MY NAME IS AURORA LEVINS MORALES. WELCOME TO MY ONLINE HOME.
I'm a writer and artist, a historian, a teacher and a mentor. I'm a also an activist, a healer, a revolutionary. I tell stories with medicinal powers. Herbalists who collect wild plants to make medicine call it wildcrafting. I wildcraft the details of the world, of history, of people's lives, and concentrate them through art in order to shift consciousness, to change how we think about ourselves, each other and the world. The stories we tell about our lives shape what we're able to imagine, and what we can imagine determines what we can do. My job is to change the stories we tell and help us imagine a world where greed has no power, the earth is cherished and all people get to live safe and satisfying lives. Because once we truly imagine it, the pull to create it becomes irresistible. Read more...
Painting © 2019 Rebeca Garcia-Gonzalez
Metaphors are my superpower. Metaphors, and a deep faith in a really big vision of what human societies could become. I'm a movement elder and I've been a storyteller and a social justice activist all my life. Most of that work has been unpaid or underpaid, and radical poets don’t get pension plans. Community is my social security and it’s time to start collecting my benefits. That’s what my Patreon is for.
Joining Patreon or donating via my fiscal sponsor Fractured Atlas offer me a chance at a stable, living wage and fair wages for my caregivers.
As a chronically ill and disabled elder, I need to pay others to maintain my well-being. I live off grid in a tiny house on family land in rural Puerto Rico which is both wonderful and hard. I’m an hour away from most shopping and medical care. Thanks to an inheritance from my Tía Gloria, I have a reliable car, but because I have epilepsy, I need people to drive me places. I have planted many fruit trees and vegetable beds, but I need help maintaining them. Arriving on the eve of the pandemic, it took a long time to find a reliable handyman who could help me build, maintain and upgrade basic infrastructure. For the first three years, I had no running water. Now I do.
Besides my handyman, I have a part time administrative assistant who handles the many tasks my neurodivergent brain can’t, and a part time caregiver who drives me places and helps with household tasks. That includes hand washing my laundry. The next upgrade is a laundry room. I have a fourth person who helps handle social media, promote my books and other work, and maintain a steady flow of communication between my desk and the world. Paying these four people comes to $5500 a month. While I don’t pay for electricity, rent or water, I have significant communications/software and professional services costs, and colonial surcharges make most consumer products, including healthy food, cost at least 20% more than in the US. I am spending down the last of my grant money and Tía Gloria’s bequest.
Besides my handyman, I have a part time administrative assistant who handles the many tasks my neurodivergent brain can’t, and a part time caregiver who drives me places and helps with household tasks. That includes hand washing my laundry. The next upgrade is a laundry room. I have a fourth person who helps handle social media, promote my books and other work, and maintain a steady flow of communication between my desk and the world. Paying these four people comes to $5500 a month. While I don’t pay for electricity, rent or water, I have significant communications/software and professional services costs, and colonial surcharges make most consumer products, including healthy food, cost at least 20% more than in the US. I am spending down the last of my grant money and Tía Gloria’s bequest.
If my work has moved, inspired or taught you, please join my Patreon community, so I can keeping doing what I do.
What's New
A Book, A Farm, A Virtual Bookstore
RIMONIM: Ritual Poetry of Jewish Liberation
Now available for sale at bookstores.
Rimonim is a richly woven tapestry of poetry meant for use. From a time of rupture and uncertainty, beloved movement poet Aurora Levins Morales brings us a prayer book for the street, for reconstituting the future through our gestures in the present. In these poems of devotion and protest, Levins Morales speaks across and through time with an undeniably prophetic voice. Written in collaboration with various communities looking to honor, unravel, and rebuild Jewish liturgies, Rimonim is a book of lyric in the most immediate sense—of poems that are meant to be read and sung. Rooted in tradition and flowering in the tumultuous present, these poems offer clarity, inspiration, and balm as we engage in the sacred work of human liberation, where joy meets justice.
Ultimately, these forty-nine poems honor the forty-ninth year, when it was taught that everything in the land would begin anew, everything redistributed and freed, when the people would see that everything on this earth was "ready to wake and bloom / just under the skin of what is."
Now available for sale at bookstores.
Rimonim is a richly woven tapestry of poetry meant for use. From a time of rupture and uncertainty, beloved movement poet Aurora Levins Morales brings us a prayer book for the street, for reconstituting the future through our gestures in the present. In these poems of devotion and protest, Levins Morales speaks across and through time with an undeniably prophetic voice. Written in collaboration with various communities looking to honor, unravel, and rebuild Jewish liturgies, Rimonim is a book of lyric in the most immediate sense—of poems that are meant to be read and sung. Rooted in tradition and flowering in the tumultuous present, these poems offer clarity, inspiration, and balm as we engage in the sacred work of human liberation, where joy meets justice.
Ultimately, these forty-nine poems honor the forty-ninth year, when it was taught that everything in the land would begin anew, everything redistributed and freed, when the people would see that everything on this earth was "ready to wake and bloom / just under the skin of what is."
The Story of What is Broken is Whole:
An Aurora Levins Morales Reader
Painting © 2019 Rebeca Garcia-Gonzalez
So excited to share with you the publication of these collected works by Duke University Press. Here's what they. have to say.
The Story of What Is Broken Is Whole collects for the first time fifty years of writing by Puerto Rican Jewish feminist and radical thinker Aurora Levins Morales. Combining well-known excerpts from her books with out-of-print and harder to find ephemeral works and unpublished pieces, this collection weaves together stories of bodies, ecologies, Indigeneity, illness, travel, sexuality, and more. As Levins Morales reflects on her use of storytelling as a tool for change, she gathers the threads of lives and places sacrificed to greed and extraction while centering care for our individual bodyminds and those of our kin, communities, and movements. This comprehensive and essential collection provides an unprecedented window into the breadth and depth of the work of one of the most significant thinkers of our time.
“The Story of What Is Broken Is Whole is cause for jubilation, finally bringing together in one volume over forty years of essays and poetry by one of the major poetic thinkers of our time. Aurora Levins Morales has long written from and about the many different forms she and our survival and liberation can and must take. To have all these stories in one volume, brilliantly edited and introduced by the author herself, is to be heartened and emboldened.” - Urayoán Noel, author of Transversal: Poems
“Aurora Levins Morales’s work changed my life, and this book is a robust gathering of that work; a generous and wild harvest of five decades of writing from our beloved madrina curandera historian. Like the Yerba Bruja plant she writes about, whose leaves can sprout even when pressed between the pages of a book, Aurora’s work both is rooted in and roots us in earth; her words reach for and guide us toward greater connection, liberation, and healing. Full of story-remedies, poem-incantations, and heart-opening prose, each piece in this collection is a revolutionary call and response with plants, stones, water, history, ancestors, and life itself.” - Dori Midnight, community healer, writer, and ritual artist
Finca la Lluvia
Since late 2019 I have been living on the mostly wild mountaintop where I spent my childhood, in the town of Maricao, Puerto Rico. Finca la Lluvia is an experiment I call a story farm, a way of using my relationship to this ecosystem, the way I steward and garden it, to tell stories in word, leaf, water and soil, about what is possible for my homeland and for how we humans choose to live on earth.
You can learn more about Finca la Lluvia by joining my Patreon community, and at fincalalluvia.com.
