Justice Begins With Seeds: A Tapestry of Global Family

This is the fourth and last part of a series of posts recounting my experience at Justice Begins With Seeds, a powerful anti-GMO conference held in San Francisco one month ago. See the first, second, and third parts.

To celebrate the close of this summit, we heard from local musicians and poets, indulged in a delicious organic dinner with abundant samples of organic pastries and ice cream. I was gifted a single vanilla bean, exuding a deliciously sumptuous aroma.

A Mexican woman sang songs her farmer grandmother taught her, softly strumming her acoustic guitar, the traditional music highlighted by a saxophone. A local poet recited an incendiary poem against Monsanto to impassioned applause. A local Latin band sang urban pop songs in Spanish.

An attendee at the conference took the mic and sang a song calling for peace by a river. She had never done anything like this before, but the passion in her spirit and song echoed through all our hearts.

My mind wandered through all the wonderful people I had met that weekend: an Asian woman who helped me reconnect with my cultural heritage, a Hawaiian woman, a spiritual massage therapist, gardeners, activists, and energetic young students all longing for peace and freedom, for sovereignty from corporate control.

The songs of farmers and smells of food wove together all the critical strategy and ethnic diversity of the two days we all shared in this space. An experiential tapestry emerged to gift a sense of global family among all who held on to traverse the journey.

Nothing separates me from any other human culture, save for the walls of my mind.

My love for Latin culture had grown. I went home and started learning a simple Spanish guitar tune. Though these people were very different from mine, I could love and appreciate them all the same. We were connected by a desire for justice, for a renewed culture of love. And anyway, our brothers and sisters in the Global South have had generations more experience in overthrowing corporate exploitation of people and nature. We need their stories to inspire our own strife for true democracy.

These days, I carry with me this gem of an experience. It has become a source of strength and guidance to me in my journey to create real, lasting transformation.