Everyone We've Ever Been Everyone We've Ever Loved

Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser/Nick Risinger (skysurvey.org)

Yesterday I was on an airplane again, up through a thick set of clouds down to Anishinabe Michigan lands full of ice and urban snow. But in the airport I happened to run into the artist Sedrick Miles who I first met once upon a time when he ran Durham’s public access channel which hosted the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind TV show (!!!!) Sed and his son were heading home to Brazil to make it to the Yemenja festival and Carnival and I remember the route. Durham to Atlanta to Sao Paolo to Salvador. It feels like it takes days.

On my short (by contrast) direct flight, I couldn’t see the moon through the clouds or the person next me so I just kept thinking about how the James Web Space Telescope just focused on the rings around Chariklo and the Brazilian scientists who first saw those wings almost a decade ago and the reverberations of the Harriet Tubman workshop on intellectual writing I got to lead earlier with the Diaspora Solidarities Lab.

Once upon a time Galileo saw rings around Saturn. I have a feeling someone else had seen them before. Saturn’s rings are the shiniest and most visible because they are mostly made of ice. It took much stronger telescopes to see the dust rings around Uranus, Jupiter and Neptune and after that the idea was that only giant gas planets had enough orbital pull to sustain rings of debris.

How did the planets get their rings? Basically the same way I got my forcefield: loss and pain. A cosmic collision with one of their moons that shattered into a million pieces. Yes. They too lost someone close to them. Or maybe it was a cold direct hit to the surface. We all lose pieces of ourselves.

I’d like to think of my rings as Saturnesque ice queen reflective realness, but daddy issues aside, who am I kidding? My forcefield is much more Neptune, dusty excuses to keep you away. And in my imagination it makes sense that once you gas yourself up to giant planet status your wounds will become that much more visible. But if even a tiny asteroid (250 kilometers wide is tiny in this case) can have rings, we are definitely all implicated.

The researchers in Brazil who first saw rings around Chariklo, that “graceful spinner” of the cosmos, that asteroid moving like a comet that the astrologers associate with compassion and spirit medicine, declare that maybe no one is too small to sustain cosmic rings. And I think about our little ones who are witnessing so much scattering shattering violence. And so much routine system reproducing violence. Even if only because they are so tuned in to our energy. Imagining their tiny rings feels like dust in my eyes.

And blinking wet I know that i have to pay attention to little Chariklo and her rings the same way I need to pay attention to my smallest self, my youngest self (who is also my oldest self since she as been here the longest) and how she learned to protect herself from the collisions around her. When did I start to freeze up? What exactly was the atmospheric temperature when I stopped crying and arranged this sharp crystals around me in self-defense? When did I start to trust the speed of my movement in through the galaxy (out here dancing with Chiron) to blur my emotions enough that I could ignore them? My radiant scars. All you have to look through to find me. All I have to look through to find me.

The scientists in Rio say they noticed Chariklo’s rings by accident one day when they were practicing stellar occultation (which sounds witchier than they think). Stellar occultation is when astronomers observe a celestial body, in this case an asteroid named grace, by waiting for it to pass in front of a star so they can see its outline directly against the light. It was June 3, 2013 and they thought they were seeing triple, something before and after the rock. Meanwhile on Earth that exact day I was with 20 other Black feminists at the Combahee River celebrating the 150th anniversary of Harriet Tubman’s Combahee River Uprising. We were staying at the Penn Center in a school build by the newly free considering how the Combahee action where almost 800 captive riceland Africans freed themselves and flooded the rice fields and burned up 32 plantation buildings, reflected on our contemporary decisions about freedom, structure and change in our lives as Black feminists in the tradition of the Black lesbian socialist feminist Combahee River Collective.

In other words, we were practicing our own form of stellar occultation. On the day that Chariklo showed up in the telescope at the National Observatory in Rio, I remember the bridge I burned. It was my relationship to scarcity. Because one year before on June 2, 2012 when Venus was transiting the sun and I made my pilgrimage to the Combahee River for my 30th birthday, my rent was late. And Sangodare and I who had just pawned our jewelry to get there heard the call clearly that we needed to organize for a year (like Harriet had 150 years earlier) and bring a quorum of Black feminists to commemorate the victory one year in the future/past. But I didn’t know how we would house, care for and feed this collective we were calling into existence. But we did. And the best two words to describe how we did it are: “not alone.” Collaboration is the victory. But that’s another sermon.

June 3, 2013 in South Carolina, on the land of the Combahee tribe, the day after our 150th anniversary commemoration when our collective job was to reflect on how we would take the magic back into the rest of our lives, Chariklo collaborated with a star to be seen. Ice, dust, baggage and all.

We, as a species, by the way are creating rings around earth right now with satellites and space shuttle debris that stays in orbit. Crashed into over and over again they are scattering into super cold high tech dust as I write this.

And I have to learn to love my rings again. Not as armor, but as what we have in common. The evidence of everyone we have ever been and everyone we have ever loved, just circling around us waiting for the moment that I can finally breathe in whatever miracles I deflected with my fear.

The astronomers clearly don’t know everything about the rings around planets great and small, but I believe them when they say that eventually as orbits decay, the particles that make up the rings around any heavenly body will fall into the planet’s atmosphere becoming shooting stars.

P.S. It feels so good to be in orbit with you. Come find me in Stardust and Salt or The God of Every Day.