How can I...

How can I think myself inconsequential when I hold the Universe and the horizon behind my eyelids...

Behind Closed Lids...

Now more than ever we are poised at the precipice of...
I see swirls of light, breath, peace, love, and freedom
Behind closed lids
I sit and listen to my own breath
and feel the vibration of millions of my ancestors and contemporaries
We in this life
We are about this life
We are this life
I see light - lightness and love in conversations between two people
We are agile
racists are fragile
bastions of white supremacy will tumble
because there's a rumblin' underfoot
a movement
by those who can see the future
behind closed lids
a time of peace
prosperity for our
people
love that has as its genesis a love
supreme for our
selves
love and peace
peace and love
breath and light
blessings to our future

Live in the opening where there is no door to hide behind. - Rumi

Here

The story I’ve inherited from my ancestors is one of strength and unity.  Of pride and solidarity.  Of water, clay, mud, powder, oil, duality.  Soft chests to lay on and hard backs to bear the brunt of the weight for many people and for too long.  Intelligent minds and bodies, bodies that disconnect from emotions but still exhale the essence of all the troubled feelings and the muddied waters.  The breath becomes partially trapped, never having the luxury of breathing in for too long or exhaling fully, particles of anger, fear, doubt, determination, resolve, resignation, steeliness get trapped in the chest, belly, organs, neck only to be softened by the small miracles of daily life that hold a seed of the promise.  The particles get soothed down to a fine dust and washed out with love and care.  A house built for my grandmother.  A dream house that my own mother can finally gift herself with after thirty years of long nights, early mornings, Sunday dinners, crying jags, and spates of laughter and togetherness.  A place of one’s own, owning something - that is part of my family’s legacy.  They have always been intent on owning the place they lay their head, having a roof to offer another in need, having a lot and some to spare.  Giving of themselves with their time, their money, their presence; sharing over food, music, and company of all ages.  

This is the part of my inheritance that is resonating with me now.  My journey has taken me from reflecting on my family like fragmented pieces of glass to seeing all of us like a crystal.  We are reflective, dynamic, at times distorted when our perceptions are not clear, always whole and one.  2016 is a powerful closing of a ten-year cycle for me during a time when it became clear to me that everything I was experiencing, every decision I enacted, was to come to a closer integration of my self.  My spirit, joining with the spirit of my ancestors and Source, has been calling me to recognize myself without the veil.  I had a dream not too long ago of myself standing in front of a wall that was not really a wall, it was a thin veil and when I woke up, I knew the next part of my journey was simply to walk through to the other side and to have the vision of both sides.  This is the part of my journey that I’m in now.  Writing in my sketchbook/journal last year, I drew a spiral and lines that shot up from the center of the spiral and I was scaling the walls of the side… I have spent ten* years going inside very deeply.  (*Likely, I’ve been inside in this way for much more of my life than not).  That drawing was symbolic to me of the climb I’m making up and to the outside of myself, to reach others and to show/share myself through dance, yoga, writing and so much more that I have yet to envision and channel...I am here. I am we. We are here and we are whole.

Emptied?

It's empty in here
Cleared away like ash after an intensely burning fire
I deliberately sucked it all up and threw the ashes to the wind
I figured it could have a new life upon the breeze of someone else's fresh start
or in the belly of someone's warm home
Warm milk
makes me think of childhood
the way I used to warm up my cereal like my dad did
warm milk and crunchy cereal turned soggy sweet
I liked it like that.  Still do
People think it's absurd
Just like giving away almost everything you own
So that you can clear the clutter of the past and
be free
Can I ever be free of my past?
It's the foundation that my present is built on
Happily I accept
The strength and insistence and persistence of women
The gentleness of men
The careful tidiness of home
The warmth of burning fires and the smell of home cooked food
The tinkling sound of laughter and music like a distant bell
Ringing through the living spaces
Where we lived
And laughed
And cried
And danced
And cared for one another
And tried to forget
And tried to find ourselves
Everything is relative
So of course there was pain and suffering
But there was also joy and growth
I accept
I build my present and my presence on the winds of the laughter ringing
like a distant bell
I bring myself closer to it
And hope to fly

The Power of...

Repeating myself.  It's the most apropos phrase I've heard yet for what I've long thought of in these terms:

Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.  - Pema Chodron

The power of repeating myself shows up
in the way my voice parrots without my permission
in the job that I have entered, yet again
only to feel the life stifled out of me as I support someone else's thin vision
there's no air up here
in the resentment I feel at not being seen
being disregarded by those who are trying to pull me close
closer and closer
until I disappear from their field of vision in their near-sightedness
it's really bad enough that I can't see myself
it's enough really
but to not have a mirror that reflects
anything of me at all
I guess I've disappeared myself
I fit in where I get in with you
I don't ask for support getting what I want
and even when I do my asking is trumped by another's needs
ground zero
starting over
right where I started
I have to appear myself
let others off the hook for not seeing me when I erased myself
all is forgiven
and in time I will forget
I will stop linking the stories of today
to my feeling of yesterday

Textual erosion...inspired by Claudia Rankine, killing of black bodies, justice-giving re-telling of stories

Our bodies as text.  What are you reading?  Are you reading me right?!  Do you have the right reference text (it's big and heavy and goes back a long way and you couldn't have read it in the minute it took you to make your judgment)?  I judge all the time.  Unfairly, perhaps.  Instinctively sometimes. Trained, yes.  The types of judgment I pass are protective and I was trained and then trained myself up to do this.

My mind flashed back on erasure today...both as in the poetic literary technique, and as in the feeling that I and other people of color have felt in certain spaces and around people who don't (want to) see us.  This thought was sparked (again) by starting to read Claudia Rankine's An American Lyric.

We are...scattered fragments...text worn away by the elements...disappeared landscape...molten objects...why did I just read about the alleged lynching of a black man in Mississippi?!  Why did this happen?  Why is this still happening?...

We are being disappeared because of the threat of our insistence to be seen.  To be heard.  To be revived as human form who can inject power in our stories and tell them ourselves.

The re-writing of a story to inject power in it...  I saw this in Scandal recently when Shonda Rhimes wrote a story that was achingly similar to Michael Brown's.  A teenage boy was shot by a police officer who claimed he had been armed.  As the boy lay dead in the street (in Scandal), his father appeared with his shot gun and determined, sat over his son until he was assured that the investigation would be handled properly.  Turns out that in this story, the shooting officer planted a knife on the teen to make it look like the killing was justified; the officer was arrested.  All of this uncovered by Olivia Pope, a black woman who is the protagonist in this show.  There were many layers of race, class, judgment, protection issues being addressed, and inherent in the writing of the story was a making visible the invisible factors that surround these real life dramas.  The erasure was of the dominant narrative.  It happened slowly in this story as Olivia herself came to realizations and through her lens, the narrative shifted.  +++++ our renewed insistence to be seen and heard and to tell our own stories through every possible medium will mean a wearing away of the imposed text that some have trained themselves up to see, at the exclusion of all reference.

passage from Tablet I*:

he is splayed on the… … … like a worn-out pig (god?)
he is un- + + + + + + + +
his is dis- + + + + + + + + + + + +
he is + + + + + + + + + + + -less
his de- + + + + + + + + + + +
he is impossible on the dry ground + + + + + + + + + + before … … … ..
he is non- + + + + + + + +
he is pre- + + + + + + + + + +*

*Armand Schwerer