Temple of Two Waters
LINEAGES
In our home communities we are taught to enter spaces naming our lineage - telling the story of who our people are, where we come from, their journeys. Through this we touch on the stories of their losses, their dreams, and their hopes, and how we carry these forward into our own lives. Through this we elaborate on our connections to the land and to each other. This is a practice that many of us bring into our organizing spaces and communities of practice too. In the same way that each of us as individuals has a lineage, so too do organizations and movements. So in this tradition we name the lineage of Temple of Two Waters.
Temple of Two Waters is born out of multi-racial, intergenerational Southern movements for freedom and justice. We carry the dreams of our past generations with us, as a lighthouse and north star that guides us home as we navigate the times we are living in, and find our way to freedom through our beautiful vision and work.
Temple of Two Waters is born from the lineage of people who were brave. Who put their bodies and lives and hearts on the line for their kin, again and again. Who purchased each other’s freedom. Who from the beginning, resisted colonization by finding new ways to survive in the corners of our beloved homelands that the colonizers were afraid of and could not reach, and in doing so, found their autonomy and found each other. We are the descendants of the ones who would not leave, and the ones who began again and again.
Temple of Two Waters is born from the hearts of those who are the inheritors of the resistance - we are the descendants of the ones who raised a stone, a machete, a brick, a voice, a prayer, a fist in the name of freedom, in the name of our homelands, and in the name of each other.
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Temple of Two Waters is born from the lineage of those who knew that song was a weapon and a spell. It is born from the music of our fathers and the stories of our mothers. It is born from the spirit of long nights spent talking it out at the kitchen table, and other nights spent remembering together on the bayou, and other nights dancing in gay ecstasy until the sun rises and we found we had made day together. It is born from Carnaval and the joy that is the collective ritual of revelry and adornment and street dance. It is born from our delight and our pleasure and our feral. It is born from our deep, abiding love for each other.
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The specific movement lineages and political homes that have shaped T2W include Southerners on New Ground, Alternate Roots, the Southern Movement Assembly, and the connected networks of Southern cooperatives and mutual aid hubs that have ensured our collective survival for generations.
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The spiritual lineages that shape T2W include Lukumi, Indigenous practices of the Gulf South, Black spiritualist/ mediumship traditions of Louisiana and the Greater South, Taino spirituality, and the worship of the divine feminine in all of their manifestations.
Values
The work of Temple of Two Waters is guided by the following values:
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Temple of Two Waters centers queer and trans Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color.
We are accountable to our elders, descendants, community and neighbors, and each other.
We abolish and disrupt the cisheteropatriarchy and the many ways it can manifest in movement work - we center the voices and experiences of queer femmes across the gender spectrum. We move from a deeply intersectional, feminist praxis.
We recognize that the work of abolition and decolonization is ongoing and are gentle with ourselves and each other as we unlearn and relearn.
We amplify the US and global South, and rural spaces.
We learn together, pivot when needed, and commit to always doing better.
About Our Name
The name Temple of Two Waters is in tribute to two key feminine deities of Lukumí cosmology that rule the waters - Yemayá, who rules the seas/ salt waters, and Oshún, who rule the rivers/ sweet waters. Some of the motifs they represent include unbridled femme power, the power of creation, warriorship, love in its many manifestations, sensuality and the erotic, motherhood and leaderfulness in its many manifestations, the salty and the sweet, and both have been known to be fierce protectors of their tgnc and queer devotees. Together, they are known as "two waters."
Our name is also in tribute to the unquestionable fact that from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Also, each of our founder’s homelands - and each of our sites - is a land bolstered between two mighty waters.
In choosing this name we honor the great mothers, the portals, the primordial deep from which life emerged, the watery voids and depths from which we each call forth new songs, new worlds, and new ways of being. We honor the life givers in all forms.
We honor the ones who have lost their children to the violence of empire, enslavement, the police state, and the cisheteropatriarchy. We honor the queer and drag mothers and parents - those who took on the sacred duty of mothering the queer children that were abandoned to raise themselves, and in doing so made sure another generation of queers lived to shape our worlds.
We honor the depths that live in all of us, our life force, our creative energy, our asé, our queer feralness, and the parts of ourselves that can never be stolen. In bringing forth this project and this vision, we offer an antidote to the theft of our time, creativity, and life force by racial capitalism, the cisheteropatriarchy, and fascism.
By honoring the queer, the creative, the tgnc, the femme, we affirm new ways to bring the world back into balance, heal ourselves and each other, and forge new ways onwards. May we remember we are unstoppable. May we continue to create new worlds when they try to tear ours down. May we all find our way to freedom.
May we all find our way home.
Asé ó.
