JANUARY ROUND-UP
mostly provisions & prayers
Dear one,
When the signs are clear they are unimaginably so. The notification of an artist grant moments before I have to spend a chunk of my dwindling money to get home. A Marvin the Martian key chain hanging on the mirror of my cab on the way to my Airbnb who will deny me access, leaving me dragging my suitcase down the streets of CDMX. A deeply kind airplane attendant who made it easy for me to stay in Dallas for just one night, after a round of travel headaches. I’d just like to land and really settle for one night is what I told him, and he met my body’s needs with such graciousness. January was a fascinating month and the first few days of February have been a doozy.
I spent the first 2.5 weeks of January sick and recovering from said sickness while moving rooms in my home to make space for a new roommate and to settle into a larger bedroom and workspace for myself. I finally have a room large enough to fit my bed, my poetry, and a work table, which has been co-opted by a gorgeous vintage sewing machine that I purchased from a local woman who repairs and sells vintage machines, and piles of fabric. I spent the end of the month traveling, physically, mentally and emotionally to different places.
January put me to work and if I am aware of anything these days, it’s that the things I love, generally, require little effort from me to love them or be challenged by them with deep gratitude. This is not to say that I’m not working hard, but that when hard work doesn’t make me resentful, I am most aligned with myself and god. Catching up to rising frustrations with gratitude is a muscle that I am strengthening.
Here are some things that got me through it all:
I read Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson in January and I’ve been feeling its reverberations every day since the day I started it, through the end, and carrying on today. In this book Jefferson is exploring her relationship to race and gender as it relates to her childhood idols — dancers, musicians, writers, both black and white — and the ways her love, curiosity, internalized racism, reverence for blackness, and observations of those idols have shaped her world and nervous system. I felt the complications of my own inner world alive in this book. There were so many moments where I put the book down to cry or catch my own breath and redirect my inner knowing towards a new truth or understanding. I recommend it to any and all, especially if you enjoy reading cultural/art critique co-mingling with memoir.
What happens when you’re a viewer, spectator, reader, who craves imaginative adventure and has no—I don’t want to say models, I’ll say avatars—to conduct indentity experiments with and on? I hate the position this threatens to put me in—the position of one who is deperate and abject, heir to the racial curse of self-doubt and self-hatred. I like to claim there’s power in learning to imagine what hasn’t, can’t and won’t imagine you. What kind of power is it, though? Negative capability won’t suffice—too much of white art requires a negative capability that negates whole parts of one’s self.
Constructing a Nervous System, page 59.
Back at the end of November, Marissa Hall of Augustine Herbals was giving away free herbal medicine to black people. I received my thyme & garlic oxymel and used it every day last month until it was gone. Oxymels are made with acid & honey — this particular one had ACV and honey infused with garlic and thyme for lung support. I loved it, especially as I was healing from a gnarly post-cold cough. I made a few of my own oxymels during my herbalism apprenticeship last year and was so delighted to receive medicine from another black person working in plant medicine. The community shop is open right now to purchase other medicine & more free healing supplements coming in March!
I’ve taken up quilting and it’s been a silly amount of fun. It’s been a while since I’ve picked up something that I want to do all the time and can dedicate large amounts of attention to. Seriously — when I am at my sewing machine I kind of blackout and suddenly I have multiple patchworks coming together. Though maybe it’s more accurate to say that I’ve taken up making quilt tops as I’ve noticed that whenever the current piece I am working on grows larger, I get spooked at the task of Finishing (big cardinal dominate birth chart issue). I keep starting new quilt tops whenever I reach a certain point with another. I’m curious about my ability to finish and praying that I allow myself to fight against the excitement of starting with the desire to complete.
I returned to Oaxaca in January to practice contact improv with teachers from Brazil, Argentina, and Peru. There’s so much to say about this time that I am holding closely and still processing. My deepest joy comes from being able to experience this week of movement and connection with Lily & Jungwoon (& C who was not there to dance but made all of our together moments hilarious and laughter-filled). I came into this practice through the support of Lily, who is both a friend and a teacher. I am deeply grateful to have felt so many feelings together during this time and grown our friendship with such safety, challenge, and tenderness. Likewise, dancing with Jungwoon has taught me how to find trust in both my body’s ability and the ability of my dancing partner — a trust that can truly transform every co-movement experience.
During one of our last jams of the week, Lily, Jungwoon, and I decided we would start with a “small dance”, a movement practice by Steve Paxton that values the action of standing still and feeling how gravity works beneath you and you against it. The small dance asks: what happens when my movements are inhibited? What happens when I suspend volitional movement?1 When we walk, it’s like a small fall toward gravity. So what happens when we make that falling even smaller? I experienced the small dance as making tiny adjustments, falls, right under myself. Catching my knees and restacking my hips, every so slightly. And what started as a trio, unintentionally grew to include more dancers around us, in their own small dance practice. I was telling James about this swirly experience a few days later before an event at Deep Vellum in Dallas and he said “It’s almost like you three became a gravity for everyone else”. We pulled others towards our trio through our unseen force, and our desire to practice small dances became a grounding force for others practice. Yes. Yes yes yes!
I saw Riley. Should I end this section here? Back in November 2021, Ri came and visited me with a galley of Mesha Marens Perpetual West, which she read fiendishly by my side for the 3 days that she was here while I dove into I Love Dick by Kris Kraus. It was a classic feral reading experience. Neither of us could have guessed that over a year later she’d be organizing an event with Mesha Maren and Fernando Flores to celebrate the paperback release of Perpetual West at Deep Vellum Books. I had not planned to be at the event. While it slightly matched up with my travel to Oaxaca, neither time nor money while planning this trip allowed for it. But god & the crazy ice storm in Texas delayed both my original travel date home and the original event date enough that I found myself on a flight that included a layover in Dallas, just 7 hours before the event was to take place. It is…like drugs…watching your friends get their way and experiencing full-circle moments with them in real-time. Truly sacred.
24 hours after I landed in Dallas I was back on an airplane to New York with a copy of Glass, Irony & God, a small collection of Anne Carson’s work beginning with “The Glass Essay”. This was my first time reading the essay in verse in its entirety though I have printed it out and started it many times. I’m on the timing of the universe, not my own! Fernando Flores mentioned Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights specifically during the PW event and when I saw Riley had two copies of the collection in her home I knew it was time. It’s both strange and freeing to read a work about heartbreak while not actively surviving one. Though the themes around loneliness, and self-obscurity that run through this piece I am almost always experiencing. Carson details her separation from a long-time love, a visit with her mother, and the life and work of Emily Brontë with a steady patience that runs over 38 pages.
There was no area of my mind
not appalled by this action, no part of my body
that could have done otherwise.
But to talk of mind and body begs the question.
Soul is the place,
stretched like a surface of millstone grit between body and mind,
where such necessity grinds itself out.
Soul is what I kept watch on all that night.
I remember taking a poetry workshop with CA Conrad in college and they were telling us about how animals shake after something traumatic happens to them and the usefulness of shaking as a way to regulate the nervous system and release the tension that we, animals, may hold in various parts of our bodies. Remember my psoas dream last year? I hold so much tension in my lower back and pelvis, it’s the first place that becomes crunched up and sacrificed when I am at odds with my surroundings. We did a big 1-hour group shake during The Field Center’s January Contact Jam that was so powerful for me that I cried for most of it and then got my period during the second to last song. Anyways, I love shaking. There’s a shake workshop coming up at The Field, co-led by my dear friend Rose Cole-Cohen and Anya Smolnikova at the end of March. I’ll be the chef that weekend and shaking to the vibration of a budding spring.
I will always get in the water, wherever I am, whatever season it is.
A playlist with all the music that was stuck in my head for weeks.
Resource on The Small Dance & recordings for guided dances: https://cargocollective.com/sharingmovement/the-small-dance