With Love: Dreams in Action (After Mahalia Jackson)
On the King Holiday, a group of folks gathered online to write together and to listen to our ancestors and our dreams. We honored the birthday of the Black lesbian feminist poet Pat Parker and her critical and crucial stewardship of the dream of feminism. We poetically gathered the artifacts of “our people” as we claim, remember and create them. We began to inventory our dream archives, both our night dreams and our daily aspirations. And we were inspired by Mahalia Jackson’s demand to Martin Luther King Jr. to “tell them about the dream” an important historical interjection that made a night dream King had shared with Jackson into a collective aspirational dream for beloved community that we still gotta create. In our group poem we wrote about what it means to honor what our own ancestors are telling us to do, and how we can speak their ancestral wisdom with our actions. As usual, I recommend reading the poem out loud. You may even decide to choose a line or stanza that particularly supports the dreams you are making real in 2020.
And speaking of what’s coming up in 2020 there are still a couple of spots in tomorrow’s workshop “Of Generators and Survival”: Listening for Audre Lorde When the Power’s Out: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/of-generators-and-survival-listening-for-audre-lorde-when-the-powers-out-tickets-89086513159
Next Thursday we are gathering inspired by June Jordan to write in honor of housing as a human right: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/89969484149
Our second LOVEBIRDS Cohort for LGBTQ BIPOC who are opening themselves up to love starts this weekend and there are a few spots left: https://www.mobilehomecoming.org/lovebird-registration-application/
AND my partner Sangodare and I are facilitating some in-person and online activities for Queer folks in love with each other check it out here: https://www.mobilehomecoming.org/loveship
And in also Durham first weekend of February I will be teaching a 12 hour weekend intensive for artists who are interested in how the idea of “speculative documentary” (an ancestor accountable future) supports the art, writing, and intellectual work they are doing. You can learn more here: https://documentarystudies.asapconnected.com/CourseDetail.aspx?CourseId=215629
With Love
After Mahalia Jackson who said “Martin, tell them about the dream.”
by the participants in “Who Taught You How to Dream” an ancestor accountable writing ceremony
tell them with a knowing
tell them with your voice bold and quivering
tell them with your well-hydrated days
tell them with humor
tell them with song
tell them with your laughter
tell them with the rhythms of drums and dances
tell them with a deep bellowing roar
tell them with the vibrations of all your sacred sounds
tell them with sweat
tell them with dreaming
tell them with your most generous breath
tell them with your whole spine and every rib you breathe with
tell them with bold truths that will shake the others
tell them with a gentle nudge or a hard shove depending
tell them with a whisper to “keep going” when the day is dark
tell them with the depth of your relationships
tell them with an invitation to dinner, laughter and leftovers to take home
tell them with a love note
tell them with giggles
tell them with your eyes
tell them with compassion
tell them with fire
tell them with food
tell them with baked bread right out of the oven
tell them with books
tell them with a hug that was hard to accept
tell them with clear boundaries
tell them with unexpected moments of grace when we think we can’t keep going
tell them with open breezeways
tell them with hand over heart
tell them with your heartbeat
tell them with infinite curiosity
tell them with patience
tell them with forgiveness
tell them with your misshapen sculptures
tell them with relaxed shoulders
tell them with soft eyes
tell them with the ebb and flow of the ocean waves
tell them with a “keep on going”
tell them with organza, tulle, silk and satin
tell them without expecting to hear anything in return
tell them with luminous silence
tell them with a yawn before a nap
tell them with the momentary dissolve of the lines of your self
tell them with bees dancing where the sweetest flower is
tell them with prayers to the water, to the land defenders to the sleeping
tell them with water whispering thank you I love you it’s safe now
tell them with fierce love
tell them with your deep practices of self-love
tell them with your heart as loud as you can
tell them with your fearless energy of unabashed love
tell them with love
