this is what it sounds like
(an ecological approach)

1.
put your ear to the ground¹

face sideways your roots²
align your dirty rhythmic heart³
a yes⁴
deep with centuries of waiting⁵

listen⁶
you may be in          danger⁷
(if) you are not          extinct⁸

2.
maroon tap break beat⁹
old blood loose¹⁰
under tongue blade be¹¹
time
stolen shared and saved¹²

3.
wake up early¹³
nocturnal animals
and unfinished dreams¹⁴
scratch your roof morse¹⁵
(and your throat open)¹⁶

1. Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind (An Example)
   The Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind is based in, accountable to, and in love with Durham, North Carolina, a post-industrial southern city in a state with a history of plantation slavery and a contemporary practice of exploiting and targeting migrant workers. Something is happening here that has been happening for too long. Something new is also happening here. [↩]
2. Durham, as a city, has a large Black working class population, a growing Latino population, and also a history of Black wealth (as defined in the destructive capitalist sense and also as defined in the subversive sense that Nikki Giovanni proposes in her poem “Nikki-Rosa”: “Black love is Black wealth.”) Durham is also a university city. See the above reference to plantation slavery and migrant exploitation as context. [↩]
3. The ground that nurtures the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind‘s perpetual growth and expression through media, educational interactions, and interactive research is a transformative activist and organizing community watered in particular by the women of color, sex workers, survivors of sexual violence, queer and gender queer people and allies who created UBUNTU, a coalition dedicated to ending all gendered violence through the intentional creation of a communal practice of sustaining transformative love, and also by a network of collectives, organizations, and projects committed to racial and economic justice, abolishing the prison industrial complex, growing community-accountable healthy food sources, an intersectional approach to queer liberation, and the creation of a people’s Durham led by working class women of color. [↩]
4. The Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind is accountable to these local conditions… [↩]
5. and seeks to fortify the loving and dynamic relationship between contemporary visionaries and the legacy of Black feminist activism, creativity and thought, specifically through the creation of ritual educational spaces that invite the participation of Black feminist ancestors. [↩]
6. The premise of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind and its “by every means necessary” approach, is the belief that Black feminist educators, community organizers, writers, and scholars are evidence of a spiritual reality, a revised meaning of life that not only challenges but also implies an alternative to the deadliness of capitalism. [↩]
7. The “Eternal Summer” riffs on and points out global warming, peak oil, and the cumulative friction of the global capitalist machine that expends life for profit as evidence that a different meaning of life is necessary now. [↩]
8. The good news, or gospel, of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind is that BLACK FEMINISM LIVES as a spiritual practice, a political legacy, and a critical intersectional possibility that people of all backgrounds and experiences have the opportunity to be transformed by when they get with it. [↩]
9. The Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind is revolutionary because it models what is possible in community as transformation. In much the way that the very existence of maroon communities as an alternative space of Black freedom inspired enslaved Africans trapped on plantations to rise up and rebel, the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, which provides loving transformative spaces and technologies sustained by the brilliance of the oppressed genius communities we are accountable to, hopes to inspire those working for necessary change within the non-profit industrial complex to remember that we do not need to wait for or pander to foundation funding or a corporately validated organizational structure to create what we need. [↩]
10. The most radical danger is here in the already existing genius of oppressed people, constrained by a system that devalues that genius. [↩]
11. We believe that all of that brilliance is available under the right circumstances. Or as Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter says “the ceremony must be found.” [‘The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism’ Boundary II, 12:3 & 13:1, (Spring/Fall 1984): 19-70.] [↩]
12. Therefore time is the most valued resource in the ecology of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind. Ancestral time, time as community, intentional time, and time across space are the forms of time that make the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Eternal. Our time together is sacred. We were never meant to survive. See Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival” in The Black Unicorn, New York: Norton, 1995 (re-issue). [↩]
13. Ancestral time: This means both setting intentional time for ancestor attention and an understanding of time that acknowledges the presence of all the energy that ever has been. Alexis wakes up at five o’clock in the morning, when no one else is interested in speaking to her, specifically to listen for what her long noticed or newly announced ancestors will demand, suggest, or make known. [↩]
14. Kifu Faruq, Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind participant, sustainer, and community food justice worker calls this practice being present to the “dream download.” [↩]
15. These ancestors often bring specific instructions, exciting possibilities, and new details for how all of our dreams are possible. [↩]
16. This practice provides a miraculous clarity to an eternal day. [↩]