March 28, 2025

March 15th: Jessica Angima

At the Brooklyn Zen Center, Kaira Jewel Lingo is leading a session of interplay during the BIPOC Day of Mindfulness. We are skipping, walking, and stomping ourselves across the sage green wood floors of the Boundless Mind Temple. We are shouting, whooping, and whispering. Humming and attuning. This is interplay, a somatic practice of speaking with the body. Their website describes interplay as unlocking the wisdom of the body. During sessions, facilitators provide prompts, inviting participants to use their bodies to swing, hang, thrust, or be still. From there, the facilitator might open up the group to more expressive forms of using the body to communicate a feeling or idea. Integral to the experience is releasing the act of rehearsal and trying to let the body respond in the moment. As the name suggests, it is play - evoking the latent creativity and silliness that exists within us. 

What is the shape of our nation's current moment?

About mid-way through the interplay session, this is the prompt Kaira Jewel offered us. I got close to the floor, positioning my body with my knees on the ground, my upper thighs pushed back flat against my shins, my upper body curved forward, arms extended out before me, palms flat on the floor. My position resembles child’s pose, though my forehead is not on the floor. Instead, I keep my head parallel to the ground, my gaze cast a couple of inches in front of me.

In these final days of Winter 2025, this is where I find myself. I am braced and protective. Planted and alert. I could just as easily spring forward into action as I could lie my head down and release. This bodily shape reminds me of Kuan Yin Bodhisattva, who is depicted with one leg touching the floor, the other leg propped up, with her arm lying lackadaisically on her knee. She is listening to the cries of the world, alert and at ease, ready to respond.

What is the shape of our nation's current moment?

I can’t quite say that I am at ease. I woke up right at sunrise, needing to leave my house at 7:42 am to get to the temple in time to help with set-up and prepare to serve as Ino (in Zen, this is the zendo, or meditation hall, manager) for the day. Getting out of the shower and lathering my skin with lotion, I listened to On The Media, where Brooke Gladstone was speaking with Corey Robins, a Brooklyn College political science professor, on the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate student who helped lead Columbia University Student encampment protests against the war in Gaza last spring. The government has yet to provide information as to why Mahmoud Khalil has been detained¹. 

Robins draws parallels between what is happening now and the Red Scare of the forties and fifties, when Senator Joe McCarthy launched a campaign to root out communism in the U.S. He describes the large scope of the Red Scare: from suppressing a range of thinking (communist, left-wing, and liberal), to the weaponization of immigration proceedings (deportations and denaturalization of people who had become American citizens, for reasons of expressing or associating with certain political beliefs or movements), and the far reach of Hollywood (Humphrey Bogart recanting the messages in Casablanca). 

The tactics of the Red Scare were a part of a broader strategy of destabilization. If those things we thought were fixed, like our citizenship or our freedom of speech, are in fact not, we begin to question what views are safe to express. Robins also argues that the cruelty of right-wing policy is not the point, as has been stated by Adam Serwer. Robins says: 

“Let's take the case of support for Israel. The Trump administration has no interest in being cruel about that issue. They're trying to produce a certain kind of belief system by silencing those who would disagree with them. This was very true during the McCarthy era. McCarthy did seem like a cruel individual, but that's not why the federal government, the state's governments, the whole society sought to eliminate all of these different beliefs about civil rights, democracy and so forth. They wanted to produce a country that was much, much more conservative and didn't subscribe to those beliefs. Cruelty is not the point. The goal is to silence anybody who has a different thought. That's the point.”

We are being taught to fear using our words. Doubt reverberates through the body and the voice trembles. Maybe we speak in a whimper, but perhaps, our voices waver into silence.

What is the shape of our nation's current moment?

In the last months, I’ve oscillated between numbness and fear, numbness and outrage, numbness and constriction, my body letting in emotion as it is able to, I suppose. Numbness is a type of silence. But this Saturday early morning, listening to Trump conflate being pro-Palestinian with being a terrorist, I can feel the flicker of a white, hot rage pushing against my numbness. It pushes against the constriction, the part of me that keeps things on lock in order to get through the day without becoming unmoored or falling into collapse. 

Another prompt during interplay: Kaira Jewel asks us to thrust our energy against a metaphorical wall and to emit whatever sound we need to as we do this motion. She gives us 5 seconds. I’m not looking around the room as I do this but I can speak to what I did: letting out as rageful of a scream as I could, I pound my fists and upper body against the air. I, and we, keep at this for five seconds, and then ten seconds, and then 15 seconds. Kaira Jewel says: “It seems like we needed more than 5 seconds with that one.”

Indeed. 

Later, we have tea and cookies. On the walk to the train, I spot snowdrops in bloom. Spring’s awakening promises the return of an aliveness that has lain dormant for some months. May it find us with a renewed energy to use our words, to resist even the smallest of silences, and, like Kuan Yin, to be ready to respond to the cries of the world.