"makes you wanna shout"

we use the same word — agency — to refer to governments, service providers, bureaucratic entities that we use to refer to proactivity, choicefulness, a sense of our own power, in this country where agencies so thoroughly and menacingly compromise our connection to our own agency. it’s telling, but i digress.1

Sendolo Diaminah totally enhanced/altered my understanding of agency this week, in this conversation. he was asked how he came to feel his “calling and sense of agency in transforming fundamental conditions” and answered,

how can i live in a world so incredible, so prolific, so miraculous…how can i feel that in me and you know people to be old and southern about it..makes you wanna shout it makes you want to take action it makes you want to do something…the creative and energizing force behind strategy and organizing and political work…this kind of like unbound wonder wakes itself up and by following that i was like okay now i gotta figure out how do i make more space for more of that in more people

i used to relate to organizing/equity/liberation work as laborious, obligatory, dutiful, like ugh we have to because what the fuck — which is at the level of reaction, and real, and also crusty. beneath that, i think those of us who want conditions to be more/totally conducive to life (speaking of words….no abortion protection in a country that aborts life in so many ways every day) are also guided by a deep reverence for life, guided by love, really. this mysterious electric call-it-what-you-want, that finds us and surprises us.

earlier this spring Sendolo Diaminah similarly transformed my understanding of practice, when i heard him on this panel,

Sendolo Diaminah!!! this awe, this simultaneity of feeling buoyed and anchored. this gladness. “I threw the book, when I first read that *laughs/exhales* I threw the book”3 that’s another way of describing this enthusiasm — with what it makes you do.

feeling stunned and enamored. and practicing. may your practices carry you, hold you. may you feel close to agency, and to wonder.