The Next Steps

Rafael's life here may be over, but for those of you who truly admired his writing, I am hoping to collect some of it and publish it (really, with a cover and everything) in the months ahead.

Rafa left his work, very consciously, to be finished, and he knew he could not finish it alone. I have some idea where he was going, but I can't go there alone, either. So I invite everyone who comes here to look through the Apocalypse No! series especially, but the rest of his writings too, and add to this thread your analysis, questions, and ideas about the next steps. Invite friends who might be on the same path to come and take a look. Rafa has handed us much of a roadmap to the next world: we only need to fill in the next few steps.

Thank you to all who have shared my loss, for your thoughts and prayers. I have felt them deeply, and they have sustained and strengthened me. Rafael has been honored in several public ceremonies, Western and Indigenous, and in innumerable private prayers and rituals, but the greatest honor we can offer him for the gifts he has given us is to continue his work and his course. I invite you to do so.

On to the Fifth World

Juan Rafael Santos of the Aztlan Mexica Nation Harmony Keepers/American Indian Movement, my brother, passed into the spirit world on Thursday, January 22. That gentle, fierce, loving, brilliant, poetic soul outgrew the shackles of his body and this realm. He is on his way to take his place with the ancestors so he can be with us all. He has found life in balance, but he is not resting, not Rafa. He's writing and laughing and righting great wrongs and showing us all the way to the Fifth World. He has joined the spirits where he can even better shine his truth-revealing light, rescue our Mother Earth, and inspire what he took to calling a Green Renaissance. Listen for him.

--Leslie Radford