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Feb 22, 2022Liked by Saeed Jones

Wow Saeed!

The fact that she enthusiastically embraces and makes space for what she doesn’t know is a sign of her intelligence and deep wisdom.

Your thoughts today and your audio moved me deeply and brought back an old but key concept i´ve naturally and gradually built my way of being: "not knowing". I´ve found your words so deeply meaningful and full of wisdom. What an amazing journey your life must have been and is dear.

"Not-knowing means not being limited by what we know, holding what we know lightly so that we are ready for it to be different. Maybe things are this way. But maybe they are not."

"Repeating the words “I don’t know” allows us to question tightly-held ideas. Done thoroughly, “I don’t know” can pull the rug out from under our most cherished beliefs."

Hope you can read this short article about not-knowing (which is not the same as doubt or confusion) to which I´ve been coming back for the last 15 years and your audio

today made me go back once more.

https://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/books-articles/not-knowing/

Much love!

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Feb 22, 2022Liked by Saeed Jones

I will definitely have to read more of June Jordan's work, and I particularly need to sit with this idea about partnership in misery vs. partnership in change. It reminds me of the problem of lateral violence - something I've witnessed in disability communities where everyone present is broadly impacted by similar societal forces, but not identically impacted, and there isn't necessarily a consensus on what the solutions are. It's easy for perceived outliers (and who is "an outlier" is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but multiply marginalised people are particularly at risk) to be targeted from within that broad group.

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I love this.

I can't help but wonder how to create space for uncertainty and give some else permission to say they don't know to me. I can IDK all day to myself, but boy is it difficult to do that for others.

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So lovely to hear your voice again after all these years. ❤

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Saeed, I very much appreciated your thoughts and your recommendation of June Jordon's essay. It was very timely for me as I think about activists as a community and a culture, and the need to not focus on connecting based on "identities"--which are, after all, constructed for us by a exploitative and unequal society not for our benefit but for pigeonholing and keeping us divided. Instead, as she intimates in her open-ended, questioning framing, we need to connect, and have solidarity with one another, because we ARE connected--as humans.

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