What is flowing through you? Love and gratitude is flowing through me. Fittingly, last month when we kicked off Wrapped in Ocean: Undrowned in Practice with an oceanic writing and breathing workshop called “The Scale of Breathing,” LOVE and GRATITUDE were the words that showed up the most times in in the chat (followed closely by SPIRIT.) During the workshop more than 60 people participated live in a series of reflective writing and breathing activities over the course of two hours, and more than a hundred people have engaged the recording since. It never stops amazing me when people show up for their own transformation and the possibility of experiencing love, especially with strangers, especially across space and time, especially at the invitation of a weird poet obsessed with marine mammals. But it happened!

The participants in this workshop were brave about their empathy, accountable to to their ancestors and communities, creative in their experiments in healing. And everyone was brilliant, literally luminescent with love through the screen. At one point I thought I was going to dissolve into a puff of glitter. We were honest about our sputtering awkwardness in the face of change, and learned from the baby and mother weddell seal about how to breathe into and through it all. In the end, we became poets again. And this is the group poem we created to honor what was flowing through us in that moment. We made it as our portal back to that time of togetherness and we offer it to you so you can join us in possibility of freer breath.

Through Me

a poem on the scale of breathing by the participants in the first ever Undrowned writing workshop

(to be read aloud if possible)

a future is flowing through me

a life-tide is flowing through me

those who have met in the water undrowned are flowing through me

ripples ripples ripples

ripples are flowing through me

genesis is ongoing and it is flowing through me

abundance is flowing through me

the infinite love of the universe is flowing through me

love is flowing through me

ancestral affirmation is flowing through me

love is flowing through me

village is flowing through me

love is flowing through me

the glow of each other’s love is flowing through me

gratitude is flowing through me

all the places I have ever been are flowing through me

gratitude is flowing through me

softness is flowing through me

gratitude is flowing through me

grounded divinity is flowing through me

gratitude is flowing through me

the breaths we take together are flowing through me

gratitude is flowing through me

silky waters full of nourishment are flowing through me

gratitude is flowing through me

deep gratitude for the core of my belly is flowing through me

gratitude for the unknown and the unlearning is flowing through me

wind is flowing through me

oxygen is flowing through me

all of you are flowing through me

us together is flowing through me

connection is flowing through me

glowing thick connection is flowing through me

luz is flowing through me

the stars are flowing through me

amber is flowing through me

glory is flowing through me

resonant song is flowing through me

the dance of the unknown is flowing through me

wonder is flowing through me

tenderness is flowing through me

spirit is flowing through me

movement is flowing through me

lands and seas are flowing through me

exhaustion is flowing through me

cariño is flowing through me

surrender is flowing through me

release is flowing through me

relief is flowing through me

death is flowing through me opening my heart and vision

my ancestors are flowing through me

generations to come are flowing through me

life is flowing through me

clarity is flowing through me

grace is flowing through me

ease is flowing through me

abundant trust in myself is flowing through me

grace is flowing through me

hope and stardust is flowing through me

laughter and trouble-making is flowing through me

joy is flowing through me

hope is flowing through me

quiet power in community with bits of glitter are flowing through me

hope is flowing through me

wow is flowing through me

rusty hard rain is flowing through me

unafraid song is flowing through me

bravery is flowing through me

trust is flowing through me

faith is flowing through me

light is flowing through me

truth is flowing through me

possibility is flowing through me

movement is flowing through me

magic is flowing through me

iridescent light and sound are flowing through me

coolness and clarity are flowing through me

expansion and co-creation are flowing through me

compassion for the bumps and bruises is flowing through me

longing for sea tendrils reaching the moonlight is flowing through me

trust is flowing through me

manifestation is flowing through me

balance is flowing through me

poetry is flowing through me

spirit is flowing through me

Sign up is still open for Wrapped in Ocean: Undrowned in Practice a series of activities inspired by Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals which includes a module based on this workshop. If you only want to participate in the workshop retroactively you can do that here.

tête-à-tête

of teeth and foreheads

angles and sweaters

you and me

you and me

patterned and big-eyed

teeth and foreheads

smiles and hands

big eyed and patterned

looking forward

smiles and hands

tilting side

looking forward

held and holding

tilting side

to melded minds

held and holding

angel warmth

mind of god

you and me

Sharon Bridgforth has a blessing card that reads (among other beautiful words) “you are your father’s nextnow.” This birthday season and father’s day which conveniently come right on each other’s heels I have been wrestling with that. What does it mean for me to be my father’s “nextnow”? What does it mean to be present with him and not anxiously wondering what would make him proud, or worse what would prove to other people that I am a good enough daughter to him. All of those things get blurred together for me, especially around this time. For a long time I have been deep in the father/daughter mind meld in this picture. My father and I are both Geminis. Twins of spirit born on consecutive days. As my father studied his astrology he taught me mine. As a child I wanted to be a lawyer like him, until he quit and decided he wanted to be a poet like me. What have I been doing this whole time? Have I been leading or following?

Just this week I noticed something very obvious. My father’s poetry writing practice in his later work was prompted by photographs. Earlier in his work he wrote inspired by individuals or groups of people conceptually, but in the last decade or so of his life he would wrote poems in conversation with one particular picture at a time. Of course that’s what I’m doing now, but as usual it takes me a while to find and acknowledge when what seems like my individual good idea is already as it has ever been collective, old, given. Maybe being present to my ongoing collaboration with my father is hard because it means being present to how exactly I miss him right now today. What I wish I could say to him right now this particular morning. No. I haven’t deleted his number out of my phone. Yes. The cellular provider reclaimed and repurposed the phone number years ago.

What I also know (and gratitude to Laura Mvula’s new song “what matters”) is that when I am present in this moment, my father is here with me, as me. I am here as more than me. More than us. Sometimes that scares me even more. But the only Juneteenth Solstice Father’s Day present worth giving or having is the present itself. This moment. My gift to my father also known as the whole universe is to be here. Forever. For us.

Join us for our Queer Black Feminist Father’s Day Sunday Service tomorrow (Sunday June 20, 2021) at 11 am Eastern at mobilehomecoming.org/live

P.S. What is your child helping you learn ? Inner Child Summer School is in session! Sign up here.

P.P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. Videos, poem prompts, meditations and more are here for you in the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

Two weeks ago we gathered on what the United States calls “memorial day” to remember our child selves, to love up on our vulnerable genius and to be curious together about what our youngest wisest selves are teaching and asking of us right now. More than 100 people participated in the “I Love Your Face” writing workshop to kick off Inner Child Summer School and for me it was a dream come true. We looked in the mirror, we looked at pictures of ourselves from childhood, we created a loving reflective space and a technology called reparative return to love ourselves in ways we have always wanted to be loved but just now became ready to offer ourselves and each other. I am still radiating with gratitude for the bravery, generosity and brilliance of everyone who participated. At the end of our time together we created a group poem to affirm the world our child selves are calling into being through our lives today. We invite you into that world and encourage you to read this poem aloud if you can!

P.S. You can still sign up for Inner Child Summer School right here and get the full recording of the workshop and many more activities and guided prompts from me.

Calling

By the participants in the “I Love Your Face” Writing Workshop for your Youngest Wisest Self

“the world you called by being you”

         -from love poem to snow angel space cadet by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

we are calling a world of love

we are calling a word of warm violet love

we are calling a world of soft-threaded blankets

we are calling a world of joy

we are calling a world of sun-soaked joy
we are calling a world of genderqueer joy

we are calling a world of light

we are calling a world of bright hearts
we are calling a world of unabashed enthusiasm

we are calling a world of unafraid ease
we are calling a world of arms flung wide
we are calling a world of loving embrace

we are calling a world of time travel

we are calling a world of play

we are calling a world of souls in free flight

we are calling a world of healing

we are calling a world of playful healing

we are calling a world of brave healing

we are calling a world of tiny dimple cheeks

we are calling a world of unlimited cuddles

we are calling a world of fierce determined toddlers

we are calling a world of revolutionary mothering

we are calling a world of transformation

we are calling a world of transformation

we are calling a world of refusal

we are calling a world of seeking to know

we are calling a world of repair

we are calling a world of seeing

we are calling a world of seeing ourselves without judgment

we are calling a world of rhymzomatic connection

we are calling a world of free and happy

we are calling a world of feet, bared

we are calling a world of bare soles

we are calling a world of wildness

we are calling a world of beauty

we are calling a world of green

we are calling a world of rest

we are calling a world of warm gold days

we are calling a world of seasons and sunrises

we are calling a world of turquoise and indigo

we are calling a world of interconnections

we are calling a world of interdependence

we are calling a world of siblinghood

we are calling a world of compassion

we are calling a world of understanding

we are calling a world of loving our “flaws”

we are calling a world of learning from the small creatures

we are calling a world of escapes from the mundane

we are calling a world of holding ourselves in our most vulnerable tenderness

we are calling a world of remembering the way home

we are calling a world of abundant love for all of us and all parts of us

we are calling a love that spills over into the space around

we are calling a world of trusting our intuition and the love of the universe

we are calling a world of complex beauty

we are calling a world of letting folk simply to be whatever however that be shows up

we are calling a world of grieving ecstatically and making space for our erotic power

we are calling a world of courageous, vulnerable, bare-faced, open hearts

we are calling a world of hands in the dirt, days stamped with love

we are calling a world of squirrel friends

we are calling a world of intuitive loving

we are calling a world of goofy, almost nonsensical love

we are calling a world of unabashed, unashamed joy,

so deep the light shines from our bones

and the trees inhale our exhaled relief

stand

feet in the water

at the edge of the land

that made us

sand

takes our skin

like tithe to burnish

all the salt within

thin

brown stance

the sun

took her chance

to love us

Here we stand at the edge of the world. Daddy almost one foot out the sea. Daughter delighted by all the forms of sunlight. All the love that shines on her from all directions. Is she taking it for granted? Wasn’t it actually already granted, given, always hers? When did she learn that she had to earn the light and salt that keeps her here? Today would be my father’s 67th birthday. And sometimes I still blame myself. I didn’t keep him here. I wrote poems for him every day after his diagnosis. They must not have been worth their salt in time. The experts say this eclipse energy is an opportunity to go within. To rest our minds. All day yesterday I had a restless mind. Have you ever felt that? Desperate to avoid your grief through busyness but too clouded with grief to think or act clearly at all? That was me yesterday. Wishing there was something I could do and unequipped to actually do anything well. On The End of the World podcast Adrienne Maree Brown said that maybe spirit-centered world everything would shut down during eclipses. And I’m doing my best. Tomorrow is my birthday. So today I am going to the beach (not the beach in the picture) where I won’t have anything I need to work. Sometimes that’s the only way I can turn it off. Turns out I will be staying in the same place I stayed one birthday years about 10 years ago during my Saturn’s Return. I remember calling my dad and having a long conversation, drawing on his study of astrology. This is when he was still walking miles everyday. Was he walking while we were talking? He told me I was born during his Saturn Return. And just like that I turned his life around. And in his second Saturn’s Return he was satisfied with his life. He said he felt like he did it. He got us kids to a place where we sure of who we were, where we knew what we needed to do to live what he called “inspired and inspiring lives.” He felt like there wasn’t anything else he wanted to accomplish. I felt happy for him and sad at the same time. “What will keep him here?” I wondered silently. And I couldn’t hear it that day, but now I know the small achieving voice within whispered, “you will keep him here by always doing something impressive, you will offer relentless success that he won’t want to miss it. So he will stay.”

My achieving voice is eloquent and wrong. Persuasive and so very lost. She can’t help it. She’s capitalism’s daughter. She offers me what she has, but it’s a lie. And now it’s a lie I can’t ignore because all the evidence is right in front of me. It didn’t work. Work will not keep anyone from dying. Including me.

Tomorrow is my birthday and I am not capitalism’s daughter. I am Clyde’s daughter, the place where sea meets land. The place where salt meets sun. I am the burning fact that this moment was given, and not earned. I am evidence that love lives. I am reborn because love learns.

P.S. What is your child helping you learn ? Inner Child Summer School is in session! Sign up here.

P.P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. Videos, poem prompts, meditations and more are here for you in the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

song into your collarbone

when you become wing

i will return

right here

to your shoulder

i will return

small as i am

to your shoulders

when you fly

small as i am

when you are infinite

when you fly

i will be here

when you are infinite

my open mouth

i will be here

to sing this song

my open mouth

right here

to sing this song

when you become

wing

My father’s favorite metaphor is the butterfly. All Spring he sends them as messengers to remind me: “The whole point is transformation.” I still rage against the way cancer transformed my fathers bones into dust. I still resist who I’m becoming, I cling to who I thought I was. This time of year, close to our birthdays I forget our birthdays are coming. I protect myself from the signs everywhere singing “REBIRTH in T-6 days.” But in this poem, this remembered song, that I sang in the first month of this life into the archive of my father’s shoulder comes back to me to take me into flight. One month old witness to so much transformation my lungs had learned how to breathe air, my eyes were taking in the light, held not in the orb of womb but in the hinges of adult arms, everything changed. Now I remember my capacity to change. My father who was one place is now everywhere. The universe is teaching me to fly.

P.S. What does your child self want you to remember? Inner Child Summer School is in session! Sign up here.

P.P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. Videos, poem prompts, meditations and more are here for you in the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

For Daddy

write my name in the snow

spell it all capital letters

so you can see it from heaven

shovel your love like a cloud

spell it all in capital letters

as if snow is forever

shovel your love like a cloud

as if love could be frozen

as if snow is forever

as if spelling is spelling

as if love could be frozen

and kept

as if spelling is spell

and my name is a prayer

kept in your heart

which is cold now

and my name is a prayer

so you can feel it from heaven

which is cold

like my name in the snow

One day my father shoveled my name into the snow in the front yard. Available to an aerial view, more like his view now in the way that I think of it. The way I think of it is that as an ancestor my father is still writing my name upon the world. And where will I see it? Will I see my name and its meaning (helper of humanity) in the trees, the masked faces of my community members, in possibilities growing up all around me? I am deepening my idea of heaven. Maybe heaven is the way we learn to know ourselves through the writing of our loved ones on the surface of the earth. Maybe heaven is a poem, a spell, a name, an infinite presence. I’m pretty sure my mom took this portrait of “me.” Not of my body, but of my name preserved for longer than the snow lasted. And one day my writing upon the face of this earth will only be known by those who see themselves in it, and remember. And maybe also in the earth herself, maybe also in the universe which can know and can feel this.

what’s the word

dappled

with light

touched by leaves

left by sun

to learn shadow

dappled with light

three generations

left by sons who learn what black means

and return

three generations

of faces dark and light

return

to the same brown the same land

the same face dark and light

refracted to

the same brown the same land

the same salt the same sand

refracted too

and touched by leaves

the same salt the same sand

and no words

One way to tell the story is that there was and will forever be so much unsaid between my father and his father. One way to tell the story is that there is no language for the matrix of expectation, identification, fear and admiration that flowed between them across lifetimes and oceans. One way to tell the story is immigrant striving, boarding school, debt, Caribbean masculinities all of which are other names for silence. Or maybe those are all ways to not tell the story.

There is another available story which is that my father became a poet to create the language he needed to be his father’s son. For my grandfather’s 80th birthday, my father who had never written a poem wrote a book length epic poem for his father. He wrote it because my grandfather loved poetry and memorized and recited his favorite poems at every opportunity. What happens in the book, “The Seven Seeds,”? A an unnamed adult “son” asks an unnamed “old man” a question he has never found a way to ask. The son admits that despite prestigious educations and career success he and his siblings “are not at peace.” He asks “Please Father, tell us of a better way to live.” The father does. But then he also can’t. After outlining the seeds of a meaningful life, faith, determination, work, sacrifice, service and courage, he admits that there is one seed, the most important seed that he is actually still struggling with: LOVE.

My father said the poem rushed out of him all at once in one day turned night turned early morning of writing. After that he never stopped writing poetry. What my father learned was that poems make the impossible possible. There was no way my father outside of the book would have admitted to his father that his own first -generation Black immigrant measures of success left him feeling empty, that he was not at peace. There was no way that my grandfather outside of the book would have admitted that he longed to learn to love and be loved unconditionally. But in the book, it all happened. My grandfather loved his birthday gift. What he said to my father was “So you really were listening all this time.” What he did was brag to everyone that his son had written a book about him. My father published it so my grandfather could give copies to everyone who passed his porch.

In the picture I am doing what I do or crave to do while I am writing: snack on salt. It is no surprise that I come to this daily writing looking for a miracle. A way to say to my father what I never got to say, to hear what he never got to say. “The Seven Seeds” didn’t vanquish the patterns of silence in our family which are still mediated by capitalism, oceans, fear, expectation, longing and loss. The pattern of the sun and leaves writes on our faces and in this photograph my mother works with light shadow and wind to make us visible to ourselves and as each other. I am everyone in the picture now. I am the one left alive to look. I am the one left alive to speak. I am the one left to write a poem with enough light and enough shadow to hold all that we didn’t learn to say.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. Videos, poem prompts, meditations and more are here for you in the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive. Click the link to learn more.

 look

silent and open

as you can be open

you see i have

silent and open

faced the camera

you see i have

one hand behind my back

faced the camera

let it take

one hand behind my back

in barter

let it take

what it takes

in barter

keep your soul

it takes what it takes

if you can be open

keep your soul

look

It’s one of my father’s poses. One hand behind his back. I have seen it even in pictures of him as a little boy. When I was a kid on the playground, we would put one hand behind our backs and cross our fingers which was some kind of childhood absolution shortcut. We used it when we needed to say something other than what was true, and yet also needed to bear invisible witness to another truth. When you put your hand behind your back your chest is more open. One side of my father is vulnerable and open. On the other side he holds me in one strong arm. Look at his hand. There is no way that he will drop me. You can see that I have never even considered the possibility that I might fall.

The blue mist in the photo is not part of my mother’s design of this portrait of us on the threshold, the floral walkway into what we called “the porch” which was really the main building of my grandparent’s hotel in Anguilla. The blue mist is an accident of my digitization process, that I have decided to keep. It helps me think about the context for my fathers advice through this long-distance poem. What do we barter? How do we keep our souls when the specter of blue waits over our shoulders? How do we look? How do we witness the recurring violence and horror against our lives, against Black children, and yet protect our openness? What are the boundaries, signals and prayers that allow us not to completely shut down?

I hold you in front of my heart. Not as a shield but as a reminder. Of why I must always protect my capacity to love. As Sharon Bridgforth says on the blessing card I have chosen randomly from the deck two days in a row: “Even when you can’t See it/ Reach for Love again and again and again./ Know that your Love/ is more powerful than your rage.” Watching Ma’Khia sweetly comb her hair on tiktok takes what it takes. Wouldn’t it be easier if I knew how not to love her? If I could somehow close my heart? The ease of capital, the way it flows depends on a state that knows how not to love anyone. It teaches itself how to not love anyone by specifically hating and repeatedly sacrificing Black people. That is the story of capitalism. The lie we live each day even though we know the truth. Capitalism the long story of unlearning love. It can only work if we too forget to love each other. And we will not.

Look. Sharon Bridgforth is right. I do not have to look far to find love. I do not have to learn an algorithm to love you. It is the most natural abundant thing here, my love for you. Look. I can love you any day. That is my strength. Look. I can even do it with one hand behind my back.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. Videos, poem prompts, meditations and more are here for you in the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive. Click the link to learn more.

my hand on your hand

elbow in your elbow

who is frame who is shape

other hand softens in a tentative fist

elbow in your elbow

i refuse to eat anything

but macaroni and cheese

bloom tiny fist

small soft black power

i eat only macaroni and cheese

grow strong in the reflux of the beast

small soft black power

you want to tell me

a story about free

i grow strong

in the reflux of the beast

not the belly but close

you would teach me the nuance of a fist

that can relax

and hold

not umbilically connected

my hand on your hand

relax and hold this

soon you will tell me the story

she was framed

in the belly

but the fist

persist

soon you will teach me her name

My father was born in the state of New Jersey. He also died in the state of New Jersey. My father disagreed with the state of New Jersey on most important things. The first and lasting disagreement he taught me was about our beloved Assata. My father taught me to love Assata. She was our superhero. The definition of true power. The person we learned to love who we had never met. The person who inspires us to meet the freest parts of our living. We love Assata as a way to love ourselves.

My father wasn’t a Black Panther or an activist when he taught me this. In fact, he was an ivy leage trained corporate lawyer and at the time of this photograph about to be the first Black vice president of the oldest and most conservative investment bank in the country. Banks were the strategic targets of some of the work of the Black Liberation Army. And of course my father’s relationship to the bank was also strategic. He did it to feed us. Until he couldn’t (but that’s another story). My father believed that loving Assata was the most effective way to unlearn what capitalism taught him about himself, on a daily basis and through the periodic rough hands of the police. He found Assata’s life, her survival despite police violence, her dignity despite the entire apparatus of the state and the media leveled against her to be another possible story of Black life beyond Babylon. For my father, Assata’s victory was a source of healing of wounds within him he was still working to name. He believed that her name and her story should be celebrated and shared.

The state of New Jersey disagrees. They say to this day that Assata is a terrorist. She is on an official list with an official bounty on her head. The highway police of the State of New Jersey who showed my father he was their enemy when he was still a schoolboy, (guns drawn on that same highway at him and the other black boys on a field trip), are still angry that she survived their comprehensive attempts kill her. They are angry that we are still listening to her despite their ongoing attempts to defame her. They are angry that she is somewhere safe and free, because they don’t know where or what that really is. Safety. Freedom.

So they fear the part of us that loves Assata. The part of us that inspires love and protection. The part of us that finds poetry in prison. That makes new life in the face of attempted eradication. The part of us that outlives the lie. I am Clyde’s daughter. May the the part of me that loves Assata be water. May it be every part of me, may it flush out the fear the state insists on and turn it into faith. May I remember this example of Black love across wildly different experiences. May I honor the place where the underground revolutionary meets the 9 to 5 corporate lawyer. May I remember in times of division and contradiction that Black love does have the capacity to flow through everything and arrive to itself as itself whole.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. Videos, poem prompts, meditations and more are here for you in the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive. Click the link to learn more.

your collar matches

the jersey blue

of the license plate

my white dress matches the car

the jersey blue

of prison metal

my white dress matches

the cars that pull you over

of prison mettle

the arms that hold

the cars that pull

the white we wear

the arms that hold

the soft of brown

the white we wear

like summer armor

the soft of brown

the license plate

our summer armor

at your throat

I only remember being with my father one time when the police pulled him over. Once is enough. We were driving through the rural south. He was bringing me home from one of my summer enrichment experiences, the academic camps I went to in other states as if school wasn’t school enough. I don’t remember what the pretense was to pull us over, I just remember my father became a completely different person. A person I didn’t recognize. He shape-shifted to save our lives.

All the other times are stories. They start when he was on a field trip with the few other Black boys at his private school and their mentor. Guns drawn on the turnpike. And of course he didn’t have to be driving to get pulled over. Often in New York City, and then in Philadelphia he was stopped and searched and threatened just walking down the street alone or with groups of friends. Those godfathers of mine who share with him the tight edge of jaw that tenses when they tell these stories. The part of them still responding to the fact they didn’t know if they would live through it.

Last time my partner and I got pulled over it was nighttime in Durham. We had the Black Feminist Film School Fellows in the back of the car. Everyone in the car was Black and queer and more masculine than me. I was not driving. We pulled over into the brightest place possible, the parking lot of Hillside High School our historically Black manufacturing site of legacy. Sangodare says I became a completely different person. But my shapeshifting was not useful. It was a panic attack. Turns out I have it too. That place in my body that does not believe we will live through any of this.

In this picture, in this poem I struggle to reconcile the softness of the man holding his daughter who is holding her sippy cup, my father and I posing quite peacefully in the driveway in the broad daylight of my mother’s camera. Our soft white summer clothes that July with the metal of the car in the background. The detail of my father’s open shirt collar with the blue thin metal of the state. How soon and which parts of us turn to metal here?

In my dream this morning my father and I were walking in a river. We were wearing white robes. We were quiet and focused. The morning mist was rising off the surface of the water. In my journal I asked him “What if our ancestors who walked through water to escape enslavement did it not only to evade the tracking dogs, but also to baptize themselves into another vibration. Another reality consistent with their freedom?”

What is the river you need right now? What rededication of your body to another context? How can our evasive survival maneuvers become a baptism, a balm, a source of peace. I am asking for myself as much as anyone. My spiritual teachers have taught me to wear white when I need to be calm in spaces and situations I do not control. And so most days I match this photograph. And everyday the shapeshifters lift me up. Hold me in an embrace soft enough that I can still displace the skin of metal, the expectation of clank. The misrecognition of my bones.

I dedicate this poem to your softest armor, breathing. I open to the peace we can’t imagine. I remember. The river was there before the chains. I remember. The water is older than the state. I remember. My ancestors are all here, riverine right through my veins. The cup is red. But it is in my hands.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. Videos, poem prompts, meditations and more are here for you in the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive. Click the link to learn more.

solar plexus

and when i have to leave

forgive me

when you can

and know

forgive me

for the healing

and know

i had to do it

for the healing

i didn’t do it

i had to do it

when i did

i didn’t do it

until i could

when i did

it was for all of us

until i could

i had to leave

it was for all of us

and you can

It’s the warmth, the multiple haloes in this picture for me. From here it is as if my father is looking me directly in my eye to tell me something, while the youngest part of me still clutches at his chest. Sometimes the break is in our hearts. Sometimes it reaches lower to the solar plexus, we wonder about the the life source that created us, we shut down our solar power in our loss. We question our own power because if we were really powerful wouldn’t we be able to prevent all this loss? If I could do anything I would undo this loss, bring back your heat. Embrace you again. But here I am, on yet another day, and none of that has happened. And deep inside I think it means I can’t do anything. I doubt my power. I feel so acutely disconnected that don’t remember where the circuits are that link me to the sun.

The words behind this poem are the words “right here.” Right here my father says. I am right here. Right here where feel you the most grief, the most rage, the most longing, right here is your connection to the heat the bright eternal. You can. He says. You can. And he means everything. I can embrace, bring back, remember, hold. All dreams I’m protecting myself from. All the healing in multiple directions. You can. The solar plexus chakra is the generator. Our relationship to that energy hub is about what we believe about our capability. What I learn in my longing, my reaching, what I learn in my crying and screaming, is that I am only capable of one thing. Love. It is enough.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. Videos, poem prompts, meditations and more are here for you in the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive. Click the link to learn more.

the other shore

there will be other shorelines

and you will reach them

and you will reach for them

and you will reach them

and you will reach for them

with your small hands

and you will reach them

with your big belly

and with your small hands

you will find your way

and with your big belly

you will breathe

and you will find your way

with all our open eyes

and you will breathe

on through

all our open eyes

you will reach for them

through through

to the other shore

In Black “new world” sacred song “the other shore” means heaven and a return to Africa at the same time. Reaching the other shore is a spiritual goal, it is a communal effort. We offer our breathing to the journey our ancestors must take across everything we can imagine into the unimaginable. The unimaginable past and the unimaginable future become the same place. In the time of this photograph, I was reaching for my mother. A few days before we had stood singing as my great grandmother Sarah surrendered back to earth, buried in the citrus grove on land she worked her entire adult life. We sang that our breathing might help her reach beyond before the sugar trade that brought her ancestors, triangulated to Jamaica from where I’m still researching to find in Africa and Scotland. That she might reach where she was going. The other shore.

But in the time of the looking, right now when I look at this picture, I feel the stretch, the contradiction. My spirit is reaching for my father, even as he holds me, grounds me in my reach. He is the one now who must reach beyond my grasp, but am I not the one who must hold on, not let him fall? I am still reaching. Do I believe that he can fly? What is the holding we learn to do across oceans and lifetimes? What is the letting go we can learn awash in grief and love? What do we let go of when we reach out with our hands? Here at the shoreline, the sound of arrival repeats and repeats and repeats and yet every impact shapes the shore, the water arrives at a different place, made different by the persistence of getting there. When I say grief comes in waves, it is not a metaphor. It will dress my face in salt wherever I am. The other shore is the beyond and it is where we were before and it where we are all going, as the song says, soon. Up yonder across the cosmic tides but also down into the deep letting go that could allow us, intergenerational us, to be reaching home and free across across which is right here. Where we are.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

Devotion

first clue

the Mets shirt

he will love you if you win or if you lose

but he really wants

you to win

and he will

yell about it

second fact

he holds your hand

though you already know

how to walk

and you are not crossing

the street you are

walking on a wide deserted beach

but the ocean is big

third thing

the sunglasses the cap

he’s fully clothed and walking

with you mostly naked children

in the sun of afternoon

what does he clothe his spirit in

to set you free

If you are truly fortunate in this lifetime, you will be loved by a Mets fan, a Knicks fan, or the versions of these lovers in other regions and contexts. What I mean is that you deserve to be loved by a person loyal to their own decision to pay attention, to study you, to bring their full presence, to root for you , to fully believe in you, even though you usually lose when it matters. Because that’s the other thing, if you are like me (or the Mets or the Knicks), you usually lose. It is usually too much, the first period or quarter is more beautiful than the last, fatigue is real, and people keep leaving. The post-season is a mess, if you even get there. If you are like me you know what it is to lose, to know everything and everyone we love will go beyond us at some point. The only way to avoid it is never to love anything, never to want any closeness, and how is that going? You don’t have to tell me. I tried it too. But now I accept myself as a lover and loser. Which means (no offense to the Yankees fans among us) that I have compassion for those who have only practiced loving the winners, who benefit from a fashionable love, a love supported by empire. But I am a daughter of diaspora. So I know that our love will have to be stronger than playbooks and billionaire acquisitions of sweat from abroad. Our love will have to last season after season after season sometimes without any reason for hope. Our love will have to reach across oceans. Our love cannot bank on external guarantees, we will have to regenerate it ourselves. And we will. This is what I mean when I say my father is a Mets fan. Which is not really about the Mets. It is evidence of a particular approach to love that I can see now. An approach to life. Which is why I look past the brave chests of my cousins to my father, in this disintegrating photo, clothed, somewhat subdued, not smiling, but holding my hand while I look at the ground. Because I need to remember that, I need to know that, I need to practice a love that is not based on performance, ease, success. A love bigger than stadiums, countries or time. A love that is its own reason. It is a love I can depend on right now. I can feel it right here, not because I deserve it, but because it offers itself to me anyway while I’m over here losing. Where I thought I was losing. Learning what I was losing. And that it can never be lost.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

communion

for you

i want a life of touching

being touched

the way you want

i want a life of touching

being held

the way you want

to hold somebody

being held

full of the reasons

to hold somebody

free

full of the reasons

sunshine laughter

free

communion

sunshine laughter

being touched

communion

for you

What is touch? What is my father thinking as he watches me reach out to touch another baby. An Anguillian age-mate with whom I have not kept in touch. I wonder. Where is my friend? How is my friend of that moment feeling in this moment. Where is my father? Where is the one who even now holds me up so that I feel safe enough to reach out with these words. Where was he then? What is it like for a person socialized to be a man in a society structured by sexual violence to imagine, reimagine what touch could mean in the life of his daughter? What is my friend’s mother thinking as I reach and she studies her child’s response? What is it for all of us right now to reimagine, reinvent touch after a year of deprivation? Is there something that we learn by not touching the living that recasts our longing to touch our loved ones who have died? Is there something we learn by not having access to touch with our loved ones who have passed on that prepared us for this moment of reach? I don’t know. I do know that I want a world where touch is communion. Not the taken for granted invasion of my personal space as a small femme Black person embodied. But also not this isolation where touch feels impossibly deferred. I want a coming back together differently. Communion. Where the many ways we touch each other, physically, and with our decisions, and what we decide to share and not share and how we listen or do not listen to each other deeply is all reclaimed by communion. Our desire to be together simply different from our fear of what it means to be alone. Communion. Our loving acknowledgement of how our lives all touch each other anyway, our commitment to unlearning the violent ricochet of ignoring our inherent interdependence. Communion, a ceremony. Finding it. A ceremony of noticing how we are touching each other. A ceremony of finding enough safety to notice. To change. To reach. To respond.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

better

my face is your face

take it in your hands

better

take it with your eyes

take my face in your hands

while you can

hold my face in your eyes

forever

while you can

blink and think and carry on

forever

i will live and laugh in your eyes

blink and think and carry on

have as much fun as you can

i will live and laugh in your eyes

‘cause i am a funny man

have as much fun as you can

better

‘cause i’m a funny man

and that’s my face

my heart

and my heart

you have my heart

as strong as water

pounding stone

you have my heart

in your small hand

pounding stone

but soft to you

in your small hand

you’ll keep my heart

soft enough

to squeeze down small

you’ll keep my heart

where it always was

squeeze it down small

into your days

where it always was

as strong as water

you’ll have your own days

and my heart

Better my heart. It sounds like its own prayer. Better my heart. What I am asking for with my repeated return to the repetitive form. Better my heart. The repeating part of me, may this heart sound towards something more and better than I know. This is what loving you does. It betters my heart. Because better is a verb. It does something. This picture of sheer joy at Dunn’s River Falls with my dad and all his teeth and my (gorgeous!!!!) grandmother does my heart good. Does teach me something about what this heart is for and where it’s heading. We do put our faces, our energy, our hearts into the tiniest of hands. Our infinity into these small lifetimes. And the “better” in the title was not originally a verb. It was the redundant reflexive command form. The you is understood. As in when you volunteer to something you have already been assigned to do. And the one who knows they already assigned you to do it says “you better.” Also understood is the “or else” after the statement. “Better” stands between you and the consequences of acting like you don’t know what you are here to do. Who you are here to be. Who am I here to be? Better. Your heart.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

i know

one day

i will

have to

one day

put you

have to

let you

put you

down

let you

go

down

when i

go

leave

when i

know

leave

i will

have to

but

until

then

here is my heart

open to you

and lettered

read it

here is my face

your own

brown window

know it

here are my hands

holding you

safe and strong

believe it

here is my home

breathing

salted warm

eternal

here is my love

forever and fri-day

wear it on your chest

My father was born on a Friday. And so now, every Friday I write to him. I write what happened in the week. I write about whatever I’ve finally realized that I never got to tell him. I write asking for help. I write asking forgiveness. I write I miss you I love you. Every Friday. It wasn’t until recently though that I noticed that in these two pictures that my mother took of my father and I on my first trip to Anguilla I am wearing a bib that says “Fri-day.” Knowing my mother, the fact that I am wearing a bib that says Friday is as good as an almanac. It must have been Friday. In this poem is my father saying that he knows he will have to let me go, or am I saying that to him? It must be both. For me, now, Fridays are a day out of time. I can feel it when I wake up, somehow it takes longer to get into my body, feet touching the floor. I wonder as I walk around in the dark lighting candles if I am still dreaming. I am often already on the mat meditating before I even realize that it is Friday. Forever and Friday. When we say we love each other for forever and a day, we must mean this. We love with a love beyond time moving forward. We love with a love that allows us to go back and be together. We love each other with a love beyond consciousness and breathing. We love with a love beyond what bodies do, hold, be. We love to the full capacity of infinity. And then beyond that. That’s what I mean. I learn what infinity means by loving you.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

My great grandfather John Gibbs was the coal and ice man in Perth Amboy New Jersey. That meant owning a truck and carting coal through the community in the winter so people could heat their homes. In the summer it meant driving huge blocks of ice through the community so people could fill their ice-boxes and keep their food from spoiling. When my grandfather, Jeremiah Gumbs, born on this day in 1913, married my grandmother Lydia Gibbs, he joined the family business. He told me about the time a huge block of ice slid off the truck and how in his haste to impress his father-in-law he jumped off the truck and picked up an unmanagably huge piece of ice (he says it weighed at least half a ton) with the force of sheer adrenaline. When my grandfather took over the business he updated it to become a heating and air-conditioning business beyond the time of coal and ice. He was able to afford to upgrade by going, in his army uniform, to a new base and getting the contract to heat and cool their facilities, and then with that contract in place, and with my grandmother supposedly sounding white on the phone, he got the loans to actually get the equipment he needed to fulfill that contract and also to upgrade heating and air-conditioning services in their own community of Caribbean migrants in Perth Amboy.

When I asked my father and my uncles and aunt about my grandfather they didn’t describe him as warm. They said he was intimidatingly strong, had a booming voice and was always working. As his first granddaughter, my experience was different. By the time I arrived he was retired, he had returned to Anguilla and was swimming in the ocean every day. I can count on my hand the amount of times I saw him wearing a shirt. The distance his children felt because of his constant work was something I pre-empted immediately, according to my grandfather. I would grab onto his long white beard and refuse to let go. They would have to wait until I fell asleep to pry my little fingers open. I had made my claim. But to his own children he was a larger-than-life figure, a hard worker and a strict disciplinarian. “Those who do not hear will feel,” he would say before the spankings he gave which were his children’s only vivid descriptions of touch. It wasn’t until they were adults that they learned about another manifestation of his warmth.

As my father, uncles and aunt grew up and did their own work in the New Jersey and the NY Tri-state area they would often get the question. Gumbs? Are you related to Jeremiah Gumbs? When they said yes the stories would come pouring out. Grown black folks and immigrants of many ethnicities would have tears in their eyes. The stories would come gushing out about how if it was not for Jeremiah Gumbs they would not have made it during this or that winter. Their parents didn’t have the money for coal or heat and he still made sure they were warm through the winter. People would ask sincerely if there was anything they could do for them, the children of Jeremiah Gumbs, to show their gratitude. Their vulnerable opens hearts, a form of warmth moving across the years. Their memories of my grandfather (before he grew the white beard that would make me think he was the prototype for Santa Claus) actually giving them coal, the best possible gift for a difficult Christmas.

I wonder if that warmth could travel backwards to the consciousness of my father and his siblings to recontextualize the absence they felt, because their father was always working. Even on his birthday. My father said that for his father, a good day, was a day that he could work. Work itself was the gift. I have had to balance this tendency within myself, a coldness borne from how much more in control of my emotions I feel when I am living in the context of work. Sometimes I avoid the messiness of actual relationships by imagining that work is the entire world. My grandfather loved his work. He loved the fact that he was able to own his own business and work for himself. There is also evidence that although his business made many things possible in the lives of his family members and for his home communities in Anguilla and New Jersey that he was also not a good businessman. Because he could not, in the face of winter agree that the money a family had was the determining factor in whether they would be warm. He felt that he was the determining factor because he had access to the apparatus to keep them warm and so he made it work. He made many investments motivated not by their ability to provide returns but because of his belief in the community and family members who asked for his support. Many times he felt betrayed by people he had supported who didn’t feel accountable to him after the fact. I have read his correspondence with my grandmother, she would write justifiably stressed out about their financial situation, and he would reply with faith that eventually everything would work out.

Today, on my grandfather’s birthday I am thinking about warmth and what it means to us. I am thinking about how most of us are dependent not on the neighborhood man who is provider of coal, but on a power grid that will perpetuate existing privileges and never have to look us in the eye. We are disconnected from warmth, not only because of the unsustainable infrastructure we pay into, but because we all repeat and believe that we are not the determining factor. We depend on systems supposedly designed to support human life where human life is not the determining factor. I’m a writer. And so here I am working on my grandfather’s birthday. Watching the ice storm out my window, wondering when the power lines will go down. The power company has already emailed to say not to contact them, but to sign up for text alerts if I want to know how long it will take for them to restore power based on priorities I can already predict.

I lit a candle on my ancestor altar this morning for my grandfather’s birthday. I want to cultivate the faith to believe that I could be the determining factor, that we together could determine that nobody is left in the cold not today on my grandfather’s birthday and not any day. I turn to blankets and the body-heat of my partner. I turn to memories and warm thoughts. But I also turn to this work. May it matter that I wrote this. May this be the work that outlives profit. May it be a part of how we learn what warmth actually is. May it support us when we feel bereft. May it light the way as we become determined enough to face our responsibility for everyone’s survival. And in the meantime, I am holding onto you determined as ever with the knowing and strengthening grip of these, my hands.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

That’s Audre in the middle between her sisters Helen and Phyllis.

Audre Lorde was born on a very cold day. February 1934 was one of the coldest months on record in New York City up to that point. Unprecedented snowfall, but on February 18th, 1934 there was no snow, no wind, just a deep cold. Linda Belmar Lorde gave birth to her third daughter under cold conditions. Nothing like the warmth she was born into. Linda’s mother (Audre Lorde’s grandmother) Elizabeth Belmar gave birth to all her children in Carriacou, traveled from Grenada to the small island of her own birth so that her sister, the midwife Annie could hold her, tend to her and welcome her babies. Sometimes warmth is more than a climate.

But in February 1934 during the Great Depression Linda Belmar Lorde gave birth in a cold city at Sloane Maternity Ward, a facility funded by the Vanderbilts and managed by Columbia’s Medical School, testing ground for a legion of white doctors committed to what they thought was the noble sanitizing mission of eradicating midwifery and imposing birth on their own terms. Cold. Institutionalized weather.

Time-traveling back to that day, I want to hold Linda Belmar Lorde’s hand. Hold the back of her neck. Whisper warmth into her ear. I want my breathing alongside her to mean remember. Remember warmth. I want to pace alongside Byron Lorde waiting for the baby who is, quiet as its kept, at least his fifth daughter. I want to look into the eyes of a man so disappointed by his own father that he changed the spelling of his name and say it. Warmth. I want to tell him he was always worthy of love. That he is strong enough to offer more than four walls and the heat bill. He has claim to a deeper warmth.

And now, come with me back to a different hospital, decades later where Audre Lorde is meeting with the surgeon who tells her that since her cancer has metastasized there is only one option, his knife. He tells her that even with surgery she only has a few more months to live. And watch with me in wonder as it flickers in her, warmth. A healing spark that we can recognize in daughter soon to be doctor Elizabeth, named after Ma Liz, Audre’s grandmother. Witness it. The possibility of rebirth as warmth. That night she will go home and write in her journal a promise to write until fire comes out of every opening in her body. She will craft her own second, but really primary opinion through her own research on the liver and “alternative” treatments for cancer. She will leave New York City for the warmth of the Caribbean and gift herself not months, but many years of life. She will form lasting connections with entire new communities of Black women, in the Caribbean, in South Africa, in Germany. Warmth. When the doctors ask she will say “It is the love of women that has kept me alive this long.”

I am writing this in the midst of an ice storm in Durham. Across the United States the human-caused climate chaos of unprecedented cold weather and the cruel capitalist structural neglect of communities of color means that many of us are cold right now in a way we don’t have to be. And so my gift to you on this Audre Lorde’s 87th birthday is warmth. The warmth we need, which is the precondition to the climate healing we are all responsible for in our lifetimes. It is the warmth that comes from remembering how worthy we are of love, how capable we are of giving it. It is the warmth that comes from trusting the healers, especially the black, brown and indigenous women healers in our midst. It is the warmth that comes from reclaiming the externalized authority of systems that never earned our loyalty. It is the warmth we make by loving each other with the heat of more than one lifetime.

Audre Lorde’s birthday is as good a day as any to clarify our relationship to heat, light and possibility. May you experience that warmth that is your birthright. May you move towards what lights you up. May you say yes to the gift already radiating within you. With gratitude to the Lorde our flame, as ever lighting the way deeper into who we are.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde: Biography as Ceremony (forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Continue the celebration with us on 2/21 at 11am EST at Mobile Homecoming’s Sunday Service where I will be doing an oracle in honor of Audre Lorde! https://www.mobilehomecoming.org/live

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

Black Feminist Breathing Chorus Winter 2020-2021

this time i smile down on you, grandma

daddy holds me in his arms

you sink up to your shoulders in this sea

that you call evidence that God’s just showing off

daddy holds me in his arms

and while you both look at my mother

beautiful unlikely gift from God

i look at you instead

and while you both look at my mother

across salt and distances of sand

i look at you instead

my father stands

across salt and distances of sand

photos and mornings of tears

my father stands

taken by oxygen and years

photos and mornings of tears

you sink to your shoulder in the sea

taken by oxygen and tears

so now it’s me

this time

i’m smiling down

on you

Sometimes it’s such a young voice that comes to bring the poems. My grandmother never underestimated me. She thought I was a worthy interlocutor for questions of life, death, afterlife and the unknown. She shared her wisdom and experience with me, but she was not afraid to show me that there was so much she did not know. So much that she wondered about. What she knew for sure? The energy that gave birth to this universe was feminine. What she wondered about? What happens after we die? And our relationship was a relationship of wonder. Wondering what would have her life been if she, the ever curious child, had been born in my circumstances. With a mother less afraid, with a father less constricted and constricting. In a word more receptive to the poems and questions of a Black girl. I came to her over and over with the question “what was it like?” I wanted to know what it was like during the Anguillian revolution. What was it like to participate in direct action civil disobedience in segregated spaces in New Jersey? What was it like to travel with women’s organizations to all the countries she sent back gifts from? What was it like to be a Black student at Pratt Institute in the 30s? But she wanted to know how it was for me. How did it look from my perspective? And how would it be? What could I see that she couldn’t fathom yet. From the age that she could walk, she says, she wanted to go beyond whatever she knew. So maybe our relationship is a study in perspective. It was my grandmother’s passing that made me an ancestral listener. All I knew was that the conversation had to continue.

This picture shows me the shift in our relationship that comes with the difference in my perspective after my father’s passing. The unspoken cliche that she is looking down on me from heaven, might be too directionally specific. She is everywhere. But in this picture and as the person looking down into the photo album I am looking down on her, I have height, because of my father’s act, even now, of elevation. Because of my mother’s embrace of this moment in particular. Because I hold the already disintegrating picture in my hands. What can I see from here, beyond what I let myself know? How completely I am loved. How humble my wise first teacher, be she grandmother or ocean, be she mother or lens of glass be he father or healing heartbreak. How great the height from all this lifting. How full and generous the wonder. How glad for what I still don’t know.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.

witness

 From Clyde:

you are how i know

i can give life

make the world better

more beautiful than it was

i can give life

another chance

more beautiful than it was

you are evidence

another chance

when i thought i was inadequate

you are evidence

that i am more

when i thought i wasn’t enough

you showed up to teach me

that i am more

than i ever dreamed

you showed up to teach me

to make a world     better

than i ever dreamed

you are how i know

From Alexis:

recognize

i hold onto your finger

you hold everything

i know who you are

i hold onto your finger

look directly into your eyes

i know who you are

you are me

look directly into my eyes

and spell become

you are me

and you can never leave

and spell become

the language that we speak

and you can never leave

my eyes

my eyes

recognize

the language that we speak

holds everything

What would I give to hold onto my father’s hand and and look into his eyes? These poems, and this whole part of the series layers words onto the wordless connection of care, holding, communing beyond syntax or the logic of language. I would prefer a tangible physical connection, I would prefer an unspoken gaze to any of these words. And so when I read them over, am I crying because the resonate, or I am I crying because they will never be enough? I don’t know yet. What I do know is that I too am moving towards wordlessness. One day (the song says “and it won’t be long” but I hope that it is a long time away) I too will exist in the wordless. The unspeakable beyond. And so will you. Maybe this practice is my way of honoring that while I deeply miss and long for an embodied connection with my Dad, who he is, who I am, who we are was always more than and beyond these bodies. And remains. More than. And beyond.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.