Last night was the first session of the Brilliance Remastered online Dig: Womanist Archeologies Intensive. We offered up our layers, listed everything we could recognize about ourselves and then asked, what’s under that? And what’s under that? We made a space for our multi-layered muddy dirty water reservoir secret cave core of the earth selves to be present. We gave ourselves permission to learn from every layer of our being. We grave dug for the relationships to work that haunt us, through the legacies of Zora Neale Hurston’s fear of being forgotten and craving a “cemetery for the illustrious negro dead” through to Alice Walker who bemoaned the “mountain of work” ahead of her generation which she felt must work “as if we are the last generation capable of work” so that their books and dead bodies wouldn’t be lost to history like Zora’s was until that same Alice Walker went digging for her. We looked at what it might mean to be grateful for the major work our elders and ancestors did in order to make themselves legible to us in print while at the same time not taking on a tradition of working ourselves to death or in a way that harms our relationships in practice. Pause right there. Deep breath.
We thought about the moment when Akasha Hull challenged a room of hardworking black feminists gathered at the Feminist Poetics Conference in honor of June Jordan to consider loneliness and whether it might be time to focus on our relationships more than the tangible objects (like books, essays and manifestas) and historical victories we have cherished thus far.
(You can watch the livestream of that amazing conference organized by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan here by the way: http://feministpoetics.blogspot.com/)
We excavated the layers of labor in our lives. We shifted “working like there is no tomorrow” (a phrase in Barbara and Beverly Smith’s collection of black feminist letters) into a serious question about what on our long work lists we would still do if there literally was no tomorrow. We gave ourselves permission to evolve. We gave ourselves permission to let go. We turned mountains of work into rivers of reciprocity and recognized intergenerational urgency as a gift, instead of a burden. We took responsibility for a present and a future where we honor the hard work of previous generations by working softer and with more intimacy than we thought was possible.
And we wrote you a poem about the deep reciprocity this type of layered lovework takes. See if you can take on one of these mottos and refine your day with it.
If you want to be on the email list for future online and in-person intensives join that number here: http://eepurl.com/bsb6rj
returning: deep reciprocity
by the participants in the Dig: Womanist Archeologies Intensive
“my motto
as I live and learn
is dig and be dug
in return”
-Langston Hughes
love and be loved
in return
inspire and be inspired
in return
see and be seen
in return
shine and be shown
in return
dig inside and be discovered
in return
change and be changed
in return
connect and be connected
in return
give and be delighted
in return
move and be energized
in return
fly and be fly
in return
meditate and be grounded
in return
release and be peaceful
in return
stand up and be visible
in return
speak and be heard
in return
listen and be wiser
in return
gather and be community
in return
write and be with everyone
in return
write and be fulfilled
in return
practice and be impractical
in return
breathe and be free
in return
praise and be danced
in return
dance and be embraced
in return
rock and be rocked
in return
touch and be touched
in return
kiss and be kissed
in return
nurture and be fed
in return
cook and be nourished
in return
dig and be found
in return