Our blog tracks Jose Arguelles' Dreamspell Calendar. "As chaos and confusion rise, galactic consciousness based on the Law of Time serves as planetary medicine, lifting us into the awareness that we exist within a higher, more expanded realm of existence than the world of third-dimensional form and appearance. Daily practice will elevate consciousness and increase experiences of synchronicity." (Arguelles)
Janaye Michelle Ingram is a beauty queen and political organizer from Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
Biography
Ingram was crowned Miss New Jersey USA 2004 in Jersey City, New Jersey in late 2003. She later represented New Jersey in the Miss USA 2004 pageant held in Los Angeles, California in April 2004 where she went unplaced.
She is originally from Camden, New Jersey, but later moved to Cherry Hill. Ingram's family is well known in Camden. Her father and his siblings are musicians who worked closely with The Sound of Philadelphia. Her paternal aunt is Barbara Ingram.
She graduated from Clark Atlanta University with a B.A. in Psychology where she was initiated into the Alpha Pi Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. Ingram later went on to pursue a Master's of Science in Nonprofit Management at The New School's Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy.
Ingram has worked with organizations across the country to empower underserved populations and has received numerous awards and recognition for her efforts. In 2013, Ingram was promoted from her position as Washington, D.C. bureau chief to be national executive director of National Action Network, founded and led by Rev. Al Sharpton. She is a board member for the Women in Entertainment Empowerment Network (WEEN) and has started a scholarship campaign for children and youth in impoverished communities called Ambassadors of Hope. In 2017, she was Head of Logistics for the Women's March, which was the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.*
There is a way of tuning into and using number matrices in relation to the synchronic order in order to create a mental force field to shift the world hologram.*
*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2018-2019.
Walidah Imarisha is an American writer, activist, educator, and spoken word artist. She is known for coining the term "visionary fiction."
Career
Writing
Imarisha is editor of Another World Is Possible: Conversations in a Time of Terror, a collection of personal reflections on the 9/11 attacks. She is also co-editor, with adrienne maree brown, of Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements, named after the legendary science fiction writer Octavia Butler.
Imarisha is the author of the poetry collection Scars/Stars (Drapetomedia, 2013) and the forthcoming nonfiction book focused on criminal justice issues, Angels with Dirty Faces: Dreaming Beyond Bars (AK Press/IAS, 2016). She is also a member of the poetry duo Good Sista/Bad Sista, and has appeared on Puerto Rican punk band Ricanstruction's second album, Love and Revolution. Her words have been featured in Total Chaos: The Art And Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, Letters From Young Activists, Daddy, Can I Tell You Something, Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Revolution, The Quotable Rebel, Near Kin: A Collection of Words and Art Inspired by Octavia Butler, Joe Strummer: Punk Rock Warlord, Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany, and Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency.
Imarisha is also one of the founders, and the first editor, of the political hip hop publication AWOL Magazine. Furthermore, Walidah has served on the editorial board for the national Left Turn Magazine. She is the director and co-producer of the Katrina documentary Finding Common Ground in New Orleans.
"Visionary Fiction"
Imarisha and Octavia's Brood co-editor Adrienne Maree Brown describe the term "visionary fiction" as follows:
"Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in an exercise of speculative fiction. Organizers and activists struggle tirelessly to create and envision another world, or many other worlds, just as science fiction does."
"We believe that radical science fiction is actually better termed visionary fiction because it pulls from real life experience, inequalities, and movement building to create innovative ways of understanding the world around us, paint visions of new worlds that could be, and teach us new ways of interacting with one another. Visionary fiction engages our imaginations and hearts, and guides our hands as organizers."
Teaching
Walidah has taught in Portland State University's Black Studies Department, Oregon State University's Women Gender Sexuality Studies Department, and Southern New Hampshire University's English Department. For the past six years, she has presented all over Oregon as a public scholar with Oregon Humanities' Conversation Project on topics such as Oregon Black history, alternatives to incarceration, and the history of hip-hop.
Organizing
Walidah spent six years on the board of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, and helped to found the Human Rights Coalition, a group of prisoners' families and former prisoners with three chapters in Pennsylvania.*
The purpose of the AA Midway station at this particular time is to re-focus and re-connect an information vortex here on this test tube planet, which is a micro-galactic beam.*
*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2018-2019.
Sikivu Hutchinson is an American feminist, atheist, author/novelist, and playwright. She is the author of White Nights, Black Paradise (2015), Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels (2013), Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars (2011), and Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles (Travel Writing Across the Disciplines) (2003). Moral Combat is the first book on atheism to be published by an African-American woman. In 2013 she was named Secular Woman of the year. and was awarded Foundation Beyond Belief's 2015 Humanist Innovator award, and the Secular Student Alliance's 2016 Backbone award.
Early life and education
Her grandfather Earl Hutchinson Sr. and father Earl Ofari Hutchinson are both authors. Hutchinson graduated from New York University with a PhD in Performance Studies in 1999.
Early career
Hutchinson has written articles for www.huffingtonpost.com, The Feminist Wire, thehumanist.com, the LA Progressive, and The L.A. Times. She is a Senior Fellow with the Institute of Humanist Studies, and is part of the Speakers Bureau at the Secular Student Alliance.
Hutchinson has taught women's studies, urban studies, cultural studies, and education at the California Institute of the Arts, UCLA, and Western Washington University. She is a co-contributor to the Black Skeptics blog on the Freethought Blogs network and a contributing editor for www.thefeministwire.org.
Moral Combat
In her book, Moral Combat, she examines what she views as the hijacking of civil rights by the Christian Right; the humanist imperative of feminism and social justice; the connection between K-12 education and humanism; and the insidious backlash of Tea Party-style religious fundamentalism against progressive social welfare public policy. Moral Combat also reveals how atheists of color are challenging the whiteness of "New Atheism" and its singular emphasis on science at the expense of social and economic justice. Hutchinson frames her critique in the contemporary realities of working- and middle-class African-American communities which are just as steeped in the tradition of religiosity-due to capitalism and de facto segregation—as they are in the cultural trappings of the Black Church. Hutchinson examines the humanist beliefs of writers such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, A. Philip Randolph and Alice Walker. She highlights Larsen's work as a major touchstone for black feminist humanist thought. Hutchinson's work also explores the emergence of black atheist and freethought activism and spotlights the voices of African American non-believers from around the country.
Black Skeptics group
Formed by Hutchinson in March 2010 she explained to KTYM radio the reason she formed the group was a "response to the emergent need amongst African-American non-believers to have some kind of community and interpersonal connection to each other, in real time". She believes that there is a large community of black non-believers on social media sites, but it is important for these people to find a "sanctuary from the hyper-religiously that African-Americans are seeped in". The group was featured in a May 2012 article[8] that chronicled how greater numbers of African Americans were leaving religious faith and adopting atheism and freethought. Hutchinson noted that "There have always been African-American free-thinkers, humanists, agnostics, and atheists who have really foregrounded the connection between eschewing religion and the liberation struggle, particularly as it pertains to women and the LGBT community."
Political views
As a black female atheist, she states that "While black male non-believers are given more leeway to be heretics or just MIA from church, black women who openly profess non-theist views are deemed especially traitorous, having 'abandoned' their primary role as purveyors of cultural and religious tradition." Much of Hutchinson's work focuses on the cultural and social history of African-American secular humanist thought and its role in the black liberation struggle. Hutchinson's work also challenges the social conservatism of the Black Church with respect to abortion, gay rights, and women's rights. Hutchinson is also the editor of blackfemlens blog and is a frequent contributor to the LA Progressive, an online social justice magazine.
Hutchinson has challenged the lack of racial diversity and attention to institutional racism in the secular, and New Atheist movements, and has also critiqued what she perceives to be their fixation on scientism at the expense of social justice. She has championed the inclusion of anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-heterosexism in mainstream secular humanist and New Atheist discourse. She has also written extensively on the role of freethought and secular humanism in black women's liberation and gender justice.
Hutchinson subscribes to a radical Humanist vision that eschews religious and social hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability status because they undermine the universal human rights and self-determination of oppressed peoples. For communities of color, radical Humanism reinforces the cultural legitimacy, visibility, and validity of non-believers of color within the context of a white supremacist, heterosexist, patriarchal, economically disenfranchising ideological regime that equates morality with Abrahamic religious paradigms and beliefs. Radical Humanism rejects the notion that there is only one way to be black or Latino, and that women and the LGBT community are marginal and morally aberrant.
Hutchinson has argued for the articulation of a Culturally Relevant Humanism based on secular social, racial, and gender justice that eschews notions of colorblindness and post-racialism, focusing instead on the lived experiences, cultural knowledge, social histories and social capital of diverse communities. Culturally relevant humanism is informed by an intersectional view of subjectivity. It advocates developing a critical consciousness of how these structures of authoritarian power and control shape knowledge construction, cultural production, and education. As the founder of the Women's Leadership Project feminist mentoring program, Hutchinson has advocated the development of secular social justice curricula that train youth to spearhead feminist anti-racist advocacy in their school communities. A key part of the curriculum is humanist education on gender roles, gender stereotypes, misogynist racialized media depictions of women of color and the impact these factors have on the self-esteem, self-identity and life outcomes of young women of color. Hutchinson has argued that the racist and white supremacist objectification of women of color as hyper-sexual "Jezebels" has made African American and Latina women especially vulnerable to paradigms of femininity that emphasize self-sacrifice and obeisance to conservative Christian mores. Hutchinson has written that the heterosexist ideal of the "sacrificial good woman" of faith straitjackets women of color and effectively contributes to high rates of intimate partner violence, sexual assault, and HIV/STI contraction in communities of color because masculinity and femininity are viewed as oppositional to each other. Hutchinson considers her activism in the humanist sphere to be inextricably bound to the other identities.
In 2012 Hutchinson was featured in a national billboard campaign of prominent black non-believers launched by African Americans for Humanism. She was paired with author Zora Neale Hurston, a folklorist of African-American culture who wrote of being a skeptic in her essay "Religion." Hutchinson stated: "To become politically visible as a constituency, it is critical for black nonbelievers to say we have this parallel position within the civil rights struggle."
Quotes
Speaking to the Center for Inquiry (CFI) in June 2011, Hutchinson shows several disturbing images of President Barack Obama and his wife depicted as monkeys and states "these images underscore that we are still... a white supremacist capitalist patriarchal society, the US has not suddenly morphed into this exceptionalist color-blind post-racial democracy". [President Obama] "... will never be Christian enough for the white heartland." The problem for black non-believers is that "Christianity has been considered the gateway de facto... into being considered a person, being considered human, being considered moral, and also being provisionally considered to be American".
[Girls] "they are still being shown that their sexuality is a proprietary object that should be used, controlled, exploited and disposed of by organized religion and theocracy."*
