Creator: AleksandarGeorgiev |Copyright: Aleksandar Vrzalski

“When this world peels away, the new one is right underneath.”

-Amaru Rufus an earthseedling child (as told to his mother and repeated to me in a reflection by Earthseed Founding Member Zulayka Santiago)

The overcast sky broke at sunset and the layers of cloud and not-cloud looked like the layers of the earth. Or at least what I think the layers of the earth would look like. But seeing the layers of earth as a visual is an apocalyptic fantasy isn’t it? As they are, the layers of earth are literally inside their own opaque sphere, rightly unavailable to any trick of light, even a sunset from another stage of star.

And it stops my breath to know the the strange clouds billowing over Ohio are dredged up stolen minerals somewhere in their radioactive process, raining back into our water supply to show us how toxic this system is, the one that we’ve stitched across this wounded land.

In all the diagrams that show too neatly demarcated cross-sections of earth, fossils, groundwater, ancient silt, crust, mantle, core, the earth is cut open, overexposed. I feel it like a gash in my gut, which is why I won’t share one of those images here. The rings of a centuries old tree may tell a complicated beautiful story, but I want the tree to live. I’m okay with the mystery.

Or maybe, as usual, this is about me. I want no further wounding. Spare me your curious incisions, too close in reasoning to the drills searching for oil in the oceanic and continental crusts of the earth right now. Stop. So we can live. Do I really have to prove my layers on this planet bleeding out? Stop all the drilling. We wouldn’t need to see the layers if we could learn to feel.

I have to learn to feel these compositional chemically complex layers within me, my thinnest oceanic crust, (still miles thick). The biggest part of me, my multi-various mantle a diverse inheritance of substance under pressure. My lisopheric plates of armor over the muck underneath. What can the asthenospheric parts of me, that slog of me, not solid not liquid not neat teach me now. And what about the hot liquid metal protecting my heavy core?

It’s complicated in here. When I get heated, under pressure I change chemically, physically. Who you thought I was melts and solidifies again. And if you would learn to recognize what’s going on here you have to look beyond looking. You would have to know who I am. Under this much pressure liquid, under this much pressure solid, at this temperature rock, at this temperature sludge and remember too, I am in orbit inside myself. How can you love the parts of me that you can’t see or even touch?

There are other ways though. The reason deep earth geologists feel confident about the substantial differences in the concentric layers of earth is that their best way of measuring what is happening under the surface is by calculating the seismic waves that move through from core out to the universe. They have to listen closer and closer to the vibration of earth. Which is what I am trying to do by learning to listen to myself. Which is what I’m trying to do by loving you. I’m listening closely for how we move through this. Because at the end of the day the sky will break, the consequences fall like acid rain. And I need the solid of you, the sludge of you, the malleable the thick. I need the flow of you the metal. I need exactly this, your melting armor and all your heaviest holding close. Because love moves through us like this. Listen. And so much should remain underground. Remain. A sacred mystery. Universe bless me with a heart better than all the Geiger counters. Universe bless me with a listening worth your iron, your nickel your change. Attune me grace, to all the layers of who you are I’ll never see.

P.S. If you are trying to listen to yourself more closely join me in daily practice. I’m here in Stardust and Salt and/or The God of Everyday.

When the plane descends and there’s snow on the ground, the earth could be a populated moon.

Yesterday when I was looking at the waning moon out my window at home I asked, “why do you turn back?”

Of course that’s just me asking myself a question I’m projecting onto the moon. I know that everything is round and the sun has found another angle from which to brighten the moon. But from here it looks like the moons finds its place in the sun and then turns and goes back into the cold again. From here it looks like the moon found away to fully shine and then went back into hiding one truth at a time.

There is a Macushi story about why women don’t trust the moon. It’s a survivor story. An incest story. Somewhat triumphant but you don’t have to go here with me. It’s okay if you turn back now.

In the story a young girl finds a way to show everyone who is sneaking into her bed and harming her in the night. She keeps her hands in the soot and smears the violators face and in the morning everyone sees that it is her own brother that has been nightmaring her nights, and they send him out into space to become the moon, we can still see the smudges on his face.

Now I do trust the moon. And I can’t 100% trust the source of this story which survives in the records of a colonizing anthropologist. But I would love to know more about this story from a more reliable source, especially if any Macushi relatives or other Carib language speakers have heard this story in circle from elders. (And please support wonderful listeners like the makers of Pantani Blog who have recorded cosmic Macushi wisdom from Auntie Paulette in Macushi language.) I would love to know if this story is authentic because, can you imagine growing up in a community where child sexual abuse within families is not the hushed pervasive terror it is in our current dominant society? Can you imagine what it would be like to grow up in a community where evidence of survivor strategies and accountable community response was a conversation as big as the moon?

We have so much to learn about cycles. Cold is a cycle geologists are still trying to understand. Right now they are digging ice cores out of glaciers and the bottom of the ocean to try to determine how long ice ages last, or more pressingly, when the current interglacial period will end. And of course in the meantime industrial global warming is causing climate crisis and messing up everyone’s math.

Multiple factors impact the relative freeze of the planet: the movement of tectonic plates and the shifting of continents can impact how water flows and freezes and melts. But mostly the larger cycles of earth herself are what determine how cold, how long on the geological scale. Changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun, (they call that eccentricity) how the earth wobbles on its axis (they call that precession) and shifts in the tilt of the earth on her axis. They call that obliquity. Recent research out of Melbourne, Australia suggests that obliquity has the most significant impact on ice age cycles.

Obliquity. Deviance from the horizontal or vertical, or the angle created by such a deviation.

I’m not an expert in geology or geometry so I know the word “obliquity” because of foundational Black feminist literary scholar Hortense Spillers and her essay “The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight: In the Time of the Daughters and the Fathers.” Spillers references Melville’s description of a lamp in Moby Dick to talk about deviance and straightness and the total disaster of patriarchy, specifically in literary representations of incestuous violence in literary work by Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison and others. The essay shows that patriarchy itself is sexual violence, (it just took Black writers to make it plain). And suggests that as Black americans aka survivors of white patriarchy taken to its enslaving extreme (but also inevitable) endpoint, we cannot reproduce patriarchy without destroying ourselves and each other. We have to create another relation. And another way of understanding relation itself.

This is why I will never stop reading Hortense Spillers (or recommending that YOU read her work!) because she takes us all the way there from A DEPICTION OF A LAMP that because of its tilted angle on board a ship sheds light on the “false, lying levels” of a room that was supposedly “infallibly straight.”

Obliquity. Our cosmic never straightness. How can we study the consequences of our angles, our deviation always from horizontal or vertical. Our tilting towards each other. Our way. My favorite abdominal muscles as a person tilted by scoliosis. My every movement an oblique meditation on tilt. A stretch. I want another relation.

I know. Sometimes it feels like I am giving you the cold shoulder, turning my (crooked) back on you, when I just need to reflect, take myself out of this projection for a moment and reckon with the impact of what I’ve done, what my mistakes have to teach me. Maybe this time I’ll let go of even more of the lie of my uprightness, but I don’t know yet what will melt and what will freeze. That’s the thing about the newness of a new relation, it’s like you or like earth, or like me, mostly unknown. But with our hands in the soot and across each others faces. With the lamp of our understanding swinging wildly in this crooked crooked room, what can you know?

That I’ll be back sometime, in some form. Still dirty. Still bright. That I’ll be shook and tilted, but I’ll be around. That I’ll be dreaming a new relation because I love you, even in the cold. Or when I barely recognize you in your sacred deviation. This is our axis aligned with change, this is our distance from the sun in a universe where uprightness never existed. This it the pull, the tilt, the spin, and I’ll be back.

P.S. Sky gazing writers join me daily in Stardust and Salt, a writing immersion.

I got this image from the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites. That’s the real name.

Yesterday I had the great honor of visiting Passage/way/s an installation by the artist Jessica Valoris at VisArts in Rockville, Maryland. Jessica and I have known each other for years and I was so lucky that she was available to walk me through the entire exhibit, a series of doorways, portals, poems and artifacts of her daily practice of honoring our fugitive ancestors.

Not so far from the eastern shore where my ancestors and Harriet Tubman and the oysters and the stars collaborated on their own impossible freedom, Jessica is doing this deeply researched, cosmic loving ceremony. Visit if you can. Every piece moved me, the doorway called “Night Sky” the big and little dipper spoons, the shoreline dance with Saidiya’s words, the zines become windows, the fugitive marbles, the people who could fly and the tools they left behind, the capture ads turned to love poems by Jessica’s careful eye and heart. I love all of it.

Jessica Valoris in the world she made visible.

And the piece I’m still reflecting on this morning is called “Spot in the Sun” which on first listen sounds like what I want and what every tourist board in the Caribbean is trying to tell me. A place where I can feel the warmth kiss my skin. Or what my ego says I want, all the shine and attention a dying enlightenment system of thought can bestow upon me.

But Jessica Valoris’s “Spot in the Sun” is about Nat Turner’s cosmic vision. In February 1831 Nat Turner watched the moon come directly into alignment with the earth and blot out the sun. Darkness in the middle of the work day. A sign. Turner believed that God was ready for a different situation. Because isn’t everything a matter of perspective? On the other side of the moon total sunlight and down here on earth dark days. Or for those working from can’t see (in the morning) to can’t see (in the night) a forced labor situation so oppressive it hurt to look at it.

Can you imagine the audacity of a survivor of enslavement who dared to challenge the supremacy of the sun? To imagine another cosmic relation? What made him think he could do that? Well. I know one thing he did. He took a month off. Yup. A whole moon cycle.

Oh you didn’t know our ancestors were out here taking sabbaticals from slavery? Yes. And I am underlining this point for anyone who is a recovering (or not) workaholic like me, and for everyone who thought they knew what Nat Turner’s most rebellious acts were (like I thought I knew) and for all my fellow urgent revolutionaries.

In the 1800s an enslaved Nat Turner hid in the woods and took a whole month off. Kinda dims the lights on all the reasons we think we can’t take a break, huh? But as those of us who have read historian ancestor Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom (a major influence on Jessica’s art practice) know, this was a common practice of rebellion, a way of temporarily escaping enslavement without leaving your people behind.

As Tricia Hersey and many others remind us, rest is revolutionary. And it was revolutionary for Nat Turner. After that month off, Nat Turner could hear God and see signs. He came back to the plantation ready to wreck shop. And after the eclipse brazenly imposed sudden naptime on the birds and work the nocturnal mammals up early, he knew anything could happen.

And wouldn’t you know, the very earth herself collaborated with Nat Turner. Yes she did. In August of the same year the mouthpiece of Earth that some call Mount St Helens erupted from all the way over in Virginia, the debris in the air looked (at least to Nat Turner) looked like the sun was blotted out again. And Nat said, let’s go.

Now I don’t know how I feel about The Confessions of Nat Turner being “transcribed” and interpreted by a white writer swept up in and benefiting from the terror and shock at the existence of Nat Turner and Nat Turner’s own credibility in his community struck in the hearts of every enslaver who had erstwhile assumed their crimes had cosmic support. Jessica’s exhibit focuses more on how Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia inspired liberationists in Maryland. I don’t know if Nat Turner’s plan was really to kill all white people, or to eventually spare children and allies or what. But I do have my own confession.

The whole idea called “white people” and the way it was made up to enact violence, the way it constructs personhood and normalizes isolation, violence and despair across the planet? I’m over it. And I am trying to kill the white supremacist logic inside me. All of it. And I think the moon and the mountains support me too.

I remember the first time I took a whole month off. It was November and I called it the month of “No.” Unlike Nat Turner, I didn’t have to hide in the woods and fear capture and death, but I did have to save up for months. And when I tell you that when, like some sort of inverse Shonda Rhimes, I tried and failed every day for 30 days to say no to every offer, request or demand that came my way it shifted something. I could see signs. I could hear the God in me. I mean it. I have written every day since then. Every day.

Like Nat Turner, that one month of refusal, gave me my belief in total freedom. Another relation is possible. And if you watch the sky, everything is a sign. Let’s go. Because you already know something that will make the systems that your extracted labor supports unworkable. Your freedom could make every lie about power shake in its sheets.

And the most important thing was that I freed myself from the lies I believed about scarcity. And by the way whiteness is a lie shaped by and insisting upon scarcity, based on and reproducing the idea of never having enough and never being enough. Imagine working in service of that idea every day. Oh right. You don’t have to imagine.

One month taught me that I had to free myself from my belief that I couldn’t say no, because this might be my only opportunity (internalized white supremacy). Or that I couldn’t say no, because I had to prove how capable I was (internalized ableism). Or that I couldn’t say no because I was scared of my emotions would teach me if I paused long enough to feel them. I feared what the signs and wonders would show me if didn’t fill all the space up with work. And guess what. That’s the contradiction. There is no way for me to help create a world free from sexual violence in an every day context where I reproduce my trauma by telling myself I can never say no. No.

Because if, as Jessica’s exhibit so powerfully reminded me yesterday, our fugitive ancestors could say no to the system and yes to themselves in a million ways on a million days, who I am I to play-act slavery in my work for our liberation? No. No. No.

So I learned to say no. And sometimes I still need a reminder, so thank you Jess. Because now I remember what lights me up and how beautiful it is to shut everything down. I remember now how I found this life where love flows freely. And now I live here. My spot in the sun.

Langston Emet with Jessica Valoris’s “Spot in the Sun.”

P.S. Do you know what Zora Neale Hurston meant when she talked about being “drenched in light?” Check out our Black Feminist Breathing Meditation series to learn more.

View of Earth’s atmosphere at sunrise over the Indian Ocean from the International Space Station. Photo Credit: NASA

From the airplane window the red of sunrise looks like a protective layer around the planet that I love. I now it’s just light breaking apart, the radiant limits of what I can see from this angle. But how long have I wished for a halo, a transparent barrier around me that universally signifies as STOP. I mean one that works.

My photo of the atmosphere from the airplane the other day.

I remember at some point earlier in this pandemic when Sangodare and I were considering going to an outdoor birthday party on the top level of a parking deck downtown. It would be safe, Sangodare pointed out, if I could just stay 6 feet away from other people. Was I laughing or crying? We didn’t go to the party. And I realized one of the defining realities of my femme gender in this society. Has it ever, for one moment of my life in public, been up to me whether someone stays 6 feet away from me or not. 3 feet away from me? What has ever enforced or protected my right to personal space? People, mostly masculine presenting people, push up, press up all the time, ignoring my implicit or explicit barriers. Social distance? My life in public in this body has felt like an anti-social collision most days here in the time of rape culture. Imagine if whether or not I had 6 feet of personal space was just a question of whether I wanted it. Whether I said so. I wish.

Is it a coincidence that when I’m in public now most of the other people I see wearing masks are people of color? Or have we always wished for some agency over our breathing, a way to signal unavailability to the aggressive breath of entitlement. I love my mask for how it frees my face from having to make that face that means get out of my face.

One of my favorite things about Earth is her atmosphere, because yes, thank you for making it possible for me to breathe, but also because of all that nitrogen. If any space rock comes out the blue to penetrate the radius of this planet that space rock or other wayward body will burst into flames as soon as it hits the atmosphere. As it should.

I don’t think I’m the only survivor of sexual violence, street harassment, unwanted advances, eager hair touching attempts, or assumptive intimacy who wishes for that exact superpower. I want an atmosphere.

What does it take to have a functioning atmosphere? Well the astrophysicists say a sustainable atmosphere requires that your escape velocity is significantly larger than your than the average molecular velocity in the gases surrounding you, your would-be atmospheric layers. In other words it it has to be harder to move through the barrier than it is to be the barrier. Because escape velocity is kind of what it sounds like how fast and in what direction does one need to move to free itself from a gravitational pull. A higher escape velocity means the gravitational pull is stronger. But in this case the gravitational pull isn’t that thing I’m trying to escape from, the inertia of a culture built as if violation is inevitable. The gravitational pull must be the planet itself. Must be me.

I must become gravitational. Because the reproduction of entitled violation is the world I live in, but the world is not the planet, it is just a story we tell about it. That’s what I need to remember. I planet, precede and outlive every scarce and grasping world ever invented. And as a planet, if I am to maintain an atmosphere gotta gravitate greatly, gotta stay. Could it be that I am actually safer the more substantial I become to myself, the more I stay here in this body, the more I value all these layers, the less I escape?

Because I may not have control over whatever unhealed broken piece of you comes hurtling at me through space. And some of you just aren’t solid enough to stay in orbit. And it does sometimes seem like the more attractive I become to myself, the more likely some other heavenly body is to see me as a temporary fix, short-cut around the work of loving themselves deeper. Have I been afraid to be so massive, afraid that my activated air, my atmosphere will saddle me with your problems?

Thank goodness I am not the only planet in the universe. I remember. Many years ago in Oakland while we were planning for the Critical Resistance 10 convening to celebrate the first decade of Prison Industrial Complex abolition I experienced the magic of orbit. After all day planning we went out dancing at some cute popular spot with a wonderful DJ. And what always happens happened, some guy interpreted my dancing which for me is usually an internal exploration as an invitation to push up, press up behind me. But this time, we were the planets gathered in the solar system of abolition, training ourselves and each other in transformative justice, and Ejeris Dixon, our beloved who is training us all to activate safety beyond policing (and if you and any of your formations are missing out please look up Vision Change Win) activated on purpose what we sometimes activate by intuition. She drew on the embodied interventions she had been practicing as part of Audre Lorde Project’s Safe Outside the System Collective and made a circle. She got our folks to make a circle around me in that moment (because the space debris of socialized masculinity can come from any direction) and now I want to live my whole life in circle.

So maybe atmosphere is another name for community, the context where even I can be free. Atmospheres are variable and astrochemists still don’t know what happened 19 million years ago to drastically increase the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere so much that now we can breathe, but I imagine it was something like remembering to love each other protect each other dance in circles. And when it happened, was Earth laughing or crying?

Yes. I commit to be a planet. Be the depth of who I am. This massive showing up. Could we know ourselves so well we earn a sky? Could I call on you in circle. Love myself so heavy so thick so consistent that anything that comes my way bursts into love. As it should. As it should. Because love is my gravity and my air. Love is all that happens here. And here you are.

P.S. If you are looking for a teacher who understood the gravitational power of love this Black History Month, I recommend Fannie Lou Hamer.

updated infrared image of our galaxy taking into account the star-birthing wave

For Cheryll Y. Greene

Yesterday morning the moon shone through the clouds on me like a searchlight. It was giving i will never leave you, i will always know you, nothing but death can keep me from you The Color Purple vibes. If I could I would play hand clap games with the moon. I never get over how someone so far away and completely on her own schedule and ever changing always feels like my best friend as soon as I see her. Actually, when I put it that way, it makes complete sense, because that’s the type of friend I am to you. Randomly beaming in your face like you know where I been all this time. It feels like the moon always finds me. And so, yesterday morning I jumped directly into the clouds.

If you get on an airplane right before sunrise in Durham and fly west you can slow the rate of change. Right? Or is earth just so multiple she stretches time? Because from here the eastern cities look like galaxies and then the midwest slowly reveals her patchwork blanket of agricultural claims, and now this desert looks like a muted Mars. How many worlds are there?

Trick question! The universe always makes more worlds. Today I learned that astronomers call the nearby galaxies birthing stars “clouds” because from here they look like misty gatherings in the sky, making stars instead of rain.

Can you imagine? When my mother said my head was always in the clouds, I wasn’t even saying things like, hey, did you know that from the perspective of Durham a galaxy looks like a cloud but from the perspective of the clouds Durham looks like a galaxy? And couldn’t astronomers have guessed that poets would come behind them to reuse all these metaphors or else critique them. I mean, who uses a phenomena of the sky as a metaphor for another phenomena of the sky, unless sky is all you know? Who sells NFTs for crypto unless they plan to never land on earth?

The two times my mentor Cheryll Y. Greene scolded me were both related to the cloud. The first time was when I posted pictures of Cheryll and her new laptop on facebook without asking and the second time was when she found out how much important information Sangodare and I used to keep in google docs. Cheryll Y. Greene the great editor of the people, those people being Assata Shakur, June Jordan, Ntozake Shange, Lucille Clifton, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and many more, knew something about discretion, and the dangers of instantaneous publication (like this) and data storage. Not because she was a tech expert, but because she was a Black editor of Black writers who co-intel-pro had high on their list of people whose words might spark revolutions. They had to decide what they wanted to say about themselves and when. For example, it was Cheryll Greene who stewarded Assata Shakur’s first public statement to her community after she escaped the prison called the United States. Exactly when, exactly where we should first hear from “our sister in exile” as Cheryll called her in Essence Magazine.

Cheryll helped make Essence Magazine an incubator of stars in the 1970s and 80s. I think she made every one a better clearer writer. I have seen the manuscripts (though I will say..very little red pen on Toni Morrison’s drafts), but the real reason I know Cheryll’s “editors eye” could transform writers is because she transformed me. And sometimes I wonder if the reason not enough people know Cheryll’s name is because she was so careful not to leave too many traces.

I went with Cheryll once to shred her documents, pounds and pounds of paper that we loaded up after cancer had already eaten through her shoulder. We took them to a truck somewhere in Harlem that would eat and spit out histories right in front of you, truckloads of snow from some soft pixelated planet.

Am I an airhead for using social media apps that allow information about me to flow to government agencies and corporations through the checked boxes of terms and conditions? I am typing pages from my journal into digital perpetuity via airpiane wifi when I’m 96% sure that Cheryll burned her journals before she died. How am I Cheryll’s literary daughter?

Is this merely a generational difference? Stars are born when clouds collapse. What they call star nurseries really look like flaming clouds lit through some internal sunrise. And a new close gas formation called the “Radcliffe wave” is changing what astronomers think the shape of our galaxy is or ever was. They call the wave Radcliffe because Harvard astronomers called it and so shouldn’t we think of the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study when we look at the sky, and maybe not think about how Harvard said the “unknown” mental capacity of women meant women shouldn’t be admitted to Harvard, even though Ann Radcliffe was one of the original donors to the scholarship program in the 1600s. A business woman who outlived her husband, Ann Radcliffe’s contribution recuperated through the short-lived women’s college and the institute that replaced it. But what about British Ann Radcliffe’s lucrative 15th century investments that put her in the position to be the first woman donor to Harvard in what could only be colonial projects linked to the transatlantic slave trade? I say the Radcliffe wave’s oceanic referent is actual the middle passage.

Which means that if we were to see a star being born right now through an expensive Harvard telescope, or more likely through their private servers, that star would have been born 8.800 years ago, long before the technological shift we call colonialism through which the speculative sale of people could fund astronomy research centuries later with interest.

I can’t say what any of this means from here. I am now data aggregatable and being reproduced even now by AI’s brain. Which I guess means you don’t need me, or that the interest in me I am generating in you right now will benefit whoever owns the AI application where you will one day ask the chat bot “give me an essay in the style of Alexis Pauline Gumbs about clouds as clouds and clouds as unborn stars and clouds as galaxies and clouds as archives” and it won’t matter that you never knew how Cheryll died the night before her 70th birthday, or that you weren’t there when I tried to record her life story the last time I saw her, but instead we watched the clouds changing into colors I still can’t describe over sunset through every window in her apartment. The clouds themselves and the clouds becoming more beautiful again reflected in the Hudson River.

I agree to the terms and conditions and post my ramblings online because I want you to know about Cheryll immediately. Because as Barbara and Beverly Smith said we have no way of knowing whether we or our movement will survive long enough to become safely historical. Because I still remember what all my sister Women of Color Bloggers taught me which is that our brilliance can flood the system with alternative possibilities even while capitalism learns to steal everything we are and everything we think we have. Or maybe it is because that great editor who I really want to read this first draft is dispersed out among you and I miss her.

But keep on treating me like the moon and saying you needed to read exactly this exactly today. Because I love you so much that I will never be able to hide from the wolves or the advertisers. You will always be able to find me out here moonfaced and howling your name as if it could reclaim the stolen claims, and name this whole universe for you light years before they come gentrify this air. Every cloud in my eyes is a galaxy, every breath is your birthday you star.

P.S. I love you every day. Come find me here.

Image Credit: Jose Francisco Hernández

“I’m a star? I’d rather be a comet by far.” -Andre 3000

(in Skew it on the Bar-B, a critique of “spittin' all that bourgeois”)

It is Black history month and Monu says somehow cold air makes for an even clearer sky. Last night walking back to the hotel after the joy of eating with public university educators who are teaching black and queer and feminist and disabled and anti-colonial and amphibian futures the sky was indeed more clear. The moon is almost full.

And the green comet (more technically known as C 2022 E3 (ZTF)) was as close to the earth as she has been in the last 50,000 years. Don’t worry you didn’t miss her. Take your binoculars out tonight and look for her somewhere near Mars.

50,000 years is a long time. They say the green comet comes the long way around the sun from the distant Oort cloud, the furthest reaches of a solar system we are still trying to understand. The Oort cloud is theoretical, it is a place that Jan Oort theorized long orbit comets like these must be from, because they have to be from somewhere. Oort, the radio astronomer redefined the solar system by listening.

It is Black history month and I wonder. Have you ever listened for a place you could not see, that no one that you know has ever seen? An origin you could only guess about by obsessing over recent arrivals, a place defined entirely by what you heard? And is that what I am doing with my longing for authentic Blackness? Building a radio receptor to listen for some old precolonial sound? I mean astronomers have built radios strong enough to hear the static of the radiation residual of the big bang so why not? (Thank you forever to Black feminist cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and all your good citations!)

If I had a solar system radio show I would ask the green comet what she saw 50,000 years ago when last she came near Earth while our species was supposedly building life out of stone. And she might laugh and remind me that she also attended the founding moment of the universe. Don’t I have a question about that?

A comet is old. A remnant of the noise that made the universe. A comet is wise. She streaks across the sky and leaves behind two tails. Two stories. One of dust and one of ionic transformation, or everything the sun ignites into fundamental change.

And it would be something other than dead air, the sound of my mind bursting the limitations my own longing has placed on the story of who I am.

And a comet is also vulnerable. Her elliptical orbit can become hyperbolic any time she comes over this way. So while the astronomers who just noticed her last year predict that she was in the neighborhood 50,000 years ago, a massive presence seems to have shifted her out of that orbit (everyone’s blaming the irresistibility of stormy Jupiter) so she may not come back for a million years, or she may leave the solar system forever. Which is why I have to ask my questions now. Study now. Get out of my own way.

So I’ll rephrase in the service of this once in everyone’s lifetime interview.

Green comet. Heart of ice. How does it feel all those years in the dark before you come close blazing towards the sun? How does it feel right now, when all you are begins to melt and glow? Artifact of the first explosion, trailing dust a million miles, could you teach me to let go of all the choking thoughts I do not need? Ancestor comet, how can I be like your ionic tail. Leaving as a legacy only the parts of me that said yes to transformation, bright enough to smudge the coldest sky.

What do I know? I’m a lucky Justice League beneficiary who thought Green Lantern was always Black. I’m of a generation young enough that there was always Black Feminism but now old enough to see my sacred responsibility the act of teaching the world Black history criminalized by talk radio listeners who fear that I will leave them in the dust, who resent my glowing legacy of change. As if it is not also your own.

So I ask the so-called steward of the the stolen Seminole lands, inheritor of the colonizer John Broward’s mandate to dry out the earth, pretending that legislated ignorance is a fountain of youth and any other listeners listening now the same questions I am asking myself: What are we afraid to know? What dusty story chokes us out of our own breakthroughs? Am I green with forgetting or green with envy or green with promised life? And do you think if you cross out the names of our transformers creation will not be what it is? Did you forget what you are made of? Did you forget what we are made of? Can we forget the whole black sky? Don’t you know? I was there when the universe was born. We were there when the universe was born. Remember.

P.S. This is where I teach Black History. See you there.

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.

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.

Photo by Elisabeth Ann

Yesterday before dinner as the sun set over Durham I stood on our roof patio and looked directly up. It was moon noon. A perfect half moon exactly overhead.

Beloved Yashna and Ang were over for dinner, which Sangodare noted was getting cold as I gazed at the moon. Sangodare noted this without saying any words at all. I love Sangodare’s articulate body language as much as I love the moon. There it is. My cosmic polyamory.

Ang’s aunt says that this particular half moon, the one between the lunar new year and the ancestral lantern festival at the first full moon, is everybody’s birthday. I don’t know why that makes sense, but I love it. If you know me, you know that I love everyone’s birthday. I will never get over the fact that each of us was born. Perfect halves all looking for each other. Or perfect wholes half in mystery ready to be reborn.

What a blessing to celebrate everybody’s birthday with vegan gluten free soy free puerto rican food and game night with our dear beloveds. But of course, when I thought about the everybody of everybody’s birthday, I thought about our recent ancestors who had every reason to believe that they would live the two weeks from the lunar new year to the lantern ceremony, to see the moon grow full again, eat mochi and send light that they now have to wait to receive.

Or maybe. And I pray this for the sake of all our sudden ancestors, ancestry is not a practice of waiting and there is no difference between sending and receiving light, and all the bullets on earth are wasted because we are all in the middle of being reborn. I don’t know. I’ll ask the moon.

I haven’t been in a state of mind where I needed the terror of other people’s screams, the spiritual plunder of bullets to distract me from my own rebirth. I use the other distractions capitalism pushes my way constantly. I mostly use work. But let me tell you right now, I will be so happy if one day you cancel a meeting with me because you just noticed you are being reborn. I will be so happy to remember that the part of you I can know remembers its connection with the part I will never know. Where for all I know you could be dancing and eating sweets with all our ancestors.

If it is everyone’s birthday in the reflected light of a half a moon, then my own resistance to rebirth, my complicity with capitalism’s desire to reproduce me as a consumer and something for you to consume is ruining the party. My gift to you right now? Go ahead and expect that I won’t be the same person I was.

In neoliberalism as usual I sacrifice strangers to my dependence on unnaccountable consumption. But all I want to do is celebrate everybody’s birthday. Not the day of it, just the fact of it. How can I live in a way that honors the fact that you were born, and you deserve free air and peace and celebration and safety today and every day?

I don’t know. That part is still in shadow. But that life where I get to love you all the way, without even knowing who you are, it does exist. Because you exist. Half lit by a setting sun. Committed to a world you can’t see from here. Giving and receiving all this light. Half of so many worthy wishes. Half open to so many unimaginable possibilities. Happy Birthday love. This is me. Gazing at you like the wisest fool. Until the food grows cold and the night makes your face even brighter.

P.S. The God of Every Day is my way of celebrating everyone’s birthday! Join me there.

Image from Farmer’s Almanac Website

Last night the moon was a bowl again, almost half full out my airplane window. Slightly tilted so maybe moonlight, if it could spill would offer the contents of its light one drop at a time.

Last night, the moon in my airplane window and Tyre Nichols mother’s face on all the airport TV monitors. I can’t hear what she’s saying for all the amplified systemwide announcements, so I just look at her round face and wonder how she’s saying anything at all.

Audre Lorde published the poem “For Each of You” in 1973 for her children who she said were black “in the mouth of a dragon who defines them as nothing.” Like Tyre’s mom, RowVaughn Wells, Audre looked to the heavens. Here is Audre’s astronomical offering:

Remember our sun

is not the most noteworthy star

only the nearest

Audre’s clarification of what space means has trailed me since I was a teenager. I couldn’t grasp the meaning of this stanza until at least a decade after I read it. And then I shook my head. All this time I had believed the colonial education that taught me it was my brightness that mattered above all else. No. Audre clarifies while her children get death threats at their Staten Island grade school, it is where you are that matters. The sun is close enough to make all this photosynthetic life on Earth breathe.

But last night as a I prayed for the effectiveness of the airline provided anti-bacterial wipe and pressed my forehead to the airplane window, it was the moon that seemed to be exactly in the right place. 400 times closer to us than the sun and 400 times smaller. In just the right orbital position to catch the light of the sun and beam it back to us in different shapes, like a photographer. Close enough to pull the ocean out of us, remind us how tidal our feelings can be.

My blurry moon pic.

The moon, just a glorified asteroid, I guess. But talk about the right place at the right time, talk about staying power in motion.

Audre’s clarification in “For Each of You'“ troubles me because I live in what my beloved mentor Kai Lumumba Barrow calls “nomadic” times. As a home renter subject to speculative housing market cycles. As an itinerant Black feminist worker racking up miles on this airline that claims to be carbon neutral as if you can buy your way out of the carbon cycle. I am in orbit and it is hard to know with all these moving parts if I am close enough to you to pull and be pulled by you like I should.

But today Audre’s words echo even more because when the police kill our people, when shooters motivated by hate kill our people these are the words we hear too often “wrong place at the wrong time.” And looking at the moon who only knows how to speak in light and shadow, I don’t know if there is any cosmic truth called wrong place wrong time. I think the wrong place wrong time murders of our unarmed geniuses by the most heavily armed cowards on the planet are a pattern of ignoring the only cosmic truth I know, the basic truth of the cosmic sacredness of the lives of the people we love.

Tyre who the Memphis police killed, halting his orbit of skateboarding and taking photographs. Tortuaga who the Atlanta police killed halting their orbit of singing folk songs and hugging trees. They were not in the wrong place at the wrong time. Laughing with their loved ones, building community, protecting the forest, learning to coast. They were exactly where we needed them to be, reflecting light.

But the moon is only almost half full (46% last night, 48% right now) at a slight tilt. And the ocean in in me tosses all night because we still need them. We still need the light they would reflect in the way they would reflect it. All that scattered light.

I used to think the moon got its craters the same way the sphinx in Egypt lost its nose. Colonial gunfire. I don’t know why, just one of those childhood assumptions like how I used to think melodrama (a word my mother used to describe my emotions often) was some kind of lemon dessert. Looking back it seems I was raised to know more about the guns of the colonizers than I knew about astronomy or my own feelings. But this is what I know now: The deadly force of colonialism is not as old as the moon. It is not a natural pattern. It just feels like it is somedays because it older than this body that can’t imagine being as brave as the moon.

But the love I feel, the light I reflect back, the knowledge that your life is cosmically sacred is older than colonial violence. I believe the love that is allowing me to write these words right now originates in the same place that you originate, the stardust explosion where we first met.

So can I stay in orbit, letting all this light reflect off of me, with all my craters in view, evidence of everything in the universe that has crashed into me? Can you keep reflecting light when you too have your own rough places where something richoted off you while you were just minding your business?

I don’t know if I will ever be as brave as the moon. But I know I want to. I know I want to stand between you and all the light and shadow that we don’t yet understand and shape it into some kind of gift.

And as long as you’ll have me, beloved, I’ll be here at this distance, just this size, reflecting whatever angle of light I can catch back to you. Because love is my orbital assignment. Even today. When I am tilted. And only almost half full.

P.S. I adore you. If you want to reflect light in community with me I’m perpetually here at The God of Everyday: A Week of Practice.

from Getty Images

“multiple orbits in one body. what a complicated wreck.”

me. yesterday morning.

“we can listen to the balance.”

kasha ho. last night.

So I changed my mind. The sexiest thing about the sun is that she rotates at different speeds within herself, faster at her equatorial regions than anywhere else. exploding at different densities closer to the core and out like the kundalini teaching bellydancing polyrhythmic ancestor that she is.

Today, dancing as part of my morning meditation, it felt so good to embrace the multiple orbits in my body, all the rotations, especially the ones where energy feels stuck. The snap crackle pop of waking up in my particular body. (I promise I won’t reference cereal every time. Actually, I can’t promise that.)

This morning I participated in a beautiful practice offered last night by Kasha Ho, co-founder of The Embodiment Institute (it’s on their Instagram, you should watch it after this). The practice is called “Breath is a Reciprocal Relationship with Earth.” YES!!! Kasha is one of my favorite teachers because she lives by and lifts up the truth that our embodiment is not individual. The places that we call our bodies are complex environments made up of multiple systems and populated by drastically more diverse microbes than cells that share our particular DNA signature. And on top of all of that, Kasha reminds us, our every breath is in interdependent partnership with plants on this planet as we engage in the necessary interchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide participating in a carbon cycle that is as old as the Earth.

Holding my breath (because Kasha said so) I could feel my internal population start to protest. And I could feel what Kasha is always teaching: just as our minds are not sovereign rulers over our bodies, our species does not rule over this planet. Our awareness is union not separation. “We can listen to the balance,” Kasha says.

Ooh GIRL!!! This is what it feels like to hold our breath as a species, huh? To refuse to give what we are here to give, to pretend we don’t need what we are here to receive? No wonder we feel like we are about to pass out half the time.

Because we are no different from the sun. We are an ongoing process, a bright explosion, an energy event and the universe is watching us burn out. Wondering what this supernova will generate.

No. We are no different from the sun, radiant in our multiplicity. I agree with Audre Lorde, who refused the understanding that stars are not planets, that planets are not stars, just like I believe in everything else Audre teaches us. We are all of who we are. We are planets. We are stars. What else could we be made of?

So now I am thinking, what if breath is orbit? The choral breathing of all these cells and the bacteria that love them? The set of cycles that ground me to this planet, keep me in communion with other species and connect me to the universe in an unbelievable polyrhythm.

What if this is my one job? Allowing air to change its life through me. All these different rates of movement in my shoulders, my waist. All these intersecting cycles, my willingness to show up, my need for silence, my conversations with the dead and the living and those unbound by the difference. The long cycles of my recurring dreams and the short spin cycle of my daily tasks. This infinite loop between what I want to tell you and what I suddenly don’t even know any more.

Can I count on you to breathe today like the planet wants and needs it? Not at my pace or in time with my demands, just sometime in the lifetime of this star. Because my pulse is saying one thing again now again now again now.

I need you. I need you to breathe.

P.S. Come cycle with me this week in The God of Every Day Week of Practice

Gros Islet, St. Lucia

It’s Thursday. Last night the moon was a bowl over the ocean waxing, 27% full of light. And Jupiter was the top edge of the spoon handle.

My inner 15 year old uses it all as an opportunity to remember the celestial afternoon snack, cinnamon toast crunch, but I know I really need to write about the planet of storms.

Is that me? Hiding a theoretical hard core center in centuries of whirlwind. All so you can’t touch me. Oblete as I fill out with storms upon storms that live for eons before merging with other storms to do it all again.

What if I am Jupiter? Because everything is storm. My inhale, my exhale, my day my night, my orbit. My favorite X-men character. My fear, my love. And however big I am in relation and however capable my rings of dust and ice at deflecting your questions, everyone can see the big red spot, most ancient bleeding storm that doesn’t seem to ever go away.

Can I love myself even like this? Where no. You cannot hold onto any word I say because I am changing to fast to even know what I am saying. Can I love you like this? Where you take up so much space without any ground to stand on? Multiple orbits in one body. What a complicated wreck.

Like this speculative world economy where they pretend all the money is in the imaginary now and the Black AI supermodels are avatars for white male coders and the tokenized try to catch the wave of non-fungible tokens and the place running out of minerals mines computerized coins. I don’t know what’s happening. Do you?

I myself, purveyor of ideas builder of worlds made out of words, make most of my money by breathing towards you, giving breath a sound. Jupiter, my mirror can you show me who I am? Landless in a world of speculation?

Shout across the solar system to this planet becoming water at the surface. That’s just our tears. That’s just all our tears. Send condolences for those of us who proved to be too turned around for Earth. Jupiter, give me a meditation:

Seven breaths.

If it’s all a story what story are you telling.

If it’s all a fable why lie to yourself.

If it’s all a stage act like you know.

If it’s all a game don’t play yourself.

If it’s all made up let go.

If it’s all what you say, say love.

If it’s all your breathing, breathe.

Planet of storms, thank you. Maybe I can imagine this. A world without debris. Where all air moves is air and there is nothing to crash into. Where all this time of wondering where I stand on a colonized planet is just a distraction from the truth. I’m filling, spilling, dancing breath.

I’m flying.

P.S. Thursday is a perfect day to rotate into The God of Every Day Practice. And so is any day. See you there.

The God of Every Day: A Week of Practice is available to you any week, any day any time. But last week a group of the radiant beings who are doing the practice now gathered for a sweet live session where we wrote, reflected and supported each other on our journeys to love ourselves through practice. We found that much of what we are unlearning is perfectionism, and a productivity paradigm. Our practices are not about becoming perfect people, and they are not about producing outputs that capitalism celebrates. Our practices create space for us to be in relationship with infinite love. Which is another way of saying being in relationship with ourselves because WE ARE INFINITE LOVE!!!!!

This is the group poem we created at the end of our session. Feel free to share it and to read it (i recommend reading it out loud).

beyond perfect: redefining practice

by the participants in the God of Every Day

practice makes space

practice makes space within myself for myself

practice makes space for me to be biggest and smallest me

practice makes practice

practice makes breath

practice makes me breathe

practice makes me

practice makes me begin, again

practice make imperfect PERFECT

practice makes giggles

practice makes every day FUN

practice makes courage take root

practice makes adventure

practice makes fierce love

practice makes my dreams manifest

practice makes widest dreams come true

practice makes joyful movement

practice makes love come meet me in the mirror

practice makes magic

practice makes ceremony

practice makes soft

practice makes space

practice makes groundedness

practice makes patience easier

practice makes pause

practice makes silence sweet

practice makes already

practice makes holy

practice makes spacious discovery

practice makes juicy mistakes

practice makes possibility

practice makes change

practice makes joy

practice makes hmmm

practice makes purring

practice makes a tempo and a rhythm

practice makes we

If you are already part of the practice, you can jump back in here and if you want to join now you can sign up for this asynchronous course and do it any time you want! The community building that is happening in the comments inspires me to no end. See you soon in the divine space of practice!

Love,

Alexis

On the first day of this month over 200 people decided to let the Lorde take the wheel. In the midst of back to school readjustments a conservative backlash and a an aggressive co-optation of our most radical beliefs we turned to Audre Lorde whose prescient insight in “A Song for Many Movements” and other poems is as relevant as ever. In the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, Audre Lorde, working as an educator and a co-founder of Black Studies in the US academy wrote about the shift she saw happening in the way oppression worked. In the face of mass awakenings (did someone say woke?) it had become to cumbersome to keep assassinating oppressed people expressing critiques of the status quo, instead the move became to incorporate those people, and even some of their language without significantly changing the deadly impact of the existing oppressive system.

This is what brought us together. So why was there so much love, joy and purpose in the gathering? Because Audre Lorde’s energy continues to turn us toward each other with passion and possibility. We started by breathing and dedicating our participation to our teachers (I dedicated to beloved Jacqui Alexander) and took a moment to revel in the abundance our teachers (of all species and ages) have given us. We continued by remembering our intergalactic assignments, beyond the specific situations of our livelihoods. And then we got into the deepest part of the Lordean work, addressing the fears that greet us in the very places where we seek to practice our purpose. We supported each other to listen to our inner knowing (and our inner knowing kept it real and very blunt in some cases!) and closed with a collective poem of witnessing.

Here is our poem as an offering to all of us who are engaged in our divine assignments in contexts that are sometimes raggedy, sometimes hostile, sometimes suffocating and always in need of transformation. Read out loud and notice the repetitions here. Our spirits choose each other. We have never been alone.

P.S. If you missed it an want to do the workshop via the recording you can do that here.

My Spirit is Choosing

by the participants in “Our Labor Has Become More Important Than Our Silence”: A Reflective Writing Workshop in Honor of Audre Lorde

“In a classroom on the 17th floor my spirit is choosing…”

-Audre Lorde, Blackstudies

            My spirit is choosing truth

            My spirit is choosing freedom.

My spirit is choosing to be seen more fully

            My spirit is choosing me.

My spirit is choosing expression.

My spirit is choosing activation

My spirit is choosing liberation

            My spirit is choosing to take the risk for love.

            My spirit is choosing sovereignty.

            My spirit is choosing pleasure

My spirit is choosing peace

            My spirit is choosing my peace and the preciousness of it

My spirit is choosing care

my spirit is choosing care

            My spirit is choosing to surrender, let go, be carefree

            My spirit is choosing REST & RESOURCES

My spirit is choosing being, not doing.

My spirit is choosing belonging no longer in question.

My spirit is choosing choice

            My spirit is choosing to notice.

My spirit is choosing ornate complexity

            My spirit is choosing to love anyway.

My spirit is choosing joy.

My spirit is choosing joy.

My spirit is choosing joy.

My spirit is choosing joy

My spirit is choosing the risk of connection

My spirit is choosing bravery

            My spirit is choosing balance

            My spirit is choosing honest communication

            My spirit is choosing to trust the love

            My spirit is choosing an unknown soon

My spirit is choosing emergence

My spirit is choosing trust

            My spirit is choosing to listen

My spirit is choosing fortitude for my own sake

My spirit is choosing courage for my own sake

            My spirit is choosing to not to invisibilize myself, despite others wanting to

            My spirit is choosing love

My spirit is choosing love

My spirit is choosing self-love

My spirit is choosing tenderness and doing things slow

My spirit is choosing release

            My spirit is choosing to let go

My spirit is choosing to recognize my usefulness

and to tap into the covenant I made with my ancestors in the dungeons — love

My spirit is choosing my, OUR collective Self, OUR wholeness,

leaning unto our aliveness.

            My spirit is choosing to ride constant heartbreaks

like gentle waves that teach me to move in new ways.

            My spirit is choosing sweetness

            My spirit is choosing rest

My spirit is choosing movement, always movement

            My spirit is choosing is choosing rest, choosing play, and choosing to play ah mas.

            My spirit is choosing courage

            My Spirit is choosing transformation

            My spirit is choosing art and creativity

My spirit is choosing to lean into, maybe love, what I do not know

            My spirit is choosing the soil

            My spirit is choosing magic

            My spirit is choosing to listen to the walls of caves

            My spirit is choosing surrendering to your rage.

            My spirit is choosing the power of listening

            My spirit is choosing healing as a way of being differently

            My spirit is choosing to jump through the portals past fear.

            My spirit is choosing it's particular place in the constellation of all

            My spirit is choosing bare feet in grass

            My spirit is choosing the power of listening

My spirit is choosing to remember the miracles

My spirit is choosing to honour instinct and the honing of the craft

My spirit is choosing to practice the art of discernment

            My spirit is choosing the nurture cycle of creation and destruction

            My spirit is choosing to dance through the feelings, any and all

            My spirit is choosing connection

            My spirit is choosing to grow like the trees, with an inner knowing

            My spirit is choosing an approximation of stillness, and the quietest melody

            My spirit is choosing to commune with my spirit

My spirit is choosing to be free

            My spirit is choosing to speak and be known

My spirit is choosing the possibilities of nuance

My spirit is choosing be unapologetic

            My spirit is choosing life.

My spirit is choosing excitement!

My spirit is choosing you!

My spirit is choosing us

my spirit is choosing you and us as we are, as we were, as we will be

            My spirit is choosing to be moved by y'all

My spirit is choosing

 We love you! Again if you want to do this reflective writing workshop you can access the video here. Or check out our other workshops here.

On July 6th 2022 hundreds of us gathered for an online workshop because we needed June Jordan more than ever. A slate of terrifying Supreme Court decisions including the overturning of abortion protections through Roe v Wade, mass shootings at summer gatherings, pandemic denial and more were sparking our justified rage about the state and structures of our days. June Jordan who had already written poetry in protest of one of our despicable Supreme Court Justice and his white supremacist insurrection inciting wife was exactly the touchstone we needed. And so, three days before her birthday we gathered to write through our own rage. Drawing on her poetry and one particularly beautifully rageful archival letter we used reflective writing to let ourselves explore the depth and complexity of our rage, the connection between our rage and our love and the commitment and clarity our loving rage is teaching us. At the end of our session we wrote a group poem to witness and affirm how rage is transforming us. Here it is. Best read outloud.

Oh and if you want to do the workshop yourself the video is available here: https://sangodare.podia.com/justified-rage-a-transformative-writing-workshop-inspired-by-june-jordan

And if you want to take a deep dive into June Jordan’s poetry you can get all of her poems in the collection Directed by Desire.

Justified Rage

a group poem from the participants in our June Jordan Birthday Workshop

“I must become the action of my fate.”

      June Jordan in “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies”

I must become

the champion of my heartbreak

            I must become

the transformation of my rage

            I must become

the witness to my own rage and share my rage aloud.

It is the test of the truth of my conviction

            I must become

the catalyst of my grief's transformation.

            I must become

the sanctuary of my purpose.

            I must become

soft(er)

            I must become

the revolution of my fear.

            I must become

the woman my ancestors before me believed I could be.

            I must become

my white body on the line for collective liberation

            I must become

the freedom of my fear.

            i must become

the archeologist of my expectations

            I must become

a salve to my fellow ones in pain

            I must become

the surrender of my wildest dreams.

            I must become

tender

            I must become

the living witness beyond my disposal

            I must become

the butterfly to my lizard

            I must become

the softness of my living heart.

            I must test the power

(or hidden underbelly) of my rage.

            i must become

the momentum of my longing

            I must become

the vessel for rage to bring forth love

            I must become

the growth from the lives and losses I've shed.

            I must become

valuable of my own mind

            I must become

the loving father of my child self

            I must become

the leader of my legacy

            I must become

fully seated in my own power

            I must become

the dance to the rhythm of my life

            I must become

the space my Hopes need to become my Reality.

            i must become

the loudspeaker for my voice and make way for yours & ours

            i must become

the fullness of my possibility

            I must become

the teacher I will learn from.

            I must become

earth, water, mountain, animal

            I must become

the fury of my loving

            I must become

whole so I can help heal.

            I must become

the old one making my way slowly

            i must become

the hope of my tender heart

            I must become

the river of all love

            I must become

the pathway to my most blooming free

            I must become

the marrow of my imagination

            I must become

the next stepping stone toward freedom.

            I must become

the de facto undoing of my destroyers.

            I must become

the tenderness I never extend to myself.

            I must become

the truth of my heart.

            I must become

the grace of my family

            I must become

"the balm" for my own Gilead.

            I must become

the loving witness of my hidden wounds

            I must become

the steady protector of my loving rage.

            I must become

my whole true self, unmasked, naked, beautiful, divine

            i must become

the hero of my sorrows

            i must become

the sound of my desire

            i must become

the medicine to my wounds

            I must become

the pride of my cognitive kin

            I must become

a tidal force where the waters have gone stagnant

            I must become

the refusal of my enemies desires

I must become

fearless of my own fear

            I must become

the stardust of my hope.

            I must become

the joy that is the memory of my future

            I must become

the crucible for my pain’s alchemy.

            I must become

the healing of my neglect

            I must become

the quality of care and presence

            I must become

the permission to redefine rage

            I must become

healed

            I must become

more than my own healing

            i must become

 awareness of all that is

I must become 

shaped by my desires and the terrain which I value my, all life

I must become

as clear as a dewdrop in daybreak

            I must become

the unapologetic love poem

            I must become

Oya goddess of storms who never loses

            I must become

the compost of the hierarchy that has lived in and out of me

I must become          

the wonder that imagines otherwises

I must become

the hope that allows me to protect possibilities

            I must become

all the love I lacked. And grow it tenfold.

           I must become

the vessel that holds space for collective healing

            i must become of

the mother of my rage

I must become

the daughter of my revolution

            I must become

myself

My poem “edges” has 134 lines. One for each paragraph of the Roe V. Wade decision, which in it’s own words is about “one’s exposure to the raw edges of human existence.”

the black becoming blue of morning after

the toilet stall of white becoming pink

the still raised red the heat of fresh slapped face

the metal slot of a just-locked drugstore door

the papercut of peace denied

the growl the car makes right before it dies

the grazing gown on grateful thighs

the salted corner of your day-stretched eye

the fast-eroding sand becoming sea

the fraying hairs closest to your temple

the names of god you call when no one listens

the tether on your ankle while you drown…

You can read the whole poem on Truthout here: https://truthout.org/articles/dont-forget-the-people-most-impacted-by-loss-of-roe-people-on-the-edges/

June 1985

behind you

there’s a tree

what is it

cedar?

behind you

stands a tree

it’s brown

like you.

and maybe

here

your spine

is not yet crooked

not yet weighed down

by backpacks full

of printed afterlives

so stand here

in the dignity

of tall

in the sureness of brown

the shade

trust me

there will be years

enough

to twist and curve

stand here

where you already

know your roots

stand here

where you already

feel your reach

stand here

and just remember

who you are

i’m right behind you

And….my inner-child homeschooling continues. Summer session. I am working with a series of portraits my mother Pauline McKenzie made of me in relationship to the natural world. The purpose of this time travel is reclamation and collaboration with what my mother saw. What is the poetic form here? Maybe lullaby as time travel technology. What I may have known, what I need to know now. I am traveling back before particular learnings. This particular poem is in honor of my spine. How was my spine related to this tree? What are the forms of support I forgot I had. What is the persistent love still there behind me? And this is for you. Your dignity. Deep underground and reaching sky.

The printer didn't work.

Valerie J. Boyd was getting ready to give her first public talk on Wrapped in Rainbows, her brand-new biography of the great Zora Neale Hurston at Hurston's Alma Mater, Barnard College in the City of New York. This was a major event coordinated by Monica Miller celebrating the 75th anniversary of Hurston at Barnard. Valerie's shero Alice Walker was the keynote speaker at this homecoming festival to Hurston's brilliance. So Valerie had carefully typed out the key insights about Hurston's life she wanted to share with the hundreds of people who had gathered for the event.

And the stupid printer wouldn't work.

And so, she had no choice. She took a deep breath and spoke directly from her heart. She spoke about how she felt Zora Neale Hurston's ancestral collaboration over the years that she researched and wrote Wrapped in Rainbows. She talked about how there are some things you can't explain away with the word "coincidence." She talked about love, how she and Zora Neale Hurston had actually cultivated a loving relationship across the barrier of death and generations. How she felt chosen. How sometimes you just have to listen and surrender. Later she would wonder if Zora even played a role in blocking the inner workings of the printer that day. On the stage in Barnard Hall, a building where Zora herself once sat listening as a student, Valerie J. Boyd let go and spoke from her heart.

Directly into mine.

I had never heard anyone speak in mixed company about ghosts. I was looking at a black women speaking with complete conviction, passion and rigor about what I felt but didn't have words for yet: ancestral assignment.

It wasn't until I was at Emory, stewarding the archival papers of my dear mentor Cheryll Greene and saw Valerie in the temporary reading room researchers had to use while the Manuscript and Rare Book Library got renovated that I was able to say thank you. Of course I was too nervous to interrupt her so it took days. She was reading and re-reading Alice Walker's journals working on the forthcoming Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker. When I finally introduced myself she asked how long I would be in Atlanta and if we could go to lunch. Her whole manner taught me that I should never have been nervous. So many can testify to her generous and eager mentorship as one of her favorite forms of creative practice, especially the graduates of the program in Narrative Nonfiction Valerie created at UGA.

And so of course I said yes to every opportunity to collaborate including that forthcoming collection of essays and the recent issue of Bitter Southerner. And of course I reached out to her for advice when I was writing the book proposal for my very first biography, the forthcoming Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. At the beginning of the pandemic we talked for hours over zoom and telephone. She offered advice on practical narrative concerns (like chronology and differentiation) but most of all she encouraged me over and over again to trust myself. "Because Audre trusts you," she insisted.

I have so many more questions Valerie. I was supposed to send you this most recent draft. I was looking forward to the day I could put the hardcover book in your hands and hug you and thank you again. You didn't see what I wrote about you in the acknowledgements. I love you so much. And I know that you know. I appreciate you letting me gush out my gratitude every time we spoke. And I hear you even now. You are telling me to hang the art on my walls. You are telling me to use a more active verb. I hear you still saying the first thing I ever heard you say. Death is no barrier to guidance and love. And still. Valerie. And still.

I love you in the place of surrender. I love you in the place we can't describe. I love you in the place where machines break and ink fails and we have no choice but to trust our hearts.

Later today our first retreat at the new Mobile Homecoming Retreat Center also known as Soul Sanctuary, begins! A dozen Black Feminist Breathing participants from around the United States will be breathing, chanting, meditating and writing together on this sacred land, cherished hunting grounds of the Occoneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, colonized and desecrated by the Cameron empire as part of one of the largest plantations in the US history of slavery and now reclaimed for and by the spiritual elevation of BIPOC and especially QTPOC people! This day has been more than a decade coming in the history of the Mobile Homecoming project and centuries in the making in the dreams of the old ones, the first loving stewards of this land.

Yesterday as I was walking the land in between one-on-one sessions with retreat participants I took a picture of this one rose among many thorns in the medicine garden next to the main building of the retreat center. As I continued to walk I noticed that sprouting up out of the land, which still holds the shape of old cashcrop fields, rows of rape, ridged evidence of forced labor, there are green thorny shoots everywhere. This land, survivor of generations of extraction, holder of the blood sweat and pain of enslaved ancestors, record of the transformation of sacred tobacco from medicine into a vessel for capitalist poison, is healing. And at this stage of the healing, there are thorns.

Me too. I said aloud.

I have so much love and respect for this land. I feel loved by it already. My breathing has shifted thanks to the trees and vines and wild muscadines and blackberries that grow here. And the strong green, the sturdy stalks, the armored thorns growing up here are so justified. After such a long time of violent cultivation the stregnth of these thick thorny shoots says, never again. Never again.

Me too.

I stood still and thought about the ridges and ruts in my life, my most fertile soil still shaped by the harms I have survived. Evidence of what has happened here, in the brown place without my consent over time. Evidence of the violence of capitalism that cuts and ties back and burns away my wildness with a million daily acts of surrender. I am growing something different, this retreat center is the most tangible evidence of that, but yes. My new green shoots have thorns. I have made it hard for you to touch me. I have razor clarified the terms of my never again.

The gift this sacred land offered me yesterday is compassion for how I’m growing. How I’m prickly even though I long for collaboration. How my areas of newest growth protect themselves instinctively. And if amidst all of these thorns I can offer you even one flower, one place of unapologetic blooming, one place where I am so alive that you can smell it, one place where love unfolds me layer by layer then this is that place. I love you. I love your thorns. I love your red. I love your soft.

Love,

Lex (in bloom)

P.S. If you want to support or sustain the Mobile Homecoming Project as we take this big leap you can donate here: https://www.mobilehomecoming.org/donate

Last night we gathered to celebrate Ntozake Shange’s birthday by writing together for an hour. We time travelled back to childhood streets, we redefined the necessary, we celebrated collard greens, we mourned, we re-evaluated. We became witnesses for each other and for ourselves. Ntozake Shange’s bravery held us and made us brave. Below is the poem we wrote together as a group at the end of the workshop. Sign up for Sculpted Impulse our Ntozake Shange Immersion which goes live today. You can engage the immersion at any time.

i remember         i was there

after Ntozake Shange’s “i. mood indigo”

(created at our writing hour in honor of Ntozake Shange’s birthday)

            9 deep breaths are a portal

i remember                 i was there

so many trees: oak, maple, sycamore, beech, birch, pine.

i remember                 i was there

            The Red Apple on Jackson

i remember                 i was there

            the pots were well seasoned

i remember                 i was there

            the cobbler from the peaches from the tree out front were love

i remember                 i was there

            I saw you in my dreams

i remember                 i was there

            Flagged by walking with my sister..

i remember                 i was there

            Mold bloomed along the edge of the banana bread,

              sweetness draws out all kinds of growth

i remember                 i was there

            The name emerged as breath

i remember                 i was there

traveling the waters with mama, the ancestors a whisper

i remember                 i was there

            that street felt like home, even if it wasn’t

i remember                 i was there

            My dead sister time traveled with me

i remember                 i was there

            I dreamt, I rooted, in earth and in the air

i remember                 i was there

            Aunt Lorry’s magic pot had enough for the whole block

i remember                 i was there

            healing my inner child is possible

i remember                 i was there

            familia as the capital of a country and dreaming forward

i remember                 i was there

            The street below this street, tar and rocks turned to dust

i remember                 i was there

            I belonged like the mango trees in the yard, abundant in fruit

i remember                 i was there

            Collards, collards, collards!

i remember                 i was there

            a soft suture for open wounds

i remember                 i was there

            Beauty still blossoms in darkness

i remember                 i was there

            My mama nem stood gentrification in the eyes and never blinked

i remember                 i was there

the man feeding long sugar cane stalks into a cold greedy machine to extract its juices     and mmm gimme some

i remember                 i was there

            East 44th Street to Tallwood Lane Tall would tell tales pain bare Mama K

i remember                 i was there

            We lived on Cutler Road and the little church did too

i remember                 i was there

It was a quaint street with lots of sad houses and even sadder people, who somehow took all that sad and made love; a love that still lingers on longing fingertips and weepy eyes 20 years later

i remember                 i was there

            The sky, the sun, the mountains

i remember                 i was there

            the bravery of going back, love to the time travellers

i remember                 i was there

            A softness that remained inspired.

i remember                 i was there

            jet magazines and World Book encyclopedias

i remember                 i was there

            unconditional love of the grandmother, delight at my mere presence

i remember                 i was there

            The house of Black feminist abundance

i remember                 i was there