"I know the biggest crime / is just to throw up your hands / saying 'this has nothing to do with me / I just want to live as comfortably as I can.
You got to look outside your eyes / you got to think outside your brain / you got to walk outside your life / to where the neighborhood changes." (From Willing to Fight, by Ani Difranco)

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Moving is Discovering!-- June 21, 2009

Moving is a process of discovery-- I've been finding old notes, photographs, yearbooks, dried flowers, buttons, nails, pens and folders of overly-detailed class notes from four years of undergraduate education.

I've also found a lot of CLP notes, from India to California. Some from plane rides in between the two. Some cryptic, some anthropological, some poetic.

Some without titles. Like this one, scribbled across three sheets, ripped out and attached to a list of "Social Service Activities" compiled by the Lights of India in Tiruchirapalli, Tamil Nadu in August 2008...

-----------------------
Untitled, Undated Field Notes (India, August 2008)

Why do we do it? Where? How? Purpose.
Marriage moment: Why don't you work locally? Why do we have to choose?
What are you doing with your life?
I'm unifying mind and action.

[Thinking Florida.]
--> Fantasy world.
--> Letter from God.
--> As I looked beneath me, I was making the road.

The weight of that moment-- to do international organizing the right way requires it to consume you. I want to let it consume me. Studying in endless hunger. Read till it becomes you. Stay up late... creating, becoming, developing.

Service, activism, social justice is a full-time job. There is nothing compartmental about it.

Flexibility. Fearlessness.

These are real lives. Where is US where is THEM ?

[A new definition]: Self-activism: a radical confrontation.
(Real social justice is transformation.)

You should get somewhere and feel fearlessly stupid.
--> Humility.
--> FEARLESS HUMILITY.

"You are a CRAZY American girl!"
--> Identity.
--> Foreigner.
--> Female.
--> Unmarried.

[[Enigma]].

Samantha Wilson's Coordinating Notes

This page is a continuous blog by Samantha Wilson that will serve as a space for updating the process of the Child Leader Project and the experience with international community organizing-- it'll be a space for notes, ideas, ramblings, videos and photos of the life-long process of organizing.

To comment, email samantha@childleaderproject.org