you listen to me. I talk to you, you talk to me. You feel me, I feel you. Is that true for you? Not for me. Let's listen, talk, and feel some more. We add to both sides. We take away from both sides. Sometimes we may need to divide both of our resources so that we each have enough. Imagine how the possibilities are multiplied for both of us if we work together to find the truth of understanding, not the truth in you, not the truth in me, but the truth between us, like an equal sign. Mayor Culpa, will you ever treat me like a prodigal son? Glad to see me after a long time away. Will the memory be made fresh, the bitter taste of our last words, swirling, not in our ears, waiting to be repeated? Or will it always be, go back to where you came from? Even though I am born here. If I am not from a country you cannot name that I'm from and I name myself Earthling, will you call me Black Earthling? Or will you deny Earth exists just to treat me like an alien at the beach? I go to the beach on days like this to find my father. Any day I want to share my water with the ocean, the sight of waves falling over each other, scrambling to the shore, as if Daddy were watching these very same waves as a seaman in the Navy. How many of these same waves rolled up on some shore that you're standing on right now? The spectacle of kites flying through their multiple shades of wind conjures up Daddy's tails of flying kites from the Bronx Tenement. Walk up to the building rooftops competing like fighting birds for the same airspace with razor blades hidden in the tail to cut the cord of any enemy kite, leaving it limp in the throes of falling. Standing on the beach sands of time, falling and shifting, carrying the same footsteps you walked on some Bermuda pink sands, but mostly Jones Beach and Zach's Bay were the favorites. Picking up impressions that vibrate like a voice in my ear. Is that the sound of your voice or mine? A glimpse of the waning gibbous moon reaching for the horizon meant it was time, that time of the morning when your blanket had to be on the still cool sands before they could melt your ice, wilt your sandwiches, or warm your grapes. Didn't even know what a gibbous moon was back on that morning when I could see one under the open sky. Breathing the same air, recycled over decades of consumption and recreation. The idea of your last breath mixing with the new air blowing off the ocean carries the iota and the fullness of your embodied spirit. Every day is a happy birthday to me, nor I can find my Daddy at the beach. So here's the new shit. Tuesday, I got up, come down the stairs to my car. This is called why breathe. The air smells dry, arid, earth scorched like something is burnt, still burning. Pardon my ashes. History is not the story. Instead of a compilation of anecdotes, our story, a narrative of our witness, life making, time passing right in front of our eyes, an unforgettable truth etched in life, writing the story becomes the privilege that write what they want to read, that owns the press, that publishes the story like it's their story, their translation, their misinterpretation, their mispronunciation, their commodification, their new words, their letter type, their type set, their original page, their first print, their story printed for their imperial king. So it became history. Take our story back. We tell our story. We listen, our story, being told our story. First person, first hand, I witness truths from our own mouths. Listen to all the stories being told. Audio tape the voices speaking their story. Video tape the tellers of the stories telling their stories in their first and only voice, telling an unimaginable story. A story that sounds unbelievable, probably fiction because the privilege wasn't that privileged to have lived a story that was true. They didn't live to tell his own story. We died making his story. Martyrs get no credit in his story. Our story is more than words. Our story is not written. Images, sounds, smells, dancing in wordless spaces. Life is the page. Listen to the wind. Listen to the water. Listen to the silence between the beats. Listen. Life is the story. Come on for time. Two more, okay good. Falling down, nightfall, soft as down falling. In between time, listening to light crossing shadows. Less sound being quiet. Silent as owls wing. Falcon gliding against the wind, no effort. Agitated prey, give them away. Patient, waiting, silence. Senses heightened, watch from beyond vision. Listen for stealth. Shadows creep towards dreamscapes. Still enough dusk light thinks you can see straight through the creases in the wind. Orange, red, magenta strokes. Paint the horizon. Winking stars call for night to fall. Okay, one last piece. The same horizon. One water, one coast, interrupted only by man-made canals. We watch the same wave always arriving with that crushing churning whisper. The rhythmic white noise of dying waves. How many winds blow between us? Fog blurring our vision. Are we still standing on the same earth connected by one thread of human being? We create the unbridged motes, the canyons, the crevices, the distances sweep away from us under one brilliant sun, melting into a red pool, pouring out of the sky into the same horizon.