Brian Babb

 

"Write with your eyes like painters, with your ears like musicians, with your feet like dancers.  You are the truthsayer with quill and torch. Write with your tongues on fire."  - Gloria Anzaldua

 

"The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life."  - Jane Addams

 

"Never question what I am God knows/Cause it's coming from the heart"  - Chuck D

 

    Shaman and dear friend to Brian, Michael Dove discusses that which is "sacred" as being that which is essential to life.  Essential to the vitality of Brian's life are the sources, essences, and forces of love, empathy, compassion, and liberation.  It is this dynamic sacredness that impels Brian personally and professionally.  

    Brian is a poet, spoken word artist, and emcee from San Diego, CA.  He engages his artistry with a determination to interrelate and transform the human and divine, sorrow and joy, hurt and healing, and oppression and freedom.  Brian composes, records, and performs his artistry with the urgency of attending to an abandoned child's adoption, an institution's practice of discrimination and brutality, and our Mother Earth's rising temperatures.  In witnessing his artistry, audiences experience the texture of beckoning and forging self love, the Beloved Community, and communion with Source.  For more than a decade Brian has performed on stages throughout the country at countless open mics, poetry slams, schools, colleges and universities, music festivals, and neighborhood and community events.

    Impassioned to globally realize equality and justice for all, Brian is also an activist.  Brian participates in movement work that assembles to oppose systemic discrimination, racism and institutional racism, the exclusionary and exploitative nature of capitalism, and modern versions of imperialism.  He has long joined others in mind, voice, fist, body, and spirit to advocate for and demand that the human rights and dignity of all peoples be recognized and systemically protected.  Brian roots his activism in the ideologies and works of James and Grace Lee Boggs, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, Audre Lorde, Bob Moses, Ella Baker, Mumia Abu Jamal, John Trudell, and Alice Walker.       

    In 2009, Brian received his master's degree in social work as a Child Welfare Fellow from the University of Michigan School of Social Work (Ann Arbor).  As a social worker, he efforts to work alongside individuals, groups, families, and communities to helping, healing, and empowering capacities.  He assumes partnering engagement with clients, colleagues, and communities in a collaborative process to holistically access and experience safety, wellness, security, and self, familial, and collective determination.  Brian contributes his helping capacity to individuals, groups, families, and communities impacted by poverty, homelessness, maltreatment, domestic and community violence, trauma, mental illness, involvement with the child welfare system, involvement with the juvenile detention and criminal justice systems, and involvement with special education.

    Brian's identities as a social worker, activist, and artist come out of his identity as a person of religion and spirit.  He ventures into religion and spirituality with a regarding honor for all of the world's religious, spiritual, and wisdom traditions.  Brian finds inspiration from the southern Baptist tradition of Christianity, the Augustinian, Jesuit, and Franciscan traditions of Catholicism, Buddhism and Thich Naht Hanh, Sufism and Shamsuddin Muhammad, Native American spirituality and religion, and indigenous African spirituality and religion.  Brian is indebted to Source, ancestors, angels, family, and friends for having been graced with an ever curious, reverent, ecstatic, and unifying relationship with religion and spirituality.  He takes great joy and transformation in enacting religion and spirituality within community, within family, and within his own practice.  Sharing in religion and spirituality with others is of foundational and sacred significance to him.