I read this morning that President-elect Joe Biden is nominating Dr. Rachel Levine as assistant secretary for health in the department of Health and Human Services. If confirmed by the Senate, she will be the first transgender federal official to be confirmed. What a powerful choice.
As I read, I thought of the picture of a mural in the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco I saw back in 2009. In 1956, the poet Allen Ginsberg, published Howl through this bookshop. No one else dared to publish it because of its condemnation of patriarchy and its vision of a world where people could just be and live with love and care without the threat of violence. The community of the creative imagination reshapes and remakes that which is destructive into something that is beautiful, healing, and nourishing.
The phrase in the mural is a reference to the Zapatistas who launched a campaign in 1994 to free themselves from the same patriarchal violence that has tried to destroy indigenous people.
As I turn to the midpoint of my 50’s, I realize that the struggle for that world of our imagination will never finish. The struggle is life itself. I also keep coming back to the notion of holding the tension that has one foot in this world and the other in the one that lives in the heart. This was the theme of last night’s practice. Sun and Moon, Hatha Yoga.
-Carlos