A Burst of Light

by Audre Lorde

How do we organize around our differences, neither denying them nor blowing them up out of proportion?

We do not have to become each other’s unique experiences and insights in order to share what we have learned through our particular battles for survival as Black women.

Eventually institutional racism becomes a question of power and privilege rather than merely color, which then serves as a subterfuge.

Dear goddess! Face-up again against the renewal of vows. Do not let me die a coward, mother. Nor forget how to sing. Nor forget song is a part of mourning as light is a part of sun.

Survival isn’t some theory operating in a vacuum. It’s a matter of my everyday living and making decisions.

To paraphrase June Jordan, we are the women we want to become.

When language becomes most similar, it becomes most dangerous, for then differences may pass unremarked.

I 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!

This is why the work is so important. Its power doesn’t lie in the me that lives in the words so much as in the heart’s blood pumping behind the eye that is reading, the muscle behind the desire that is sparked by the word—hope as a living state that propels us, open-eyed and fearful, into all the battles of our lives. And some of those battles we do not win. But some of them we do.

And yes, all the stories we tell are about healing in some form or the other.

that when it truly exists it is the most potent and lasting force in life, even if certainly not the fastest. But without it nothing else is worth a damn.

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.

“It is in the recognition of the genuine conditions of our lives that we gain the strength to act and our motivation for change.”

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.

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

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.

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

Origin of self care? Different than we use... she's dealing with a terminal cancer diagnosis, not instagram influencer

Most of all, to listen to the messages of uncertainty without allowing them to immobilize me, nor keep me from the certainties of those truths in which I believe.

I am living my life every particular day no matter where I am, nor in what pursuit. It is the consciousness of this that gives a marvelous breadth to everything I do consciously.

It’s about trying to know who I am wherever I am. It’s not as if I’m in struggle over here while someplace else, over there, real life is waiting for me to begin living it again.

But those of us who live our battles in the flesh must know ourselves as our strongest weapon in the most gallant struggle of our lives.

another kind of power is growing, tempered and enduring, grounded within the realities of what I am in fact doing. An open-eyed assessment and appreciation of what I can and do accomplish, using who I am and who I most wish myself to