31 Reflections at 31
Liberation is Breathwork, Let Us Blow It All Down
“You’re on the right path if you are intentionally trying to reduce the gap between your values and your actions.”
— Mariame Kaba
I turned 31 on May 31st. And I wrote most of these reflections while being held by the mountains of Shenandoah Valley; winded by all the worry and the wonder. Will I survive another 30 years? Will this forest survive the next 300? The White Oak Canyon became a teacher. At some point, the only way to make it through the hike was to commit to a cadence of intentional, steady, breathing. Whenever I stopped in despair and the trail seemed too great an adversary I realized, I had lost track of my breath.
The last time I was inside this canyon was my 28th birthday, in 2021. I remembered the pocket in the beginning of the trail, which opened to a creek whose trickling made me shed a tear with it. Then it gave me permission to wash my feet here and stay awhile in the water we were making. This time it’s 2024 and that same pocket in the beginning of the trail presented the most perfect walking stick. I took it as a sign and brought it along to sturdy the journey having no clue just minutes later the rain would start. With each step my gratitude for the walking stick deepened. Fellow hikers on the trail complimented the stick one by one, I smiled and said it was a gift. Hoisting me up slippery rocks and stabilizing my stride as I descended slick cliffs. Muddy, soaked and winded, I survived the hike and left the walking stick for the next student who will embark on this trail.
I will survive the next 30 years with black feminism as my walking stick and the cadence of my breath will connect me to my commitments, moment to moment as I climb. Mariame Kaba reminds us we are “on the right path if we are intentionally trying to reduce the gap between our values and our actions”. I want to add one more word to the edge of this reminder. We are on the right path if we are intentionally trying to reduce the gap between our values and our actions, daily.
What if liberation is a mindfulness practice? What if revolution is quotidian? What if the worlds we’re manifesting unfold inside the mundane, in the pockets between our inhale and exhale? What if breath(work) is the only way to traverse the valley in the rain and make beauty out of surviving the mud? Our breath connecting us to the forest as the lungs of the planet. Our breath connecting us across time, minute by minute1, we keep holding on. Our breath connecting us to marine mammals breathing in ancestors still alive in residence time. Freedom is an interspecies collaboration whose possibilities reveal itself inside the peaks and valleys of our breath; the sacred landscape of the inhale and exhale. This is what Alexis Pauline Gumbs teaches us in Undrowned. Our breath is a clock capitalism has no use for. Perhaps we don’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools2, because we blow it down instead.
With black feminism as our walking stick and the lungs of the forest as our comrade, what values are you breathing into at this very moment?
Day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, inhale by exhale.
31 Reflections
The stock market, real estate, capital are all powered by speculation. What happens when we engage in speculative practice3 to actualize abolitionist realities?
Racial capitalism feeds on my faith. How do I reclaim the faith capitalism couldn’t survive without and re-direct it to my communities in order to usher in new modes of survival outside the systems that have the nerve to ask for our participation in killing us?
Beauty is a method4 like Christina Sharpe said, don’t play about it. To leverage the power of beauty to perpetuate harm is a “biological betrayal”5.
Burn and protect your Clearing6 by any means necessary and I mean by any means necessary. Otherwise, what are we fighting for if not our joy, if not our play, if not our life? Your Clearing may be 3pm every Sunday or the 12pm lunch hour in the green space across the street from your job. Maybe it’s your 9pm bath time after you put the babies to bed. Mine is 5am every morning. What’s yours?
Take your work seriously. Put some respect on it, come correct, cite your sources, raise the bar for us all.
#CITEBLACKWOMEN7. You owe Fannie Lou Hamer whether you know her name or not. You owe Ella Jo Baker whether you know her name or not. You owe Audre Lorde whether you know her name or not. Learn their names, as many as you can — then say them as often as you can. How might we show up as if our entire life is an offering to those that came before us and the ecosystems that hold us?
Prioritize intergenerational worldbuilding. I’m convinced most of the unnecessary suffering in my 20’s was a direct result of not being in an intentional relationship with my elders.
Gender dysphoria will not protect you. I regret not showing up fully for myself and my students in an attempt to assimilate into white, tech bro culture. It might have protected me in the short term, but the long term damage took years to heal from.
“Artist” is starting to feel like an insufficient title. It’s becoming clear you can be an “artist” and not dedicate every fiber of your imagination to black trans futures, stay silent on overlapping genocides and not wear a mask. Being an artist does not imply any political framework. I will practice inside the framework of “abolitionist” instead. Moving forward, I want not living in alignment with my values to be incoherent against the backdrop of what I proclaim to be.
Speaking of, not masking for COVID safety is incoherent inside black feminist values. Figuring out how to get our cousins out of prison is the hard stuff, wearing a mask is the lowest hanging fruit toward practicing collective care and liberation in the everyday that we have IMMEDIATE access to. This, too, has everything to do with breathwork.
Liberation is mundane. Perhaps the years aren’t up to us, but the days are.
How do we habit stack8 our way to liberation? You ever notice how most self help books put an irresponsible emphasis on individual responsibility without addressing the collective responsibility we have to each other and the planet?
I’m not creatively blocked, I’m oppressed and pissed off. Yes, we may have wounded our “artist child”9 with abuse. Yes, our parents may have wounded our “artist child” with abuse but the system did it first. Let’s punch up.
We’re not afraid of our creative voice, we’re afraid of our political power. The nervous system regulation work we have to do is not about our fear of creative expression, it’s about our fear of accountability.
Fear of accountability is learned, therefore it can be unlearned. Because of our trauma, because of our oppression, because of attachment styles, people pleasing or fear of abandonment, many of us are afraid to engage in a public practice or release a creative offer. What if you aren’t creatively blocked, what if you don’t fear your creative potential, but what you fear is accountability? We actually do more harm by assuming we can read, research, prep our way into never causing harm.
Consider reading for every page you write. If you’re doing morning pages, for every 3 pages you write, read 3 pages of political text. Call this daily devotional practice, Daily Seed.
Once you have a vision for your life, you can’t unsee it. Once you imagine the most authentic expression of your practice, you can’t unknow it. I will die. You will die. We will die. The best possible outcome before that happens is allowing ourselves to step into an irresistible10 vision beyond survival11 and iterate toward it daily.
It’s impossible to be bad at doing you, bad at breathing. This is the danger of disciplines. Someone could say you’re bad at being a vocalist but no one could say you’re bad at your voice. Care more about your voice than the metrics of “good” vs. “bad” determined by gatekeepers.
Almost all animals and plants use their sensorium to facilitate their survival and, in many cases, the survival of their entire ecosystem. Passing along survival data and information via root networks and pheromones is a somatic technology we all have access to. Grounding in our sensorium is also a reliable way to quickly and consistently drop us into the reality of abundance and beauty that is already-always surrounding us if we pause to take it in. We don’t need to wait on the artist grant or our sibling to come back with the car to make a trip to the art store if we remember the pantry of herbs, the textile documents in the linen closet, our bodies, the soil, the book stack beside our bed, the paper scattered on the floor, the breeze wafting in from the window is plenty (if not too much) material to work with.
Just because you love your job doesn't mean you should always be working.
Just because you love your job doesn't mean you should always be working.
Just because you love your job doesn't mean you should always be working. As someone who is a recovering workaholic, who used to derive a sense of worth from my work, it is now a tricky dance to set boundaries on work I finally love. Work I finally feel worthy of and work that finally feels worthy of me.
You ever notice how folks participating in underground economies or surviving via criminalized economies call their work “the game”. Folks in hip hop say this too and, of course, athletes. What does playing to win as an abolitionist look like?
You should get paid for your labor. It’s a fact we’ve somewhat naturalized in our relationships with employers but when it comes to our own creative practices or our offers, that fact destabilizes. Why? Who does this serve if it doesn’t serve me or you?
Allow curiosity to charge you. I realized I feel most engaged and alive inside my practice when I’m riding a learning curve. I show up to the newsletter, the podcast and create offers when I’m working through open questions I can’t answer alone.
Do not be suspicious about what you know or how you know. Trust them as gifts from ancestors, from god, from the earth, from the wind. Be more suspicious of the voices coming from outside of you than the voices emerging from within you.
Allow yourself to practice beginning. Bouncing back from “failed” experiments is no longer optional. Persist, persist, persist.
In The Salt Eaters Toni Cade Bambara invites us to “to unite our wrath, our vision, our powers”12. Kalamu Ya Salaam asks, “Do you think that fiction is the most effective way to do this?” Bambara responds: “No. The most effective way to do it, is to do it!” What would you say or do right now if you weren’t trying to protect yourself? Ask: Do I need protection in this way right now? (Oftentimes, no) Then ask: Is this a risk my privilege, power, creativity makes space for me to take? (Oftentimes, yes)
When considering a move to a new city or making a critical housing decision I always return to advice I received from Wesley Taylor, “go where ever makes the work possible”. I spent most of my 20’s dreaming of “the work” unfolding in the studio or the clout of the art world. The older I get, the wiser I get, the more accountable I become to the communities I care about inside my practice, the more I realize the actual “work” I dream of doing is researching, inventing and practicing new methods of relation with humans and non-humans. This “work” can unfold anywhere, at anytime.
What Toni Morrison said about home: “It’s a safe place, nobody is out to get you. Everybody doesn’t like you, some people might dislike you but no one is going to hurt you and everybody is going to help you whether they like you or not.” She says, “that’s the spiritual and physical safety of home”. How might the spaces we already hold in common like public parks and libraries be ideal rehearsal grounds for practicing the safety of home?
Want a surplus of suffering beyond what systemic oppression already piles on our plate? Protest the present by spending an unhealthy amount of time dwelling on the past or escaping to the future. Abolition is presence. How might refusing to resist reality allow us to breathe into shaping it?
“Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.”
— Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Gilmore and Lambert, 2019)
“But minute by minute by minute by minute
I keep holding on
Oh, minute by minute by minute by minute
I keep holding on”
— The Doobie Brothers (1978)
Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110-114. 2007. Print.
“Is there a way of being intellectual that isn’t social? When I think about the way we use the term ‘study,’ I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice.” — Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013) by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, pg. 110
Christina Sharpe. “Beauty Is a Method” published by e-Flux Journal: Issue #105. December 2019.
“Janine Benyus and Azita Ardakani Walton: On Nature's Wisdom for Humanity” published by On Being with Krista Tippett. June 6, 2024.
“And without covering their eyes the women let loose. It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart…“Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it… No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them! Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it - you!” — Toni Morrison, Beloved. September 1987
#CITEBLACKWOMEN, I found out about this resource from
, a newsletter published by Kay Brown. Current Seeda School Retreater and brilliant black feminist writer and worldbuilder.Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear. October 16, 2018.
The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron published 1992
“As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.” ― Toni Cade Bambara, Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara
Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred by M. Jacqui Alexander. 2005. pg. 279
Thank you as always Ayana, happy birthday <3
Footnote 3 spoke deeply to me. Thank you for sharing.