Sacred Uprising

We must fight.

Not with fists, not with fury,
but with the fire of what cannot be broken.

Fight with your hearts,
wide open, raw, relentless.
Not just for the worthy,
but for the weary, the wandering, the ones who were never given a way.
For the hands that shake in the cold,
for the voices that crack before they’re heard.

Fight with your art,
let it bleed, let it burn,
let it rise from the ashes of every silence that tried to swallow us.
Paint the pain, sculpt the struggle,
etch the echoes of every unspoken truth
into something that cannot be ignored.

Fight with your voice,
a whisper, a wail, a war cry.
Sing the song of the forgotten,
of the ones who held their breath so long
they forgot what air tastes like.
Let your words shatter the ceilings built to keep us small.

Every touch, every brushstroke, every note
pressed against the wounds of this world with purpose…
a love too fierce to be ignored.

Nothing given with intention is wasted.
Nothing given with love is ever lost.

Fight with your feet…
march until the earth remembers your name,
until the roads carved by those before us
carry us further than fear ever could.
Step into the spaces they swore weren’t ours,
stand where silence used to reign,
dance in defiance of every chain meant to hold us still.

Fight with your hands….
build, mend, lift.
Hold another hand when they’ve forgotten their own strength.
Raise the walls that shelter,
tear down the ones that cage.
Shape a world where no one has to beg to belong.

Fight with your love…
wild, unshaken, unafraid.
Let it pour from you like rain onto scorched earth,
let it seep into the cracks,
let it bloom where they said nothing could grow.

But we must also grieve.

Grieve without apology,
without rushing the ache toward some tidy end.

Let the sorrow come like weather
…
slow rain over old battlefields,
fog settling into the hollows of our ribs.

For every name that faded before it was spoken loud enough.
For every dream folded carefully away
because the world said it would never fit.

Grieve the lives that could have been lived
in gentler seasons.
The laughter that never reached the room.
The letters never written,
the hands that almost met.

Let the grief move through us
like a river finally given a path.

Let it carve its quiet truth
through the stone of our silence.

Cry for what was taken.
Cry for what slipped through our fingers
before we knew how tightly to hold it.

Cry for the generations
who swallowed their sorrow like dust
and called it survival.

We carry them.

In the tremble of our voices,
in the stubborn rhythm of our hearts,
in every small act of tenderness
that refuses to disappear.

Grief is not the opposite of the fight.

It is the proof
that something precious lived here.

And if we dare to feel it fully
to kneel in the dirt of memory,
to hold the fragile bones of what once was

then even in mourning
we are planting something.

A seed of remembering..
A seed of mercy…
A seed of a future
that knows the cost of love
and chooses it anyway.

We are not done.
We have only just begun.

Larson Langston

Art by Gustavo Rimada

My scars are my strengths
My wounds are my Mother
The tears I’ve shed are magical amrita elixir
The grave that my enemies dug for me is my resting place
I Am so much more than what has happened to me
I Am an alchemist
Everything meant to destroy me; I will turn into gold