We Were One Time Wise

And also still getting it very wrong, the tension of our becoming

Nasturtiums in the backyard. It’s been 55, foggy and wet, which seems to make these beauties glow all the more.

You see, there was another essay.

One with words that twisted like vines, studded with surprise nasturtiums poking their neon dream heads through lichened fence posts. I couldn't recreate it if I tried. Too twisty. Too interwoven with time and place and textures that escape me in this June fog. But I can tell you what it was about.

It was about my first meditation retreat and how hours on the cushion gave me new eyes. I saw, for the first time, the delicate pink buds of a lavish bush I had walked past many times. With tear-welled eyes, I stood before her everyday magnificence and wondered what to-do items had distracted me from her grandeur. How sure I was that this seeing was proof I was doing meditation right, that I was more present than ever before.

A handful of breaths later, ready to rest and reflect on my successful weekend of practice, another welling took hold -- arrowed, hot, and vengeful. This red-poker energy grabbed my broom and indulged in an act I'd previously only fantasized about. Using the handle, I thumped my ceiling with a vindictive force equal to the perceived clod-hopping above me as my neighbors attempted to Gangham style. It was only after they apologized and I realized it was before 8 p.m., the weekend of Halloween in a college town, that I began to feel a bit sheepish.

The lost essay was about my curiosity at the space between these two landscapes, the humanness that unfolds as we meet our becoming.

The stretch is always followed by the contraction. The fight. The depression. The anger. The doubt. Some part makes this wrong. The in should always be out. The undone should remain done. The tense should forever release. But this is not the nature of things. The morning glories show us this, the jellyfish, the crocus. The tension between is the texture of life.

That essay is gone now, though. Perhaps I'll rewrite it, but that day is not today.  

In a mad hunt to recover this work, I entered my texture of the between. Swan diving in time, I recovered shiny treasure after shiny treasure, enough to blush the bluest raven, in my deleted waste bin. One of these finds is too on the nose not to share here. I have to believe it resurfaced because it was really what was meant to find the light.

This weekend, I'll be marching with so many others, carrying an American flag — although I don't particularly love the American flag. Eight years ago, we were doing this same thing in a different and yet the same crisis.   

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We Were One Time Wise
From Jan. 2017

Comfortably

Three beginnings shape my world this week

Each slicked with that vernix caseosa from which newness springs -- trepidation, uncertainty, possibility

Crossing a threshold

Around the world we marched

In Oakland we inched
Streets packed like a citywide game of sardines

Standing together for hours in silence, in song, in proclamation

“Pussy power,” “My pussy grabs back,” and more and more, the glittering vaginas we held overhead read

I was comfortable in my pink raincoat and purple leggings
Surrounded by too many white faces

“The biggest march in history.”
“One in every 100 Americans was there.”

But not for Black Lives Matter

And where was I on those nights when my people screamed from years of battery, death and dismemberment?

Listening to the helicopters from the perceived safety of inside?
Dancing to Jeremih one street over from protests

In church the next day

I drug myself exuberantly to be with

The mother and child who danced in the aisle
Over and over her voice raised higher than the others.
“Take me Jesus, Take Me Jesus, Take All of Me or Nothing!”

Yes, heal it all or nothing.
Pull one thread and all the colors and textures of our suffering come undone to be seen.

I am not Christian.
Sometimes I’m a half breed.
But I belonged in that room.

Tears rolling.
Feet stepping.
Hands clapping and raising.
Singing songs never before heard but somewhere known.

Dredging the unincorporated pieces of my own lineage.
This is the language, embedded in me by some percentage of Blackness, of the divine.

And now my work. Our work
This heavy door, formidable, with peeling blue paint

Dropped with certainty from a knowing sky god
It beckons the strength of the arms I use for lifting the water kettle
It wants me

I am scared

And so I inch, we inch
Knowing not where, but with hope we will arrive

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If You’re In Oakland …

I’m teaching InterPlay this Saturday and then we’re Marching in Oakland

Join us if you’re called for all or some or none.