Nature brings us through phases, the shifts needed for sustaining all life. We are beginning our deep rest.
Starting with the solstice/Shabe yalda/Shabe cheleh on December 21st, the ground will start freezing and for forty days will suspend all new growth. After that is another 40 day cycle where the earth starts to thaw - from the bottom up.
We walking on the topsoil and asphalt will be in a deep chill yet the deep earth will be softening, expanding and letting seeds germinate.
On 12/20, the eve of solstice, I’m hosting a digital space to reflect on loss, on letting go, on mending memory and story to reclaim your deepest roots of possibility. Join me for FREE
During 2020, There is a Portal has come into being through a deeply felt process of reimagining the impossible, intuiting through the dark, and being nourished by the darkness of a womb space - a place to float and build connection.
This project has grown in the dark of the pandemic through the brilliant community pedagogy team and is on the threshold of birth.
In this transition from dark to light, we are halfway to our crowdfund goal. We appreciate the growing community as much as we appreciate the financial support to keep going. Who else needs to be included in this project?
One of the wisest and sharpest members of the community pedagogy team is Robin McGinty. I’m sharing a bit of her writing to offer another way to think about how the impossible manifests. She has gently pushed me through many of my own limitations and consistently offered the notion that everything is possible! For her friendship and guidance I’m grateful.
“Twenty-five years later, I can’t even recall what the weather was like that day—whether if it was raining, if the sun was shining or something in between. Even so, there would be no one to greet me with any open arms, nor would there be a car waiting for me outside the prison filled with joyous family members to whisk me safely back home to New York City. It was a weekday, so everyone was working, and had no time to take off. Reflecting on that day, my memory of how I even made it from New York’s Taconic Correctional Facility in Westchester County to the MTA’s Bedford Hills railroad station is vague, prompting me to check in with a woman I had ‘served time’ with at Taconic. After all these many years, we remain in contact after being locked up together at a site, which in the cultural vernacular of currently and formerly incarcerated Black folk is most often referred to as the ‘penal.’ In truth, I left the penal the same way I arrived---an anonymous Black woman being transported in a dark blue NYS Department of Corrections van outfitted with heavily tinted windows where I could see out, but no one could see in. Twenty-five years ago, I could not have known my experience of incarceration would become foundational to my work as an interdisciplinary scholar-activist, multi-media artist and educator whose pedagogy and critical practice is animated and shaped across multiple methodologies and form. As a PhD candidate (ABD) with the CUNY Graduate Center’s Earth and Environmental Sciences Doctoral Program in Geography, my project “A Labor of Livingness: Oral Histories of Formerly Incarcerated Black Women” considers a re-imagination of the living experiences of formerly incarcerated Black women that attends to the ways of knowing the world.”
Robin, top left. Seonae Byeon is top right, another community pedagogy team member and Tania Cañas is bottom right - Coordinator and Lecturer in Social Practice and Community Engagement program at the VCA, University of Melbourne who hosted our workshop and conversation with her students.
I am starting to get it.
The universe of possibility, just slightly beyond my reach, is manifesting.
I don’t have to push but I do have to reimagine what can be.
I have to live outside of what is, what has been prescribed, and be a weaver across dimensions of reality.
I’m humbled by this community (you) that sustains and supports my work and walks alongside me as we make and remake the impossible, possible.
Many warm blessings for a nourishing, restoring, and dreamy holiday time.
