weekly witness: from boundary to breath
(a curatorial approach to witnessing my creative practice)
Whenever I am preparing for a new tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or preparing for a writing workshop at the MoMA, I always take the whole of the work in and let it move through me. I ask the exhibition certain questions as my eyes become the sacred offering to the art to witness and elevate:
Dearest ancestors, what would you like me to see in this moment?
What stories are you telling in this ecosystem of offerings?
What work are you doing, and what work are you inviting me to do?
I enter the artist's world through sacred exchange where I witness what has been transformed in them or the worlds they are crafting and allow myself to be transformed through these experiences as well. Everything is ceremony for me. I do not believe that one can sit in as many ceremonies as I have and not see the ceremony in everything, and suddenly writing also becomes a sacrament.
With my trauma-informed Monday emails, I now get to bring the same overview to the work I am doing on the page so that I can interrogate what has been moving through me and how I am building an ecosystem in the stories being shared. I think this moves me from doing a thing to a place of understanding that which is being done through me.
And it began with declaring that my public writing practice needed a boundary, where instead of occupying inboxes daily, there is an ask of readers to seek out my work during the week if they so choose in my post mondays only: a trauma-informed approach to your inbox. Since implementing this practice I have noticed my readership sharply drop, and as I bow to that, I also notice that the demands of performance, so sneakily ingrained in the Black body, have also fallen away. I write daily, but not emailing has been helping me reset and reclaim how I value my work and my beingness…outside of metrics.
However, two days later I inadvertently emailed one of my posts. In muscle memory and creative freedom I examined the surprise in noticing how I now have a public sharing habit. Me. Me?? Yep. Me. Hiding used to be my jam, and I ain't mad at it because I am pretty sure that in my lineage were some genius ancestors who hid themselves so as to not upset systems that believed them to be fools. The embarrassment of absentmindedly hitting send allowed me to notice how presence has now become my friend. I will need presence for the future I am creating.
In the spirit of presence, I also shared that the What is Collective Healing? podcast interview dropped last week as I spoke about my book UNRULY in writing to save my life: a podcast conversation. One thing about trauma and the way it operates is that it will, without fail, silence all who are touched by the wound. The more the wound burrows into us, the greater and more expansive the silence. Collective healing gets activated when we voice, and I have been developing myself to tell that which cannot be told well.
As one person begins the process of telling it then others are liberated through presencing as well because UNRULY was always meant to be held in community. Even as my book holds an ancestral weight that is to be respected, I am so overjoyed that UNRULY has found community in the poetry is not a luxury club featuring UNRULY (July 13th) that is featuring my book for July through the framework created by Audre Lorde. I have never been one to write about butterflies and pink unicorns, and Lorde gives such refreshing permission to honor my medicine because poetry is a technology that languages and liberates.
The medicine I was born into though had such a challenge being published. UNRULY almost never made it through the gates and so many gatekeepers “politely” told me to sit my ass down with my little piece of poems. Though this process was humbling, mostly because my manuscript started to feel like the violences my body experienced when doctors were the gatekeepers to my survival, I also wanted to acknowledge the right relationships I was able to develop with two people who shared their access with me in publishing while Black.
This healing journey, whether it is in our individual body, collective body, or the bodies written on the page, all will need our surrender and tenderness. However, while facilitating a Reparations Café centered on the divine feminine I noticed the trauma that also sat among us was the expectation embedded in should. Should will never free anyone. Should is a master, an overseer, a dom, and I explored why we need to stop "shoulding" on ourselves in healing work. In the absence of shoulding is such a gentle presence that keeps this work alive in us, through us, and around us.
And in the presence of this work, I always return to the breath. This is the titration that acknowledges that I need resourcing right now and that is so human of me. I also shared breath with my bonus grandmother, born in Alabama, who has never taken a vacation in her almost hundred years on this earth. She helped to raise me, even after my mother and her son divorced, even though we not kin by blood. And I honor this land that nurtured me by teaching my grandmother how to breathe. After we exhaled together, her pressure went down.
May we all remember throughout the week how the breath will alleviate the pressures in this world, even if but for a moment.
Be blessed y'all.
Support my debut book UNRULY, Legacy Book Press, LLC 2025