Resistance is respect for life

Dispatch #48: They want to kill all things green

Sep 24, 2025

Hi friend,

Here I am on my 41st birthday spent this past August in Central Park.

What do you notice? My cowboy hat? The grey sky? The little blue circle pinned to my chest? (It reads Birthday Boy). The silhouette of my bulbous jacket? When do you notice the green? How does it feel? Is there a place, a memory, that this green reminds you of? Was it the 1st thing you noticed or close to last? What does it mean about me that I am surrounded in green? Who gets to have green? Does it matter?

Today we consider what it means to take green for granted. Today we consider my friend Mahmoud who is barely surviving day after day in Palestine; who I wake up & check on via Instagram each morning; my hope is to see the bubble of his “stories” activated, & in truth, to know whether he has survived the night, whether he is alive.

Often Mahmoud will update me on the unfolding crises in his direct vicinity, whether he has been displaced again, how his family is doing. He tells me stories about his life, that he loves soccer, that his brother was martyred by the genocide. It is normal for his voice notes to be interrupted by the sound of helicopters shooting down at civilians. Bombs detonate while he speaks. Robots wander his neighborhood & erupt. One day I hear a wedding taking place in the background of his voice note; the songs are expansive, the joy is so palpable that I’m smiling ear to ear. I tell him how much it touches me. He records more, just for me, a little surprised that I’m enjoying the music so much. He is numb, he tells me.

One day as Mahmoud & I are chatting over WhatsApp I mention that I’m heading to play soccer. He asks me to take a video specifically to show him the soccer fields. I pan the camera in a full circle, capturing the trees swaying & the abundant green of the turf, which goes on seemingly forever. Usually, admittedly, I hold back on sharing images from my life in our chats because I don’t want him to feel pangs of unnecessary longing or sadness at the unjust discrepancy between our lives. But Mahmoud asks me for it, so I send. He writes back immediately with joy, “I miss green.” Everything around him has been reduced to grey, the rubble, the collapsed buildings, all signs of life (green) have been purposefully obliterated. This razing of life’s most prominent color has an effect on our environment (Israel’s bombing is “equivalent to six Hiroshimas.”)1 And it also has a psychic, emotional effect.

All systemic policy which robs humans of access to green (think imprisonment, solitary confinement, as well as carpet bombing a people & their landscape) are meant to tear nature from nature, humans from the heart of being human.

I “heart” Mahmoud’s comment. I choose the green one 💚. It becomes our language. It means: you deserve green. You deserve all that flowers & flows & froths. The earth. Your pulse. Joy. Abundance. Of course you do.

If you want to support Mahmoud & his family please consider contributing to his fundraiser which directly supports his every day life in Palestine. Find the details here.

Because my mind is a field for parataxis, it works by making quick bonds & connections between seemingly disparate things, I can’t help but think now of queer Mojave poet Natalie Diaz’s poem From the Desire Field, specifically the lines:

“I want her green life. Her inside me
in a green hour I can’t stop.
Green vein in her throat green wing in my mouth
green thorn in my eye. I want her like a river goes, bending.
Green moving green, moving.”

Life, sensuality, sex, intimacy, touch – all evoke a flower opening, a stem shooting forth a bloom. Desire and green are bedfellows.

There’s a story about Pablo Neruda that he always wrote in green ink. They say he considered it the color of hope. “Dress of the earth,” he called it in his ode to the color. Understanding that green & freedom are intrinsically linked he writes, “The green / I did not hold, / I do not hold, / the green I could never claim.”

And so I think of the trickery of making American cash the color green. It might seem innocuous, but I don’t think it is. “I’d like to buy a new car but I don’t have the green” crosses our wires, fudges with our instincts, replaces Diaz & Neruda’s expressions of freedom with a new symbol for capitalism. Any place that capitalism works its insidious agenda into our language is potent & worth examining, so says the poet on the other side of your reading.

Speaking of language, we are in a moment where two+ years into the televised genocide of Palestinians the globe is starting to concretely name it as such. It is crucial to note that this has always been named as such by Palestinians & their voices have been steamrolled, trivialized, & annihilated. The fabrication of an irrelevant Palestinian has been the mainstream media’s legacy & through this minimizing of their humanity the larger agenda of extermination has cooled into place. So, of course, just because the international community & human rights groups are finally saying genocide aloud does not make it any more valid than when Palestinians said it.

Simultaneously, it is true that momentum & pressure is built by hearing a team of independent experts commissioned by the U.N. Human Rights Council declare a genocide, as well as many of the world’s leading genocide experts (among them Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust & genocide studies at Brown University & an Israeli who earlier argued against this very nomenclature). Joining these voices is Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez (“This is not self-defense, it’s not even an attack — it’s the extermination of a defenseless people”), two Israeli rights groups, and Amnesty International.2

On the scale of resistance where do you find yourself? This is not just a question for you but one I have asked myself daily over the last two+ years, specifically when it comes to this genocide & the explicit erasure of Palestinian culture, artwork, libraries, journalism, the list goes on. How do I resist? Many of us have been asking this question explicitly since 2020 in light of the escalatory freedom-call of Black Lives Matter. How can I respond, so many of us wondered, while isolated, while quarantining? We took to the streets. We protested in masks. We donated to local & national organizations. We emailed our families asking them to donate too. We organized, some of us for the very first time. We advocated & argued online, on the phone & in person, exhausted & often deflated, we rested, we held each other, we made space for sadness & fear, we made space for music & joy.

This is how we resist & yet it is often just as important to reground ourselves in why we resist. The answer might seem obvious: injustice. But resistance can be more than pushback against. Resistance can be a protecting act, a cherishing of values, a tangible way to cup something precious. So we resist on behalf of justice. In the words of Egyptian activist and writer Alaa Abd El-Fattah (written from prison in December 2011):

“We go to the square to discover that we love life outside of it, and to discover that our love for life is resistance. We race towards the bullets because we love life, and we walk into prison because we love freedom.”

Yes, we resist the machine of death & subjugation because we hate the machinery of death & subjugation. But also, simply put, we resist because we love life. Our very resistance affirms an unshakeable commitment to life. Life is not conceptual. Life is flowers, children, access to clean air & running water. Life is poems & songs, literature & weddings, donkeys & dogs, olive trees & rest.

My dear friend Aracelis Girmay just released her newest collection of poetry GREEN OF ALL HEADS which highlights greenness & evokes therein the natural world, wildness, wilderness, & the unconditional cosmos buzzing beneath our skin. Her delicate poem “flower” unfolds uncapitalized as if penned by a learning child unconcerned with proper grammar. It paints a portrait, which is also an ode, which is also a thesis: respect for green things, for the ever-regenerating cycle of life, for all of us when we are awake in our reincarnate possibilities. Consider her address of a flower:

“your life in one place
your little chair
of dirt upon
which you stand
orphic secret
with fog
it is through you
that the buried grow
a second communication”

Yes, Girmay affirms along with our globe’s eco-activists, that the flowers know things. The water knows things & must be protected. It calls to mind Toni Morrison’s words:

“You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses & livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”

We who love life & resist on its behalf are the flood. We overturn all sterile attempts to categorize, colonize, & demonize in the name of “self-defense.” We remember & we force the world to remember. When, seemingly suddenly, the world can say genocide aloud we must flood the world with Palestinians’ long repeated truth: that they have always been here, that this has always been about displacing & erasing them, all of it, from the first Nakba to now.

To remember is a power. The body knows it. At times remembering carries with it, without hyperbole, the power of a flood. “I was flooded with emotion,” we hear someone say & we understand. A buried power has unearthed itself, forced them to feel, to recall the hidden or suppressed. The singer Muddy Waters said, “I been in the blues all my life. I’m still delivering ‘cause I got a long memory.”

Feeling & remembering walk side by side, twins on the road to liberation. We cannot get anywhere without them both. What is blue, tender, & aching in us (& in the world) must be spoken aloud, reiterated, recorded. Will your resistance include remembering?

Lastly, my friends, please enjoy some polaroid tidbits from said 41st birthday, a recent collage of mine, & (drum roll please) a recent feature of Angel & my wedding in THEM!