I am thinking about bodies these days. About how they begin under a microscope, but contain fingernail, and footprint, in the same way that the Big Bang held stardust and peonies and the Grand Canyon and chocolate. I’m thinking about how we begin and end in transcendence, but spend our days in earthen vessels, defined by limitation, and DNA and time. I am thinking about how wounds heal and years pass; about the way that broken hearts are contagious when they’re ignored and how one group of people can think they’re well, when others sick and dying.
This week I listened to Krista Tippett’s just-posted On Being interview with therapist and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem who talked about bodies with a frankness I’ve never heard in such settings. The fact that it took place IN Minneapolis BEFORE George Floyd was killed makes it even more revelatory.
When I was a child I did not play with dolls. I read books and roped friends into basement productions that surely tried the patience of any audience we could find. I watched television, hours and hours of television and wrote scripts that were blatant ripoffs of what I saw. And I was in love with New York City, a place I visited only in pages - the Lower East Side with Sidney Taylor, Brooklyn with Chaim Potok, the Upper East Side with Harriet the Spy. I read magazine articles about Alphabet City, Madison Avenue, and Columbia University radicals with the kind of longing one reserves for a distant lover, but never once considered that moving to New York was something I could do. The first time I stepped out of a cab and onto the street, my body knew that it was home. It took my mind another 12 years to get the message.
We are struggling to catch up right now, to hear the voices of ancestors and our own better selves, calling us to a different world, while our bodies are doing breakfast lunch dinner and work, feeding the baby, smiling for the camera, and reminding us of that nagging ache, the one we feel in the twilight between sleep and waking; the sense that lather rinse repeat couldn’t possibly be all there was to this life. It will take imagination to see this through. Not dreams of a big house and a bigger retirement, but one of community and abundance. Where bodies are tenderly nurtured and well-fed. Where education treats each mind as the specific and necessary building block that it is. Where everyone is safe.
Our bodies know what home feels like.
Today I watched the Dream Defenders Sunday School, a panel called Unlock Us: Abolition in Our Lifetime. Participants included Dr. Angela Davis whose life’s work has been abolition and Derecka Purnell, whose shift from unbeliever to abolitionist happened in the past three years. If you only have a small window of time, start at the 1:15 mark because Derecka asks and answers the most basic of questions for those of us just asking the question of, What does it mean to live in a world without police? She describes her time of deep study and joyful realization that, “I wasn’t the first person who asked, ‘What about the murderers?’ only to learn that there are people who have considered these questions for centuries.” And then she reminded us that those who struggled against slavery didn’t wait until everyone was on the same page to begin the fight for their bodies because, “they knew that it was riskier to stay on plantations than it was to pursue freedom. They just started running and figured it out.”
I was so fired up by the end that my body was ready to join the revolution, but my mind couldn’t stop asking HOW? Where do I even begin with a system so massive and wtf do I know? And then I remembered this scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and I know it’s not real but today taking one step meant believing I could finish this newsletter and look, it got me that far.
Last week a video made the rounds of a white female police officer stopping a Black child and her mother at the park. I’m not going to link to it here because I found it so disturbing that an adult would selfishly and willfully invade a child’s space, knowing how it might traumatize her tiny body. The little girl cried and put up her hands (duh) and the cop comforted her and I can’t stop thinking about it because it is precisely the kind of pointless feel-goodery that has allowed us to perpetuate harm and tell ourselves we’re good people.
So watch this instead. Watch the softness in the faces of these children. See little boys swaying and feeling in a way they’re so often told they can’t. Watch their bodies move - hands lifting, eyes closing, hearts touched.
Let’s help each other build a world that looks like that. Where are you feeling called to start? What feels too hard?
I woke up this morning thinking about why yesterday felt so hard and lonely and realized that multiple days without infrastructure are really challenging for me. Also "deadlines" where there are no real consequences if I miss them, ie this newsletter. I think I crave down time and also feel like I'm not great at using it. If anyone has found tricks for those things I'd love to hear them.