Last Saturday, thanks to seeds planted by Kozo long ago, we had the joy of hosting an Awakin Call with the radiant Ra Avis.

Ra's words are-- like the meaning of her self-chosen name-- rare birds. They flutter on the page and in the air between us like a feathered revolution. Soft, strong, strangely insistent, pulsing with intelligence, and very easy to love. Through her words she kindles connections, magnetizes community and explores some of the most meaningful questions that humans are capable of asking themselves and each other. Hard to corral her wide-ranging frightfully wondrous Awakin Call into a selection of nuggets. Instead I'll just open a window onto the conversation, and let a few assorted excerpts, like bright-winged birds sing their way forward.

I believe in my capacity for loving, endlessly, more than I believe in anything else about myself. - Ra Avis

If you really knew me, you'd know that I am delighted by people, even when they are being ridiculous. - Ra

On Goodness & Greatness -- Lessons from the Farm
I was born in Texas, and the Giantness of that state's mentality is almost impossible to erase when you're raised there. You take this possibility of extreme greatness everywhere you go. I moved from there to Washington state and lived on a farm. There is so much you learn from the earth when you're that close to it, when you're her caretaker, and it applies to literally everything. It showed me this greatness of small things. The greatness of seeds, the greatness of goodness. I tell people that I wish for great things- or better yet good things, because good things have the capacity to be greater. There is so much power to them.

On Meeting Dave & Being Rooted in Love
I moved to California and met my husband here. He was just so steady and grounded. It was like meeting an oak tree in person. Like, "You have a million years in this body." I was lucky enough to be around that for a long time.

"I always tell people I'm rooted in love, and I don't really distinguish between types of love when I talk about those things. I've had a lot of parental love. I have five siblings and a dozen nieces and nephews now. So a lot of familial love. My marriage was a happy one, every day. And that's a hard thing, even after widowhood. It's like those roots stay behind and it's very much a part of me, especially because I was married so young. I was a teenager and I grew into it. It's not like we formed something different; I was still forming myself. So they became part of that. And, yeah, I think it always just comes down to love and different types, but I've been lucky to experience many types in my life."

On Stroke Brain & Dangerous Assumptions
Stroke brain is my humorous way of referring to my brain injuries. After I had a series of mini strokes I felt like I had a different working brain. A stroke brain is in many ways, far more creative than my actual brain. When it doesn’t know the answer it just fills in the blank. Right after the stroke I lost peripheral vision, and my brain would just fill in the blanks. Which was dangerous because, if I looked out of the corner of my eye and saw a blank street, it could actually be filled with cars driving back and forth. My brain knew it was a street, but couldn’t see it, and decided “I know this. Let’s just make it empty.” And I think about that a lot with the stories and conversations we have. The questions we have. We live our whole lives with assumptions. And we think that was an empty street-- but it wasn't. There were so many things to discover there. We just didn’t turn our heads.

Ra is hoping that it's not that her brain has scorched earth parts, but just parts that are inaccessible at the moment. "That's just how earth is. Right? Sometimes certain areas kind of -- even if it does scorch the earth, you know -- there's very often regrowth. So I've just been hoping for regrowth that I love. And so far, so good."

"I think in terms of brain injury, brain loss, it really made me hyper aware of how much our brain holds. It holds the truth of what we experience, our perception of what we experience. It organizes all these things for us. And, thinking of mine was like maybe a weaved basket with a couple holes in it. I have to be really careful about what I put in because I don't know what will squeeze through that hole because of it. I've never been big on television in general, but I've been more conscious about what I do put into my mind. And the books I read, the people I talk to, all that becomes much more important because, what if this is all I have left? If this ever happens again, the chances of recovery go down. All of that becomes super important."

On How Default Questions Mislead the Truth of the Story
How we ask questions influences the answers we get, which influences how our mind understands a situation. And one thing I used to talk to my bloggers a lot about is default questions. Like when someone says they had a baby, you say, “Is it a boy or a girl? What’s its name? How much does it weigh?” To think that those are the most important questions is misleading the truth of the story. It’s misleading the truth of that child. And it’s misleading the truth of the person you’re talking to. A great question instead is, “What did you learn about your new baby in the hours since you finally got a chance to meet them? That tells you a lot about the person, and that tells you a lot about the child. And it erases this idea of the uniformity of an infant, you know-- that the only interesting idea of a new baby is its assigned gender and size makes it sound like, a sock.

To relate this to the carceral system - the question that most often gets noted is, “Why were you inside? What did you do? What were your crimes? That's sort of a default response when I say I was incarcerated. We think that’s the next conversational foray. And while I don’t keep it a secret, I do like to stop people and ask why they think that’s an important question to ask? Or, what would be a better question to ask? Or, what answer are you trying to get to? If you’re trying to get to know me better, is that question in fact going to work? Is that the question that’s going to open the door to understand how I operate? Or if you’re trying to ask if you can trust me, then, is that enough? Is that enough information to know? It’s not even that we ask lazy questions. It’s that we ask programmed questions. And much of the issue with the carceral system is this programming that we have in our brains that tells us, “These things are good and true, and those things are bad and forever and this is the way to solve them.” And it tells us all these things that are factually untrue.

The Start of A Poem (by Ra) That's Relevant Here

The doctor asks me to step on the scale,
& the stranger asks why I went to prison,
& both are trying to weigh me without any heavy lifting,
but only the doctor admits it.

***
We have to think about what questions open doors. What questions enlighten us, what questions introduce us to each other? What questions really give weight to our humanity, so that it’s not just a numerical issue? We’re not just weighing people. When your questions are leaning towards data and numbers, sizes and assignments whether that’s job titles or genders or things like that, you’re going to kind of hit a wall. If the focus of your question is always to look for the deepest part of the human, then you’re always going to find a good answer. You’re going to find something that fills in the blank.

On Why I Went to Prison
I think I went to prison for the same reason everybody goes to prison, which is-- that is the direction their community was flowing. And they were stuck in that flow and not paying attention to the direction of it. I think there were things that led to my incarceration that I really look for now. I maybe always did, but in this case I just ignored the signs. Like being around personalities that aren’t safe for you. They may be safe in their own world, but certain combinations don’t work and are dangerous. I think it’s easy for the mind to just absorb the current world as it is. Sort of like how stroke brain fills in the blanks. It’s just human nature to find a home where you are. And when that home is headed towards prison, that’s where you go. And I guess that’s probably why, when I came home, I was so focused on community efforts, you know — what can we do to stop those flows in general? One thing is to not have prison at the end. That’s maybe not the easiest solution, but it's the most clear. Another is to realize that the things that flow into these circles, these human needs, these sufferings, these harms, all end up flowing in the same direction, the same as privileges do towards a different direction. ...

I think it's important that people understand that we go where the flow goes, and that isn't necessarily marked by the number of people in your community, but by the one pushing the most. If you think about it as water, it's the people who are most desperate, the people who are flailing in the water that change the path of it. We have a lot of desperate people in the water in this country, and it does change the flow for a lot of other ones. There are so many people impacted by the system or thrown into the system.  

On Firefighting in Prison
I learned so many things through the firefighting program when I was incarcerated. Firefighting is such a fascinating art and science. But I do want to make clear that this is prison labor and it’s a terrible thing. I made 7 cents an hour. That the system has people do something so dangerous for so little is something that we should all be hyper aware of—that we exist in this country that is living part of a slave story—and why do we want that? One of the things I truly believe is that there aren’t any wounds that we don’t have medicine for. Right outside the fire camp where women were getting burns and cuts and injuries and falling sick to smoke inside their bodies, all you had to do was clear a little space, and Mother Nature was like, “Well, here’s some aloe vera, some dandelions, and here are the exact things you need to care for yourself.” I planted a little garden at the fire camp training program with things that could be used for healing. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re putting out these wildfires [in California] through oppression and the Earth isn’t having that. I think that’s a reasonable thing. It’s a reasonable thought process on behalf of Nature. You have to solve things with genuine love and healing and animals and trees and plants can always tell the difference. I hope we learn. I hope we learn soon.

On Fairness, Kindness and Strange Solidarity
From Ra's blog:"When I tell the waiter I cannot read on the days I can’t, and their face falls in pity, I am embarrassed. I find myself not explaining the strokes out of some kind of strange solidarity with those who are illiterate for any other reason. I cannot read, I say. I will need some help."

I love the expression “strange solidarity”. I think that probably explains more of my personality in a nutshell than most things. I guess I don’t really understand what fairness is supposed to mean. Fairness only exists in conditions that are measurable and life by default is gloriously immeasurable. And how can there possibly be fairness? One thing that I think is measurable, or could be, is the idea of kindness or justice or grace. And so for the things that we can measure I do try to give us all a heaping of the same you know? I hear people say things like, “Oh I wouldn’t say that around my mother.” And I try to think, “Well okay, everybody has a role in somebody else’s life. A mother-like capacity, and if I’m honoring the mother — my mother, I should honor every mother, which is every person that I meet.” I tend to weigh things more in terms of kindness, rather than fairness, because that seems more clear to me. Fair or not, you can always ask yourself, is it kind or not? Is it good or not? Is it helpful? And you know, it doesn’t have to be great, but - good. Good is the kind of greatness I like best.

On What I Want for My Incarcerated Family
From Ra's blog: As time happens, I encounter more and more people who think prison is a metaphor I fold into my writing.In a way, this makes sense. It was hard for people to imagine me in prison, even when I was there. And everyone knows, I love a good metaphor. I spent 438 days incarcerated. It’s important to me that I remind people often because I am sometimes the only door they know to that world. A door where just knowing me is the key, the key to a gentler understanding, the key to a world that needs fixing. A world that needs help. A world that needs you.

A lot of people have mentioned that there is a certain energy to me that is at odds with the carceral system. I have the voice of a kindergarten teacher no matter what I'm talking about. Because I grew up with teachers. I’m not the person you expect to say, “I spent a year and a half in prison.” And I want that grace to be extended to everybody who is inside. I want people to look at all of my incarcerated family as people who should never have been inside. And they all do have this type of grace. It just doesn’t manifest the same way because we live different stories. It manifests in wildly different ways. Small ways, and if we just paid attention we would all see them.

On the Contraband of Kindness in Prison
The most extraordinary thing about the kindness in prison, is that this is the place where kindness is contraband. It’s very much not allowed. And I don’t just mean for the people incarcerated. Also for the correctional officers, the free staffers, the medical staff. There is a distancing that is put into the system under the pretense of being for safety, but it really is a demolishing of the human spirit.And there are no resources. When I say I made 7 cents an hour, that means I had $11 to spend at the end of a full month of work. And canteen prices are four times what they are out here. So when you see people inside making each other birthday cake out of Top Ramen packets or whatever it is, you have to understand that they’re giving someone 50% of their net worth. When I lost Dave, a friend came over from her building to bring me a small cake made out of cookies, and frosted with coffee creamer emulsified by hand. She was risking being put in isolation for several days- which is permanent life damage. Imagine if I said in real life, "I lost my husband, and my next door neighbor, whom I once went on a nice weekend trip with, brought over a month’s salary and risked the punishment of losing a finger." It’s just so dramatic the amount of goodness in these actions. The bigness of it because of the smallness of the space is amazing. People say you can’t miss the food. And that’s true. Prison food is terrible. But I can miss the food because the women made cakes you know? With a month’s salary and days and days of work. The incredible amount of effort that goes into showing someone they are loved happens all the time inside. ...

Part of the reason Sack Nasty is retired (and I will be introducing a new book in the next year or so) is that there is some language in there, like "inmate," that I'm trying to use less. That language makes it very easy for people to imagine this two-dimensional character instead of the human beings that I really knew and loved and am lucky enough to have many of them home now. And they get to be just as loving out here. The strength of it is not just cakes; it's not just clothes. It's the little whispers, it's lending people books. One of the women inside was able to get a book when none of us were, and she ripped the pages out into segments of six, and we'd spread them around so that nobody had to wait to be reading something. Just to keep it so that we didn't have to go without words. What a gift. That was her only possession inside and to take your only possession inside and tear it up in pieces so that everybody could have something is phenomenal. I've never seen anything like it.

We've Always Been Talking Abolition
Abolition is about creativity. And abolition is about love. When I first started talking about abolition one of the questions I got was, “Will your blog readers travel over to this abolition world?” And what I said, and what I truthfully believe is that readers of our blog have been hearing me talk about abolition for years. You know we just call it-- taking care of each other. We call it-- analyzing things from the roots. We call it acknowledging suffering, learning to hold grief and love. We’ve been talking about abolition this whole time. ...

On Relearning How to Read, & How to Heal
After the stroke I lost my ability to read and write. I had to relearn all that. I still remember that space of not knowing how to read. And it’s so interesting that my brain can kind of see both things now. Like I remember how the letter ‘A’ was so charming to me. It was just so triangular and looked like an object not like a letter. like it was something that could exist in the world, or in a house. To me it didn’t have any sounds. ‘A’ for anteater didn’t pop into my mind. Also with strokes you very often have a symptom called aphasia where you flip your words and replace them with similar words. So I would say 'milestone' in my mind, but my mouth would say 'yardstick.' And it kind of makes sense. Mile, yard. Stone, stick. My brain clearly saw that but I didn’t. Or I would think seashell but say cauliflower. I guess my mind thinks they look the same. And then a dear friend and one of my favorite poets, Brendan Constantine, gave me the advice to lean into that. To just write that poem about cauliflower you know? And he also gave me the advice to write a specific amount of words a day and not go over that. Essentially, physical therapy for the poet. I was very rewarded by the results of that. And I got back here. And in some ways it’s been like meeting myself afresh as a writer. I’m letting my brain kind of lead the way, and it’s healing…It’s been a couple of years and I am much more healed, but healing is a forever process. It’s right hand in hand with growth and I hope I keep growing, and because of that, I hope I keep healing.

"I'm a fairly consistent person and my metaphorical glasses are always facing a certain direction. So when that started being different as well, I went to the doctor. And, you know, these aren't things that Western medicine is really designed to hold. When you say "I no longer see animals in the clouds," that's not really a medical crisis. So they didn't really know what to do with that, but I am lucky to have a doctor who really holds space for ideas like that, really writes it down."

On Forgiveness and Re-growth

I believe strongly in the practice of forgiveness. I believe that it is one of the more powerful tools made inherently accessible to us. Wherever you are in life or location or time in your life, you can forgive yourself, your community, your home, the sun. You have so much forgiveness inside of you. And one of the things that makes nature so strikingly different from humans is that it can, in fact, scorch earth, you know. It can, in fact, say, "nothing will ever regrow here again." It can make that choice. And the sometimes unforgivingness of it is fascinating to me. But it is also, I think, why nature can benefit from us as caretakers if we step into that role, because we can be forgiving where it can't. This is a gap that we can actually offer to the earth. We can say, “Yes, that won't grow there. We respect that boundary you've set, but we can grow something here.” This can be beautiful land. You know, a family can be raised here, maybe rabbits or some creature that this is perfect for. We can be sure to be caretakers for that future of it and we can respect that choice. ...

The direct oppression of people is never the pathway to actual care. Every year wildfires get worse and I don't think that's a coincidence. We're putting out these fires through oppression and the Earth isn't having that. And it's a reasonable thought process on behalf of nature. You have to solve things with genuine love and healing, and animals and trees and plants can always tell the difference. It is us who get confused, again, humans can be very ridiculous creatures. We have so much going on in our big bucket of brains. We all have little holes in the weavings and things that we filled in the blanks and we had all these conversations that weren't complete enough to build the story and all these streets that we thought were empty, but were actually full and all that stuff just confuses us.  But the trees know, they know if you're taking care of them right and from a good place. And we aren't. Whether or not people get jobs at the end of it, we still aren't taking care of it with grace. So I hope we learn. I hope we learn soon.

On Post-Stroke Emotions, Oceans, Astronauts & More
I live right by the ocean. And that means I drive by it every day and hear it every day. But every so often, there's just a moment where I look over and it's just like, "Oh, this is an ocean. This is bigger than my state, bigger than my country." There's just a moment where you realize the bigness of it. And I'm not a doctor, but I think during strokes, this is something that happens in our brains -- we experience the vastness of the universe in our brain. And, I don't think the brain forgets that-- that little glimpse of its own internal self, the self image that it captured in that moment. I think every so often the brain just falls back to that moment, and it gets emotional. There's a thing they say about astronauts who have seen the moon, they say that nothing ever really looks the same again, and earth doesn't look the same again. Understanding the vastness of the universe literally wires their brain differently. And it's so sad and so beautiful at the same time. I feel our brains are these vast universes and in these moments where they get a little scrambled, we get to see the full scope of it. And I think we carry the sadness of that. The sadness of the fact that we can't live in the fullness of that, the glory of that. We wouldn't function if we had to. So I think of course, we're going to get emotional. We saw the whole universe!

How We Talk About the Weather
There are limits in our language to what makes sense in normal communication when speaking with someone. Metaphors make more sense to me but it’s an unusual way of speaking. You know, when you ask someone, “How is the weather today?” They say, “Oh it’s sunny and it’s bright.” They don’t usually say, “My weather outside feels like the ocean decided to be air. And just for today she’s costumed as the air and dancing through the city. And it’s not that it’s wet, it’s heavy and it’s full of waves and full of salt. The weather today is deep.” But nobody answers the question that way - even if that’s how we’re experiencing it. But when you sit down to write you might express it that way.

On Love Notes & Valentine's Day
I believe in writing things down. I think the written word has a special kind of resonance. Also a love note meets you where you are. It has a different power than what you say (which is also important.) I send a lot of Valentine’s Day cards. I know a lot of people don’t celebrate it and feel like it’s a romantic relationship holiday. But we have one official holiday for love. I feel like we can make it what we want to be. I also believe in actions as love letters, and acknowledging these actions because there’s so much we do just out of love for the people in our lives. The message You Are Loved is the unofficial tagline of the Rarasaur blog

On How to Stay Connected
You can follow my blog at Rarasaur.com. It’s really a place for my healing. I write for community, so having people pop in and say things really does change the shape of my day. I also have an Etsy shop with tee-shirts that say things like Radical Love and Hope is an Essential Service, things like that, that you'll find on the blog. With the finances I socially support, people coming home, my girlfriend's coming home. I also use the resources for the publication of books that need to be out there, and providing books to prisons. I'm lucky enough that my job covers my life now, so all the rest goes right back out to people. The new podcast Abolition Is For Everybody could definitely use listener support, to support that, just type in the title at any place that streams podcasts and give it a listen. The more people who listen, who rate it, and leave comments really pushes it out into the world, so that it might find someone unexpectedly-- kind of like the love notes we talked about earlier. I don't have any direct needs that anyone can help with, but I do often do projects, and I love as many people being involved in those as possible--whether that's writing letters to each other, or supporting a friend inside or, collaborative book writing, things like that.

Says Ra..."We want to live as the heroes of our stories. We want to live as the helpful, magical creatures of our stories. None of us wants to be the villain. Which means when we are asking people to live in the best and kindest way possible, we are actually speaking to the most true part of them.So when you give people an opportunity and space for that —they reach for it. Because why wouldn’t they? You know? This is exactly what we want. I just try not to lose sight of that because there is a lot of storytelling that says otherwise."

Thank you Ra. Thank you All.
You Are Loved.

[Ra Avis didn't call herself a writer until she was accused of the crime that would, four years later, result in 437 days of incarceration. After a friendly push from her writer husband, she started a blog that became a space for writing about love and grace and grief. Shockingly to her, the blog followed her to prison. She received letters every day and wrote posts when she could. And she continued writing -- the blog and then three books of poetry -- when the collateral damage began. First her beloved husband Dave passed away with just a few months of her sentence left to serve: "a year with his only person in jail killed a man," she wrote. "It does harm to the families who aren’t serving time." Then, years after her release, a prison injury followed her outside, causing her mini-strokes. Ra now works to end mass incarceration by activating the power of the people directly impacted by it.]