Illumination at the Umi-Nation

From beyond the stars in the jungle of space, transmitting from The Mothership UMI...

Brothers and Sisters,

The deep seeded joy in my heart drives me to write as an observer, about the enlightening energies and the monolith of power and diversity that converge in me. It is today 14 weeks since I’ve opened my doors to the neighborhood. It might seem long to some and a blink for others. I, for one have felt a lifetime. We’ve gone from being individual fetuses to being conceived in the womb, now for 3 months. To those who have had any part in nurturing the space that sits today on the vibrant corner of Somerset and Percy, we would like to extend a well pressed hug and a gesture of gratitude as partners. The essence of Umi is today, the direct result of the hard work, ideas, love and support of the community. Thank you for your presence. We acknowledge. Thank you for your absence. We acknowledge.

This past Friday, the last thing I heard at the twilight of the night was, “Man, I’ve been here for like 9 hours, this place is like rehab”. Now, I refer to this not because I am trying to be presumptuous, I am by no means geared to conventional methods of rehab. As I percolate on the night, and reflect on what rehab would be like, I can synthesize some thoughts and confidently say that one element of rehabilitation is overbearingly present in me: Empowerment.

I have never been to rehab, but the clutches of habit and custom are all too familiar, especially the kind that disenfranchises. In the urban turmoil, we all lose a little bit of ourselves, or at least we are made to believe that we must give it up. We must be documented, registered, quantifiable, rectifiable, obedient, and most horrific of all, predictable. It is when our will and our spirit is presented to us on the shelves, packaged and copyrighted, that those parts of ourselves become disposable. To dispose of our garbage, to dispose of our dignity, to dispose of our love, to dispose of our food, dispose our values and principles. Disposable beliefs, disposable doctrines, disposable reality…disposable people. To steal our sense of participation, our consciousness, our duty to ourselves and others…this is disempowerment.

With unconditional love, sharing and unity, we see the death of prediction. The grandeur of the diversity that fills me is a reflection of the evolution of man into a new nation as well as a universal sense of brotherhood. This is not a phenomenon or an accident, we have simply created a space, that could very well be (and was) empty. In this space, the most destructive of illusions is being dismantled. The illusion that we are alone, that we are different and that we are separate.

Friday night, I observed the growth of this unity, hosting the Snake charmers, the same band that blessed the night when I first opened. This friday I met, (and I describe this not with the intent of generalizing) downtown business men in suits, farmers from a ways away, our next door neighbor, activists, bankers, environmentalists, poets, mechanics, retirees, children, dancers, aspiring politicians, bad politicians, street artists, rappers, bakers, coffee enthusiasts, ordered anarchists and so on. Instruments like saxophones, steel drums, pianos, banjos, flutes, beatboxers, harmonicas, beatz, spoken word, freestyling, guitars, sitars, cellos, djembes, voices, chants, comedy and tap dancing (while playing the sax!). You catch my vision. This in one night. What I mean to express in listing all these is that while we may identify all these different types of people, who dance on different sounds and convey different experiences, the focus of the evening was always in the unity, in our similarities, in our collective potential. When we become participators of our reality and let go of any expectation, we are then at that very moment empowered. As our fellow brother Raul declared in a chant, “We are Strong!”.

It seems like our communal gift to be able to create together, through collaborations, improvisations, songs, dance, gardens, co-ops, studios, magazines, art, neo-activism… we are creating freedom. We could share with peoples from all over the world who we stand in solidarity with, announcing that our future will not be pre determined, we will not submit our happiness and joy to those who wish to subdue it, we will not carry our burden of our economic, political and social anxieties and frustrations into our homes, our hearts, rather we expel them from our minds. As an observer, I await a second longer to exhale when I hold in the joy we all feel when we liberate ourselves and empower our brothers and sisters who walk beside us. Those things that made us unique from each other were not sources of friction but instead are celebrations of our similarities.

You call me Umi because you see U in ME.

Oh, and the coffee is prime-time-sunrise-divine, organic for that shady taste, fair-trade to make the day pay. All in all, gratitude is expressed on behalf of the workers in my belly to all the members of the community, collaborators, consumers and providers. We can all work together to sprout initiators, motivators, truth seekers and justice keepers.

In La’kesh

Umi