A Hoodoo Trust

“Those of us who can see clearly what we are waging war against may feel their knees quaking. May feel devastated at the enormity of it, crushed even. Yet we conduct our blooming. Not because of the certainty of the outcome but because there is no other way. Not really. Not for what is real.”

Of course, there are many things to be afraid of right now. If I started listing all of the things to be afraid of, I would never stop. And of course, we have never stopped being at war. As long as anti-Blackness is at the foundation of this current Empire, my people have been at war, whether we recognized it or not. And prayerfully, we recognize it now.

But fear. The colonial mind does not just have fears, it is run by them. It is deluded by them. It is chased and haunted by them. And it constructs nightmares that we call oppression and fascism because of them. The fear of being replaced, the fear of not having, the fear of being insignificant against the vast breadth of the cosmos, one in which it is a roving, lonely, individual speck of dust railing against its own death. And so in its desperation it will destroy everything to prove its might against creation & transformation.

In one of my initiations by a forest, I was taught to shed my [colonial] humanity and allow myself to become a being among beings. We call folks who behave in deplorable ways monsters, exclude them from the definition of humanity, but by its very nature, colonialism necessitates the production of humans who are willing to behave in the most deplorable ways. Being run by fear means being enslaved by your worst instincts.

Many people think that faith and belief are the antidote to fear. That faith is the opposite of fear. In my work, I find that what most people think of as faith is just another illusion laid on top of fear. It does nothing to fundamentally change their relationship with themselves, their world, or the way they move in it. As soon as pressure (violence) from the systemic nightmare of colonial imperial white supremacist capitalist patriarchy touches them, they fall back in line, curtailing their vision, kowtowing to the status quo, accepting their definitions and boundaries of reality. A lot of what people call faith is the psychological equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and pretending that you can’t hear the bombs dropping just because they aren’t dropping on *your* head. And that is why people think that faith and science are diametrically opposed. Because faith, inside these colonial boundaries, is largely another word for delusion. Most faith does not challenge the status quo, doesn’t disrupt anything. It just hopes to get a little bit more bread and a little more ease for itself inside of the collective nightmare of colonialism and whiteness.

So back to being a being among beings. Faith, the bible tells us, is the evidence of things unseen. But what I have come to know is that trust is the evidence of relationality. As colonialism teaches us that we are lonely individuals against an uncaring and unfeeling universe, who must prove our worth by dominion over everything, or find our relative and shifting value in our position in the hierarchy of domination; as colonialism continues to rip apart communities, families, and relationships with land, spirit and each other, replacing all of that with faith in a white god that seems to hate to love us and faith in a dollar backed by that god and his missiles, we have been taught that nothing and nobody is trustworthy. A hefty majority of people can’t even trust themselves, their minds being minefields of self-censure and self-scorn. And if you can’t trust, you can’t rest. And if you can’t rest, you can’t receive. And if you can’t receive, you can’t be guided. And if you can’t be guided than you can only be used on behalf of the status quo.

But trust isn’t a magic trick, a mental gymnastic you use to ignore all the bad shit out there while you wish for something better. That’s unsustainable in the long run. Trust is a natural by-product of strong and healthy relationship. It is a natural by-product of what you know to be true about yourself in relationship to that which Iz. It is a lived, experiential knowing of how power flows in your own life, of where the source of your abundance and supply is, of who you belong to, who you are in community with, which relationships of yours are reciprocal and dynamic. I trust trees because trees have saved my life. I trust ancestors because the miracles in my life are daily, ceaseless and boundless, and they respond to my celebration of them and with them. I trust orcas because when I went through devastating loss in an unfamiliar territory, families of orcas sang to me across land. I trust the sun because the sun feeds me and teaches me. I trust the wailing woman because she holds my grief with and for me. I trust the stars because they guide me. I trust High John because He makes way out of no way. I trust the land under my feet because She holds me and gives me permission to exist upon Her. I trust whom and what I trust because when I have called, they have answered. I trust my partner because when it’s life or death, we have each other’s backs. And this trust has led me to understand the nature of the universe not as a cold and unfeeling darwinesque dog-eat-dog hierarchy with one entropy to rule us all, but a call-and-response universe. Not that I always get the response I want. But that when I call, I can trust that someone will respond. I am never alone. I am a being among beings.

Being a being amongst beings means this. When you speak to me, you speak to the community to which I belong. You speak to my ancestors, the stars, and the land. You speak to the trees and the wind and the sun. Because that iz who I speak to, with, respond to, am responsible to. I am never alone, and I am not an individual. I have existed before this lifetime and will exist beyond this lifespan in this body. I am a representative of the communities which I am in relationship with, and with whom I have built mutual trust.

[Christian-Colonial] faith asks us to believe in the idea of wishes granted by a capricious and fickle god whose unfathomable temperament leaves a lot of folks uncertain as to whether they’ve been good enough to avoid burning for infinity. And even if you weren’t raised Christian, the punishing god permeates all the structures of this punitive, carceral systemic nightmare we live in.

But trust is spiritual science, built through experience, that transcends belief and theory to live in our bones and allow us to do what those that don’t know can’t do. Allows us to be what those who don’t know can’t be. It’s not about not having any fear, it’s about knowing where your power is and where it comes from. So when my knees shake with fear, my ancestors stand at my back, holding me up. When my voice quakes with timidity, the wind lifts and carries it higher. When I fear my life is over because the almost-worst has arrived, the earth holds me more tightly and tenderly than my own mother. This is what I know, not what I believe. I know that I am loved, I am held, I know where my power lies, I have the evidence of it in my life, and therefore I trust.