Cuando me veo y toco yo, Juan sin Nada no más ayer, y hoy Juan con Todo, y hoy con todo, vuelvo los ojos, miro, me veo y toco y me pregunto cómo ha podido ser. - de "Tengo", Nicolas Guillen Tengo. I first fell in love with Cuba over the poem "Tengo" by Nicolas… Continue reading “Finally, We Eat, and Our Children Play”: Reflections on a Visit to Cuba
A white man called me 'nigger' in the BART station yesterday. He was standing alone on the platform. He watched me as I came down the escalators, hatred shining in his eyes as I drew closer. He glared at me and then he hurled the word out of his twisted mouth, as if he were spitting… Continue reading A White Man Called Me “Nigger” in the BART Station Yesterday
I find solace in some of the most ordinary moments of life. One of those moments is when I deep condition my hair after it has been straight for some time and I can touch the curls once more bouncing from my head. It feels like coming back to roots, back to a familiar once… Continue reading In Search of a Pair of Wings
One of the greatest gifts I have allowed myself to receive in my life are the reminders that I find of things that I need to recall or remember. Sometimes a word, a conversation, a photograph. I just have to be ready to listen. Last night I went to a celebration in Oakland in honor… Continue reading Reminders
Five days a week I take the same train on most days. The 7:56am Baby Bullet from San Francisco 4th and King to Redwood City. Redwood City is one of the multiple cities found in the peninsula of the Bay Area, also known as Silicon Valley. It isn't a place that I would have ever… Continue reading Caltrain Journeys
While reading Terry Tempest Williams I came across this line: “Women piece together their lives from the scraps left over for them.” Young girls are too often socialized to think of their highest calling in life is to give freely of themselves to others. While there is nothing inherently wrong with living a life of… Continue reading A Deliberate Life of Healing
We pursue visibility often. The need to know that someone or someones have given us a nod of approval, read our words, liked our photos, has reviewed our work. But if visibility is driven by something at its foundation, that foundation I feel must be hate. Whether that hatred is about hating who you are… Continue reading Loving Myself to Change
For Trayvon - I think I always start with you because your murder was the first time I had the responsibility of looking into the eyes of a younger generation, and try to find the words to make sense of the senseless. There were never the right words, the proper lesson to do that work, so… Continue reading Reflections on Commencement upon 5 years of Journeying and Writing
The staples of my desk at work consists of red chili pepper flakes, salt, a glass name plate, and a black and white photograph of James Baldwin. I am sure others wonder why I have a photograph of James Baldwin on my desk, when they have family photos and old cards, because I can see their quizzical… Continue reading On the Broken Nights, Generating Healing
''How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers' names.'' -Alice Walker Whenever people ask me why I want to be a writer, I always begin at my mother, who is a writer. I would feel… Continue reading The Gifts of My Mother –Reflections on Mother’s Day
Odelia Younge 