Postcard from North Carolina - June 2026
I sit in a circle with my neighbors. They have gathered camping chairs in a makeshift circle in the cul-de-sac across from my house to celebrate a birthday. I carried a kitchen chair across the street and placed myself at the end of the 20+ person curl. No one talks to me. Although I know my friend and landlady, I recognize only 3 more people, including the birthday host.
As I move solidly into late middle age (or early old age?) I see the world through my aging eyes. I sip my seltzer and think about being new, unknown, possibly invisible.
Every situation is a mirror. Every relationship is a mirror. Especially when you get pinched, that's when there’s an opportunity to learn more about yourself. Like sitting in this circle, feeling ignored thinking about the neglect of my childhood. I enjoy my own company now I can sort out the feelings in my body, I can enjoy watching my neighbors catch up and not take it personally, not feel the need to take up the space to make sure I’m seen and heard.
On this beautiful early summer evening, I sit facing an electric orange sunset through the tall pine trees. Eavesdropping a bit on the conversation next to me, a house being built on a piece of land not too far away, I consider belonging.
Part of aging, I am realizing, is that we can grow weary of looking in the mirror. Both the existential ones as well as the looking glass.
People show me my own internal workings. Oh, and I have discovered time travel, albeit involuntarily.
Every day, I feel the gravitational pull of time and earth, the spinning, the misalignment of then and now. I am holding my baby in my arms, smelling his newborn sweetness, his toddler heat, his little loving bear cub snuggle. Seconds later, I am transported to a text message that says, “Can I go out with my friends tonight?” Conversely, I feel Vangie’s cool palm on my feverish temple. She's cooing and whispering that everything will be okay when, seconds later, I glimpse my stepdaughter tying her child’s shoe. I am on the mother-daughterhood ride of a lifetime.
Maybe if they told us that aging came with time travel, we wouldn’t be so susceptible to skin care and diet product marketing? I wonder if other people travel through their roles, experience five decades worth of memory at any given moment, and then swing back to the present?
If you’re thinking that all sounds so dizzying, well then, you get it. Perhaps the foggy brain or senility, or that why-did-I-come-in-this-room feeling is precisely because we are roaming through the past.
Racism is a mirror, too. When white people accept responsibility for seeing the many ways white supremacy culture filters our thoughts, we accept that the stories racism can teach us about power and honesty, community and humility are meant to help us heal.
Thoughts on what the racism of the world mirrors back to me:
Power dynamics are everywhere. Nothing is power neutral.
People of the global majority fight and resist racism and colonialism every day in countless ways, with abundance. I can choose to join them; there is an open invitation.
My exhaustion and weariness are part of the strategy of white supremacy. It’s so much easier to choose denial or despair.
Living joyfully and ethically is its own form of antiracism.
There are choice points everywhere. From where I spend my money to how I facilitate a meeting, I am building for collective liberation or maintaining the current social order.
We are halfway through 2026. What have you done to build for liberation this year?
You are not fifteen, or twelve, or seventeen—
You are a hundred wild centuries
And fifteen, bringing with you
In every breath and in every step
Everyone who has come before you,
All the yous that you have been,
The mothers of your mother,
The fathers of your father.
If someone in your family tree was trouble,
A hundred were not:
The bad do not win—not finally,
No matter how loud they are.
We simply would not be here
If that were so.
You are made, fundamentally, from the good.
With this knowledge, you never march alone.
You are the breaking news of the century.
You are the good who has come forward
Through it all, even if so many days
Feel otherwise. But think:
When you as a child learned to speak,
It’s not that you didn’t know words—
It’s that, from the centuries, you knew so many,
And it’s hard to choose the words that will be your own.
From those centuries we human beings bring with us
The simple solutions and songs,
The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies
All in service to a simple idea:
That we can make a house called tomorrow.
What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,
Is ourselves. And that’s all we need
To start. That’s everything we require to keep going.
Look back only for as long as you must,
Then go forward into the history you will make.
Be good, then better. Write books. Cure disease.
Make us proud. Make yourself proud.
And those who came before you? When you hear thunder,
Hear it as their applause.
Copyright © 2018 by Alberto Ríos.
provocations and Nourishment
Roxanne Gay reading about privilege, “Peculiar Benefits.”
Thank you Jordan for sending this over! Ancestral Recovery and Radical Diasporism: Beyond Dispersion to Solidarity
Upcoming Opportunities
Atlanta people! In-person Finding Freedom is coming this fall! Join us in September, and please help spread the word.
Antiracism and the Church: a self-paced online course. Sliding Scale
Ruach is an anti-zionist space for Jews to learn somatic practices for leading in collective liberation spaces. We will gather in person in Seattle this August led by Wendy Elisheva Somerson (Wes) and Donna Hirshfield White, this is a magical space!
Toward Justice,
Evangeline
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