This new perspective...

Life.. has shifted my worldview, my identity, and the means to its (life's) objectives a number of times. Somehow this new perspective I seem to be growing into is significantly weighted and pivitol. I have always been one to seek accomplishments through somewhat spontaneous choices, all that I have grown from and that I never regret. Although there seems to be a side of that that is still there, and will always be a part of who I am, looking into building upon more long term choices and their implications seem to be comming into the forefront. It is an uneasy shift. One that at times has me feeling alone in what seems like a world full of people who place value in acquring wisedom through being in constant transition. A value I have always held throughout my life, and still do.. to some extent now.

A shifting worldview is opening up, one that sees freedom in choices that involve long term negotiations and renegotiations. One that sees wisedom and growth in becoming through building strengths through people, places, actions that call for long term challenges and flowering that never stops reaching out and refining its beauty. I am comming to see the importance of this woldview to my commitment to my work, to revolutionary liberation, to those in my life who have vowed to dedicate their lives to the same. Through this changing perspective I have also seen fears come exposed before me, those that have blinded me to possibilities but also those fears that I needed to experience, understand, and learn from in working through and building a new sense of viewing my life, my people, my world.

I call this a shifting worldview because to completely grow into it is to decolonize myself from all the fears of taking on the work necessary to impact real, true, and effective change. This kind of change has always been my goal, and I have always been on this path. The means to which this goal is achieved is constantly being redefined and refined. Admiting to these changes are moments of overcomming " distortion (s) of the vocation of becoming more fully human," as Paulo Friere puts it. The second challenge comes in instituting a form of personal "praxis". Although Friere speaks about liberation as a social agency, through analyzing this shift I am increasingly becoming convinced of the significance of self-liberation through the process of our work and relation to the world, to our people, to revolution.

In a world that does not value those liberating factors that bring the actualization of self into the forefront of human development (because this would be a threat to a system of dehumanization itself), this process of self-rediscovery seems like a solitary vocation. This dehumanizing society does not value the implications that humanizing relationships and humanizing work has on our lives. It is programed to see these gems as less than secondary if we are lucky to see them at all. Even when we are given these opportunities, we are forced to make choices that dehumanize us and our people, because these choices are safer, because they are so normalized that anything outside these choices would be too risky: "But while dominated by the fear of freedom they refuse to appeal to others, or to listen to the appeals of others, or even to the appeals of their own conscience. They prefer gregariousness to authentic comradeship; they prefer the security of conformity with their state of unfreedom to the creative communion produced by freedom and even the very pursuit of freedom." -Paulo Friere

It would be easier to choose to ignore this shift of wisedom by ignoring the value of long term growth and the challenge to engage in work that calls for an ongoing presence and commitment. It is easier to say that I am committed to some abstract idea of "the revolution." In exposing these truths I am making the choice to accept those blessings that cultivate outcomes of true and tangible products of revolutionary action. These choices will involve personal challenges, but also growth; these choices will include the need to redefine myself to the world and defend the authenticity of who I am becoming; these choices will mean beating against all the odds that a dehumanizing society will try to screw me with. These choices are the choices of a growing warrior, an identity I have always known, though am still coming to know. A warrior who defends life, a warrior who will cross the edges of of a preconcieved world to prove that it is in fact maleable without a definate shape, a warrior who will take on the necessary battles to defend love till death; a warrior with a will to teach, expose, and become truth; a revolutionary warrior; a warrior for life.