Dear friend,
A few days ago, as the sunset early on the first day of daylight savings I road my bike through the leaf-lined residential streets of my neighborhood and felt something wild and pure burn inside my chest. I’d been invited to meet with other folks from the community gardens I’m a part of to talk about leadership for next year. I remember so clearly, before I moved into my current apartment, eyeing the gardens just two blocks down the street with curiosity. Now, gathered around folding tables in a church auditorium, nibbling stale pizza with elders and young families, I found myself experiencing what felt like a kind of initiation: an entryway to a deeper kind of belonging.
I’ve been trying to locate language for that feeling — how an ordinary moment can suddenly transform and join a string of other moments, joyfully knocking against each other like beads on a bracket.
Over a year ago, after the omicron variant of COVID tainted another winter, I finally visited a small neighborhood venue I’d been wanting to check out for months. My entire return to Chicago in 2021 after my roadtrip felt like a constant battle with insecurity and anxiety. A sense that the life I had started to piece together in my dreams and my journal entries was beyond my grasp. That I was the wrong actor to play the role of protagonist in my life. Venturing out of the house and into a communal space felt vulnerable in many ways.
That night, a female band from Niger - Les Filles de Illighadad - was playing. I was surprised by the crowded room that was both multi-racial and multi-generational: a true rarity in segregated Chicago. As the music played and a language I didn’t know filled the room, I smiled behind my mask, watching people dance and clap. Feeling something that my friend and I later referred to as “church” — a word that was still too small for everything that dropped in and moved though and poured out that night.
I often think about the myriad conditions that make those moments possible. The physical space, the instruments, the hunger of many people for music and touch — the unglamorous emails and logistical phone calls to gather that many humans in one room. And then the mystical things that arrived and left with each person lucky enough to be present and open to receiving.
A while ago I came across a quote that was attributed to Kahlil Gibran: “My role as an artist is to arrange the elements to make way for God.”
The word arrange continues to reverberate in me. It’s a verb that seems to best describe my own daily motions. Each action feels like a kind of clearing for something to emerge or descend. A making way for that wild and pure burn in my chest to appear. It’s all those hours spent pulling weeds in a vacant lot until it becomes a garden. It’s all the pungent onions it takes to learn a soup recipe by heart. It’s those winding, yearning phone calls with friends across state lines and oceans. How all of these mundane gestures create conditions for that feeling. For true sight — where God seems to manifest even if just for a moment.
I grew up learning to practice devotion to the metaphorical and the ephemeral. To invest my actions in preparing for a world beyond this one. But a deep connection and accountability to this world was often missing. I’ve been thinking about the longing and tenderness within my desire to exist simultaneously in the physical and spiritual realms. To accept that longing as a kind of divine urgency and to know that the Divine longs for us with the same veracity1.
In this season of so much personal and global change2, I’m trying to root deeper into something. I’m noticing where the old arrangements in my life were misaligned — the job that pulled me into a state of anxiety and panic, the relationship that was unworthy of my vulnerability, the myths that were shaping my reality. And so, yet again, I am called (we are called) to rearrange. I’ve found this is a process rife with sadness. Disappointment in the false horizons of certainty and safety. Grief for all the ways I haven’t shown up in full integrity.
Most days, I experience comforts and delights others can only dream of — the smell of warm coffee or burning incense, a neighborhood full of greenery and sunshine, the soft, caress of clean sheets — and I have the privilege of choosing to sink deeper into the dream of my “reality.” While others wake up to living nightmares, prison bars, rubble, decay and fear of violence in their own home, I wake up knowing many of the people who have devoted their life to loving me are still here. On this planet. In this country. In this city. In the other room. In the bed right next to me. These “ordinary blessings3” which I am continuing to understand are not ordinary at all.
For many years, I worked on curriculum and trainings rooted in the idea of empathy, which I believe when put into intentional action, is solidarity. It is to say: your pain is my pain. Your struggle is my struggle. Your joy is my joy. To allow yourself to step into some supernatural place in which this body - which is only yours by chance and only yours for a little while - becomes a magnifying glass for the soul(s) of people. Not a border between you and the rest of the world but the flesh and bones that allow spirits to touch.
Instead of surrendering ourselves to be fundamentally changed by this kind of connection, we have been trained in the art of sympathy and pity. Of condemnation and vilification. Of blame and dismissal. Of distance and protection. These ways of being never keep us safe. They only benefit the machines of power that seek to continue exploiting us. The machines who sow something deeply inhumane and let our species reap4 the sinister harvest.
The natural world keeps reminding me of this. Redirecting my attention. Whispering eagerly for me to look. To witness. To care. About all of it. It feels as though the less I exist in scattered pieces, seeking to escape or perform, the more quickly the universe can locate me and offer more than I could ask for or knew I needed. I’m continuing to learn how devotion can be a bridge that roots our everyday into something unbelievably redemptive.
A friend of mine recently shared that they make vows to trees. That when they reach for a cigarette to smoke, their promise to the ancient natural being across the street reminds them that a commitment made in love is bigger than the urge to numb or sooth. In these small ways we heal ourselves by relating to the pain of being alive in new, tender ways.
As a collective of displaced people on colonized land, I often think about the longing that exists in each of us. I think about the trauma and loss of our present, that’s alive in our ancestral pasts. It makes sense why we choose to forget and rush to obliterate anything that frightens us. It makes sense why we do not always take time to connect the dots, fearing the map of interwoven pain we might encounter. And yet, there is no more important work than this: To witness, to let our hearts grow larger. To continue arranging the elements to make way for God.
With love,
Jas
“May you come to accept your longing as divine urgency. May you know the urgency with which God longs for you.” — from John O’Donohue’s poem, "For Longing”
“"All that you touch you Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God Is Change.” Since first encountering this quote by Octavia Butler I keep thinking about what it means for Change to have God as the catalyst. Like God is the eye of the storm. How to be in right relationship to that . . .
“We wished them happiness, we wished them health, we wished them love and luck and beautiful children . . . . we could see no reason to think that such ordinary blessings would not come their way. Do notice: We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as ‘ordinary blessings.’” — Joan Didion, Blue Nights
I recently finished the book Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward and the quote by Harriet Tubman that inspired the book’s title has been sitting with me: “We saw the lightning and that was the guns and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.”