PART V

Last Wednesday of the year. !!!! In the words of Smash Mouth (lol), the years start coming and they don’t stop coming. They also sing, didn’t make sense not to live for fun….just setting that down here on this highly charged eve…

We had to do it to ‘em. Working At It In Five Parts, in homage to Toni Cade Bambara. The ‘It’ in question: the it that is on, freedom also known as love, love also known as freedom. Now is sometime, somewhere, some place to start, to get one inch loser. Now lives in every year.

Too bad the word pentagon is ruined now, but if you missed the first four sides

• Part I (rivalry/let’s act like love and freedom are the same thing)
• Part II (it is right now)
• Part III (it is participatory)
• Part IV (it is what has us be (trust?) and reveal ourselves)

May 2026 be good to you and good for you. May it be, dare I say, freeing and loving.

Here goes…..

On the Emergent Strategy podcast, one of the questions that they consistently ask is how did you come to think of yourself as / realize that you were a change agent? This is a question that probes how we learn about our own power. They want to know how we learn that as much as the world shapes us, we can shape it too.

Another way of asking would be how do you come to feel that the rules are made up–can be ignored, broken, changed? The question reminds me of poet Taylor Johnson naming his spiritual imperative to question everything he does.1

This question is connected to freedom/love–how did you realize you were free and/or that you longed for freedom? When I went back, adrienne maree brown actually phrases this question as: “how do we get more people to think of themselves as responsible for changing the conditions of the world? So, I wanted to ask you, when and how did you realize you wanted to change the conditions around you?”

This was an apt tilt of my recollection, Toni Morrison imparts— “the function of freedom is to free somebody else.”2 She has also said that freedom is choosing what you want to be responsible for.

Responsibility can sometimes have a ho-hum connotation. There’s enough stale, lifeless duty to go around. There is also so much obligation, coercion, and this breeds bitterness, meanness.

I think of Sendolo Diaminah’s answer to adrienne’s question, and tbh the entire episode a lot, because he names a different, more vital source of this freeing, radiant, energizing responsibility. He recalls the experience of coming out as an occasion to weigh convention and inherited values and ways of being against his own experience of awe and desire in how he made decisions about the world moving forward. He describes,

It’s not that conventions, structures, systems aren’t real, it’s just that there are other forces afoot in this unknowable universe which are maybe more real, or a different kind of real and some of us decide to be allegiant to those instead. Given how much violence so many of the conventions ask of us, I’d prefer the other forces. I’d prefer love.

With wonder at the source, responsibility is freeing because it’s like oh, yeah, I am at the mercy of the world and other people but both are also at the mercy of ME. They hate to see me coming. They call some people a force of nature. Well, the cat is out of the bag, we are all forces of nature we are just taught to forget/ignore/suppress in service of our own exploitation lol.

Enthusiasm—in/god/earthquake—feeling possessed by something greater. The greater is love and freedom, the greater is each other, the greater is a longing for the conditions to be conducive to life.

I’ll keep working at it in 2026, thanks for being here.