Notes of an Inverse Navel Gazer

image from the website “sciencing”

“We know more about other planets than we do about the core of the earth.” Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist

I confess. I am more likely to gaze at the moon than to watch the news. Yes. The moon is my luminescent belly button and I am studying it intently. But right now the clouds are forming a screen a shield and the only thing out here shining is the streetlamp.

I get most of my news from you. Here. On the internet. And that is why it was the IG story of the visionary activist mama Kate Shapiro (we also happened to go to high school together :) that informed me that the core of the earth just stopped moving and changed directions.

“Wait what?” I typed in response.

“I KNOW” she typed back in all caps with a wide-eyed emoji. But like three days later, which is my happy clue that Kate spends more time gazing at her adorable baby than she does checking IG messages. What a luminous belly button indeed.

Anyway, this is how I ended up watching a clip of theoretical physicist Michio Kaku on a morning news show explaining to a bewildered anchorwoman that we hardly know anything about what is happening, in his words, “right beneath our feet.”

Seismologists at Beijing University have been studying the core of the earth by the tremors that reach us at the surface and after checking and rechecking years of data they feel sure that the core has stopped and is turning around. At least sure enough to publish it. What does that mean?

In a reassuring voice, Kaku says it might not mean anything because we do not know anything. At least that was reassuring to me. The seismologists suggest that maybe the core of the earth just switches directions once every 70 years or so and we just hadn’t noticed yet because we know more about other planets than the core of the earth.

At least that’s better than imagining that the rotation shift in the solid core of earth is a first step in a planetary orbit shift that will cause us to crash into Venus before I can achieve my goal of getting Audre Lorde’s words in front of the eyes of every Black woman who currently gets her advice on Black womanhood from Steve Harvey or TD Jakes. (Which is exactly what I imagined when I read Kate’s repost.)

So maybe the core of the earth just switches it up for balance, like how our nostrils take turns being the main breather every two hours, a fact that astounded me when I first learned it in yoga class. In fact I think my reactions are version of the same feeling.

I felt like Michio Kaku was speaking directly to me (and not subtweeting his colleagues in theoretical physics AT ALL) when he said we know more about other planets than our own core, just like we know more about outerspace than we do about the ocean that sustains us. I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been surprised, when it clicked:

Oh. Everyone else has been disassociating too.

A few days ago I was sitting in a very loud airport departure lounge in Atlanta, talking on the phone with Shoshone two spirit doula, storyteller and author Murphy Barney when I said it outloud for the first time.

I had made this secret divide between my spiritual practice and my physical practice as if I meditate and then I work out. But I recently realized that the yoga and pilates that I practice every morning (thanks to Yashna Maya Padamsee, Lana Garland and Mariana Castaneda) is a core part of my spiritual healing practice, a necessary practice of inviting spirit into my body. Because, as a survivor of sexual violence and a person whose body has been met with racist patriarchal violent words, actions and multiple scales of aggression since childhood, I have a long history of disassociation. I flee myself, based on an early response to the message our intersecting systems of oppression reiterate over and over again:

This body is not a safe place for love.

The news brings us new affirmations of this cruel conclusion every day. And so, after my ancestral meditations and my breathing and singing and dancing meditations I stretch and breathe and get on the floor and try to do impossible pilates movements that show me exactly which muscles are exhausted and strained from me not engaging my core, and then I give up and fall over and finally trust that what my core can do is enough even if it such a small movement that no one can see it. And what I am remembering with all my loud breathing and frequent flailing is that this body is the perfect place for love and all my ancestors are here ready to feel it.

And I get it. Why we would rather look at other planets than our scary depth of home, especially since we are so complicit in her restlessness. And the billionaires are just master disassociators who excel at not feeling the pain of their impact on everyone whose labor they undervalue and the earth they’ve dug dry. So they make literal what we all do when we disassociate. They literally fly off to space. I just didn’t realize until today that we let them do it because we generally believe along with them what I wake up early to unlearn every day. The story that this is not a place where love can happen.

It is. This is what the core I am still learning to trust is teaching me. This is exactly where love happens. And that is why it matters that we’re here. Turn around, somersault backwards, do whatever you need to do. Just know I’m here and I love you. And I love you. And I’m here.

P.S. Also I’m always here beaming love to you via video. Find me at The God of Every Day or Stardust and Salt.