It’s raining today and I’ve been deep in my copy of Yvonne Rainer’s Feelings are Facts. I am looking forward to the rigor of grad school and committing to more research and writing. Having just wrapped Writing the Personal yesterday I feel both complete and filled with light and ready to take a teaching pause. I have never been so delighted and inspired by a class and watching the ultimate outcome - more outspoken words and work from my peers and students. It is heartening to witness.
What oftentimes comes out of a season of thinking I know is a season of not knowing. As soon as I hit a tipping point of being so sure of myself, god will bring me a new person or set of ideas that will bring everything crashing to a halt. It isn’t to say what I thought before is no longer true, if anything it invites in two truths to exist simultaneously. The past four months I have been in a constant state of feeling or thinking something and deciding it is the only truth, believing my own brain, outside resources, news, people, and committing to it as fact that I can report on with ultimate authority.
What a hoax! To be an authority on anything is against my own values and even when I state I am still learning I have to ask myself - am I still learning? Am I truly dedicated to knowing all sides of the dice? Or is the learning just digging my heels in to what I already know?
Ok so I have this moment last week and in an instant I knew nothing. Like I actually felt my brain smooth over and restart growing inside my skull. I was watching this person’s mouth move as a brief history lesson flew out of him and I thought, I have never known less than what I know now. Everything I thought I knew about longing and hope and politics and living and opinions and desire and nothingness and war and how to make a brick work stopped making sense to me. Nothing made sense and I knew nothing and I liked it that way.
I was flattened. A pancake of not knowing. A flapjack of nothingness.
Every word I use for devotion slipped between my finger tips like a thick molasses that I couldn’t catch and I couldn’t scoop and I didn’t want to. I wanted to be able to hold nothing in my hands, as if my hands had deceived me all along from knowing what was real and what was possible. How silly to think I knew so much, when there is so much outside of me that I can never fully know.
Lately when I go to describe something I am feeling I am lost for words. I have the words to tell you about the experience of having the feeling, but the feeling itself has no language to capture it. This is when I often turn to my dance or my quilting practice, longing for sense making without typing. Sense making through movement. The only sense I am looking to make is one that lets me continue to live in the not knowing. It’s like a tingling in my bones, the excitement of learning more about what I thought I didn’t want to know about.
I pray to be surprised today. I drink my coffee and I whisper -
god, surprise me today
With your glory and your wonder
Bring me something new to be true to replace the old ways
May new truths stand alongside the others
May my wishes fly away if they are not of your will.
Your will not mine.
Under imperialism and patriarchy and white supremacist systems - needing to know is a survival mechanism. When the world wants to silence your story and your possibility - knowing who you are and standing in that truth is a way to combat the pressures and violence of the oppressor. So it makes sense. To want to find myself. To want to stand in what I know about who I am and what I believe. To have an unshakeable foundation of my essence in an effort to fight for the freedom of others and myself.
I write today wanting to be shakeable. Wanting you to stand at my limbs and shake until the leaves fall slowly down to create a ground cover that will freeze over in Winter and decompose come spring.
I want to have a foundation that is allowed to be to torn down and rebuilt. I want to wake up everyday and know only enough to still be me and be of service, but to build a new house of knowledge each day. The scaffolding with its chipped paint, the windex with its broken nozzle. Each stone is laid to fit perfectly next to the other, meeting here for the first time.
Oh holy vacancy, show me how will I be built today
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“I sit and look at the intersections of my practice — each additive piece paving the way for another portion to completely deconstruct. So much of this work I claim as spiritual has been the direct route to my queerness, to my abolitionism, and to my craft that is derived from all of the spaces of tension within my body.” From latest newsletter Fracturing for Liberation
Just as I made the decision to start next year mostly behind the paywall wrote a beautiful piece about removing her paywall altogether. My favorite thing about our friendship is we love to do the same things diferently and compare notes. Looking forward to the parallel experiments.
ADVICE!
Making money as a writer, the comparison trap, and our divine calling
Yes Yes Advice Column
Such a beautiful newsletter from
Trio A by Yvonne Rainer
Word Acts from
Green and Red words on a spiral boud notebook that says OUR LIBER-ATION WEAVES NEW WORLDS FREE - Posters for Palestine by print and hang up in the window of your gallery or small business, march with them in the streets
The Ezra Klein Show is one of the things this week I listened to where I can hold two truths at once, or find new ways to hold all the sides of all the coins and disagree and agree and be curious
Forgot about this song then remembered and love it
Monday Monday is having a 25% off sale through January 5th as I prepare to write mostly behind the paywall for Jan 1 - April 1 of 2024
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