Lots of experiences and feelings in my life drive me to be more radical - the list grows every single day. I tried before to tell a coherent story about the most important things, then I tried to list the things exhaustively. I wasn’t satisfied with either approach. There’s just too many things to list, they’re all so deeply interconnected, and they’re each relatively equally important. Each represents a new layer of complexity to my thoughts. Each experience, each action, each lesson, each thought, each feeling brings new understandings and transforms my views. Each day as I collect these things, I notice more hierarchies, cycles, and systems. I witness in all kinds of ways — from the individual to the family to the group to the community to the society to the nation, from the day-to-day of our lives to the changing seasons to the defining eras to the unreachable eternities, from bias to habit to tradition to norm to system — the fractal nature of our connected lives. I witness our relations to each other and to the world around us. And I’m all the more radical for it; the deeper I dig, the more truth I find in Angela Davis’ remark that “radical simply means ‘grasping at the root.’”

In this context of ‘witnessing,’ representing a decade of personal and political evolution, I call myself a liberationist. I am not (and cannot) (directly) operate on *all* parts of the human condition, but I regard what I do not experience or act on (directly) as equally important to what I do. It all lives within my radical heart. It represents what Filipino psychology refers to as “[[Kapwa]]” — a recognition of the self in the other, the concept of having a shared soul with all other things (and not just humans, either). Hurt experienced by one is hurt experienced by all. It is organizing against oppression, hierarchy, injustice, and exploitation. It is organizing towards change, empowerment, justice, and community. It is raising consciousness. It is a spiritual calling to build a better world, to love wider and louder, to raise the human condition. To answer the question of what it means to be human.

Liberation contains limitless possibilities for what could be. It is bold and hopeful. It is defiant and resilient. It is radical and revolutionary. It is active and reflective. It is love which creates justice which brings peace.