How to Breathe Fire, Watching Discipline Melt into Devotion

For The Worldbuilders Ep. 040

A screenshot from HBO's Lovecraft Country created by Misha Green. In this still from "Rewind 1921" (S1:EP9), at the 42:40 timestamp, Hattie grabs Leti’s hand to pray as she holds the Book of Names and the house around them burns. During this scene there is audio of Sonia Sanchez ⁠reading⁠ "Catch the Fire" amidst the backdrop of the Tulsa Massacre.

“He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose — not to need permission for desire — well now, that was freedom.”

— Toni Morrison in Beloved (1987), pg. 191

Dear Worldbuilder,

I love you and I dedicate my life to finding new ways to say it.

I’m watching the sharp edges of the second hand turn into a feather here. Here, in the space between the real and the infinite, I’m feeling real infinite these days. Working alongside you, body doubling — I am elsewhere, I am here, WE ARE HERE across all time zones. Emphatically here and the air is heavier. Our breathing is heavier. Our breathing is like fire now. Weightless and heavy with life.

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The fire within me is hungry for more ground
Creating clearings all around
Thirsty for oxygen — chewing on ash
My spirit isn’t starving
It is ravenous
Craving my madness
Coaxing the slip of sanity
Into Something much harder to control
	Something much harder to read
	Something much harder to digest
	Something much harder to consume
	Something like fire
The fire within me feels like an organizing principle
Sharpening my sentences and my sword 
Piercing time with my pen
Directing air with my tongue
The fire within me is hungry
And I feed it to keep me warm

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The prompt was: “Describe the fire within you”. What’s above is the poem that fell out my body in response while inside a 10-minute vessel within Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ “The Character of Fire: Writing After the End of the World” reflective writing workshop. The workshop, inspired by M. Jacqui Alexander and by APG's “Archive of Fire” in M Archive: After the End of the World, was “about the element of fire in our lives as people both committed to changing the world and devastated by the desperation of self-immolation and the firebombing of whole communities happening before our eyes”. Inside this episode, I’m also thinking about Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought edited by  Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall. An artist’s job is to reflect the times, to hold a mirror up to what we’re thirsty for, hungry for, begging for, longing for. I feel our collective fire melting discipline into devotion — terraforming a lifetime of commitment to our desires and values, trusting the combination of the two to build the world anew.

Consistency is the spell and I’m not the first to say it. I echo Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Akwaeke Emezi and Toni Morrison when I say the ceremonies create the clearings and the only thing left to do now is make the work. We’ve faced the truths that were once too unbearable to utter. We’ve screamed into midnight. We’ve tried punishing ourselves and others for the love we didn’t receive — for the love it took us lifetimes to remember we are worthy of and 37 lifetimes later now we know, with absolute clarity, we are beyond worthy of the love the trees, the rain and our community is begging to offer us. We’ve gone from running from the love, to running towards it, to bathing in it, to beaming with it. Now? We’re fire-breathing it. Melting the hard edges of discipline into Something much more softer, Something much more bearable, Something that doesn’t hurt to hold.

Tune in for Strategy, Tip and Remembrance Seeds to Plant Inside your Practice This Week

Listen to this latest episode “For the Worldbuilders” on either Apple or Spotify! I invite you to email me your reflections after implementing the strategy¹ for seeding a practice of fire-breathing inside this episode.

We start with desire, not needing permission, and we might find ourselves stumbling into something called freedom. 

Until then…

So be it, see to it, fire-breathe through it,

Ayana

1. “Think. Never write without thinking. First think about how it might happen. Then think about what else might happen. Something else will always happen. That’s why you should only do small things. You can keep control better, writing a long ladder of little truths.” — Octavia Butler, Mortal Words Fragment. Cited in Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing by Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin