In Buddhism we accept that the mind is a knife. It can kill others and it can kill ourselves. We must train the mind to go deeper, to find true power by killing the ego itself, to focus this weapon in unexpected ways. As I search for comfort during these times, for myself and for others, I pick up my books. Here is my copy of Tanna Tucker’s zine Blacks & The Soviet Union. I’ve included in this post two excerpts that stir my heart in the moment as I sit with the collective grief of oppressed peoples. They are not the most important elements of the zine but simply what I needed to read today. There’s a lot that can’t be said these days. But no fear, others have already said all that there is to be said and they said it better.
One:
“The man who accepts western values absolutely, finds his creative faculties becoming so warped and stunted that he is almost completely dependent on external satisfactions; and the moment he becomes frustrated in his search for these, he begins to develop neurotic symptoms to feel that life is not worth living, and in chronic cases, to take his own life.” - Paul Robeson
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞
Two: the poem “Lenin” by Langston Hughes
LENIN
Lenin walks around the world.
Frontiers cannot bar him.
Neither barracks nor barricades impede.
Nor does barbed wire scar him.
Lenin walks around the world.
Black, brown and white receive him.
Language is no barrier.
The strangest tongues believe him.
Lenin walks around the world.
The sun sets like a scar.
Between the darkness and the dawn
There rises a red star.
langston hughes 1932