A Burst of Light

by Audre Lorde

I think of what it could have meant in terms of sisterhood and survival for each one of us to have known of the other’s existence: for me to have had her words and her wisdom, and for her to have known I needed them! It is so crucial for each one of us to know she is not alone.

Where does our power lie and how do we school ourselves to use it in the service of what we believe?

how can we use each other’s differences in our common battles for a livable future?

All of our children are prey. How do we raise them not to prey upon themselves and each other? And this is why we cannot be silent, because our silences will come to testify against us out of the mouths of our children.

want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes—everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!

There are some occasions in life too special to dissect, not only because they are everything they are supposed to be, but because they are also a sum of unexpected fantasies and deep satisfactions all come together at one point in time.

Control of Thought Think of a small object (i.e., a paper clip) for five minutes, exclusively. Practice for a month.

Control of Action Perform a small act every day at the same time. Practice, and be patient.

Control of Feeling (equanimity) Become aware of feelings and introduce equanimity into experiencing them—i.e., be afraid, not panic-stricken....

Positivity (tolerance) Refrain from critical downgrading thoughts that sap...

Openness (receptivity) Perceive even what is unpleasant in an unfettere...

Harmony (perseverance) Work toward balancing ...

As a living creature I am part of two kinds of forces—growth and decay, sprouting and withering, living and dying, and at any given moment of our lives, each one of us is actively located s...

I don’t know what makes the anthroposophs think this sort of false socializing is not more stressful than expressing real feelings, but I find it terribly wearing.

my heart aches from strangeness.

Don’t they know good things get better by opening them up to others, giving and taking and changing? Most people here seem to feel that rigidity is a bona fide pathway to peace, and every fibre of me rebels against that.

“Take what you can use and let the rest GO!”

I cannot bear to think that this might be my last New Year’s Eve. But it might be. What a bummer! But if that’s true at least I have had others which were sweet and fall past comparing, and filled with enough love and promise to last forever and beyond me.

always, the sea speaks to me no matter where I get to her.

When I am next to the sea, the wide spread of water laps over me with an enduring peace and excitement that feels like finding some precious rock in the earth, a sense of touching something that is most essentially me in a place where my past and my future intersect along the present.

I hear the waters’ song, feel the tides within the fluids of my body,

But it is the ways in which you are the same that make it possible to communicate at all.

As warriors, our job is to actively and consciously survive it for as long as possible, remembering that in order to win, the aggressor must conquer, but the resisters need only survive. Our battle is to define survival in ways that are acceptable and nourishing to us, meaning with substance and style. Substance. Our work. Style. True to our selves.

Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone; who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.

I want to acknowledge all those intricate connections between us by which we sustain and empower each other.

Racism. Cancer. In both cases, to win the aggressor must conquer, but the resisters need only survive. How do I define that survival and on whose terms?

The accuracy of that diagnosis has become less important than how I use the life I have.

I made up my mind that if I was going to die in agony on somebody’s office floor, it certainly wasn’t going to be his!

friend Clem’s voice coming back to me through the dimness of thirty years: “I see you coming here trying to make sense where there is no sense. Try just living in it. Respond, alter, see what happens.” I thought of the African way of perceiving life, as experience to be lived rather than as problem to be solved.

Each victory must be applauded, because it is so easy not to battle at all, to just accept and call that acceptance inevitable.

Simone de Beauvoir’s words echo in my head: “It is in the recognition of the genuine conditions of our lives that we gain the strength to act and our motivation for change.”

The tensions created inside me by the contradictions is another source of energy and learning. I have always known I learn my most lasting lessons about difference by closely attending the ways in which the differences inside me lie down together.

I have a privileged life or else I would be dead by now.

Time is a crucial element in the treatment of cancer, and I had to decide which chances I would take, and why.

This work gives me a tremendous amount of energy back in satisfaction and in belief, as well as in a vision of how I want this earth to be for the people who come after me.

When I work with young poets who are reaching for the power of their poetry within themselves and the lives they choose to live, I feel I am working to capacity, and this gives me deep joy, a reservoir of strength I draw upon for the next venture. Right now.

It is ever so much more important now for me to fill the psyches of all the people I love and who love me with a sense of outrageous beauty and strength of purpose.

Inside and outside, change is not easy nor quick, and I find myself always on guard against what is oversimplified, or merely cosmetic.

Another secret is to find some particular thing your soul craves for nourishment—a different religion, a quiet spot, a dance class— and satisfy it. That satisfaction does not have to be costly or difficult. Only a need that is recognized, articulated, and answered.

There is an important difference between openness and naiveté. Not everyone has good intentions nor means me well. I remind myself I do not need to change these people, only recognize who they are.

It’s nonsense, however, to believe that any Black woman who is living an informed life in America can possibly abolish stress totally from her life without becoming psychically deaf, mute, and blind. (News Item: Unidentified Black man found hanging from a tree in Central Park with hands and feet bound. New York City police call it a suicide.) I am learning to balance stress with periods of rest and restoration.

Each one of us must define for ourselves what substance and shape we wish to give the life we have left.

I respect the time I spend each day treating my body, and I consider it part of my political work.

To acknowledge privilege is the first step in making it available for wider use. Each of us is blessed in some particular way, whether we recognize our blessings or not. And each one of us, somewhere in our lives, must clear a space within that blessing where she can call upon whatever resources are available to her in the name of something that must be done.

For me, living and the use of that living are inseparable, and I have a responsibility to put that privilege and that life to use.

I wish to live whatever life I have as fully and as sweetly as possible, rather than refocus that life solely upon extending it for some unspecified time.