Practice Provides A Clearing
The worlds we’re dreaming of are already there
It’s the last full day of our writing retreat at Mesa Refuge, where I’ve been rising everyday to Mexican marigolds surrendering to the air as I make my way to the writing cabin whose entry is a portal of velvet sage and forgiving lavender. The crows call and I smile, my family followed me to Point Reyes, California to keep watch. I'm preparing to do a table read of a spell I conjured in bed yesterday morning but first, I wanted to come to the altar of my keyboard to thank you. Thank you for reading. Thank you for listening. Thank you for helping make space, for taking the words with you and giving the vision legs. While on this retreat it occurred to me all we really need is a clearing. A moment so slow it becomes clay and we have enough time to sit there, reflecting on the shape we need the most. I can’t overemphasize the importance of practice, I think that’s all you might hear me talk about for a while. After this retreat my writing feels and sounds more like liquid instead of stakes in the ground or mile markers. Do you need the water as much as I do, a stream to clean off your faith and wash it anew? Take me to your riverbed and I’ll show you mine too.
That clearing wet with wonder and unstoppable in its possibility. Lately, I’ve been having a lot of dreams about the rivers flooding, remembering where it all used to be. Dreams about what comes next and who we become after the floods. Dreams of the divinity of wetlands and the clearings they create, the story of Cykofa soaking me with desire.
We know this place as the North Carolina Black River, they know it as Cykofa. A parallel universe suspended among the past and the future — where cornrows are cryptography keys, data farms are data forests, the weaving loom is a computer, a cloth is a document, and chain link fencing from demolished prisons are used as architectural membrane woven with plant life. In Cykofa the trees have learned to communicate using the data Cykofians have encoded in the DNA of the dendro-databases made of up ancient tree rings.
The clouds are full of memory, the shapes of great grandmothers who taught you how to spellcast. The sun is being generous. Birds are singing a sonnet of pre-history and Seeda remembers how much they love to sunbathe. As they’re drafting a mycelium memo to store in their body they sight a hummingbird outside the door and know they’re not alone. They feel safe in the company of this memory. Thoughts trail off as they do when fighting the melting of the sun and suddenly there’s a knock at the door.
They wash infinity off their skin as interface and remember the power of getting dressed. Structured but lightweight cloth, a woven document of freedom dreams. Encoded data in the DNA of cotton, Seeda puts on the trousers and wears the grimoire. The work shirt was made of the same fabric and cut like colonization was a distant memory. The jewelry was the most important part. Spiritual locating devices, your swagger must make a sound to be found. The jewelry is a marker of kinship. Neologisms made of metal. Arm cuffs, ankle brace lets?, silver hair tubes, neck lace. If you get the people real close they become a chorus of chimes.
Using their bodies as interfaces is the foundational technology in Cykofa. Their bodies so central to their culture, their bodies filled up with their culture. Data sensing capabilities developed in the soles of their feet, mycelium guiding their steps home. Cornrows act as QR codes, cryptographic keys hosting destiny. Handshake a sign language of care in mid air, storing the frequency of intimacy. They are a people wearing clothes that tie but the ties are hidden. They host concerts while floating on water, surrounded by a buoyant fire as the blues plays the drums.
Across the field is Seeda’s lab made of the most ancient wicker work you’ve ever seen. See, the Cykofians figured out how to use the root network of trees to make architecture in mid air. The trunks act as supportive points emerging from black gold. After years of developing a relationship of trust, centuries ago the Cykofians asked for consent to collaborate with just a few threads of roots below ground. The Cykofians nurtured the roots upward into braided lollipop sticks. Once high and strong enough, they let the roots grow wild while they gradually, slowly and carefully ushered them into a sphere of aliveness from the decomposing fabric of prison. A living room. Whose entangled above ground roots created a network of neighbors throughout the overstory.
Each node is responsible for carefully tending to their root walls to prevent uninhabitable over growth but prune too much and you may cut your neighbor’s home from the sky. This is why “Home Maintenance & Architectural Care With Responsibility” is a class taught to everyone from a very young age in a cycle of courses called Foundations. The teachers are the oldest and most respected members of Cykofa. The Griot Guild. More like guides, a gentle breeze offering clear direction but never instruction. “We were grateful for the gentleness”.
“I know!”, Seeda remembers. They climb through the door of their living room, a place in the woven wall where care formed an opening, and made their way down from the wooden root network of ancient chain link material suspended in mid air to head towards the field the length of 1,370 breaths, a couple dance floors and restorative justice circles. As they enter the lab, so does a thought, “What’s making the rip possible and why now?” Seeda reflects while sitting on an archival tree stump at the biotech bench. Yarrow enters the room and Seeda remembers the rhythmic miracle of them not falling off their tree seat every time they arrive. Yarrow always smells like they’ve been kindling a pit full of cedarwood and sound and Seeda can never make out the first 7 seconds of what they’re saying. Especially these days. Judging by the growth patterns in the garden and the recent shape of the moon, Guild Day is coming up again.
They can organize and experience the shadows of information happening in the community each day. The interior worlds of Cykofians are never captured, but distributed, becoming the air, water and soil. Ancient bald cypress trees hosting centuries of data in dendrochronological memory, the river is stained black from fallen branches and limbs. A compost tea of song, prayer, spell — take a sip of the ecological gumbo and remember a future that hasn’t happened yet but will.
Future real conditional1. We’re already home but all clearings require stewardship, careful maintenance of the living room walls. Everyday practices that keep us whole and nurture the wind flowing in and out of our body. Things to burn, prayers to sing, movements that allow you to reach down and untie the knot in your throat, meditating inside one long now. During the length of this retreat I’ve written the first 3 chapters of Cykofa: The Novel, outlined the characters and their potential journeys and reflected on what it sounds like to have an ancient bald cypress tree rooted in a Black River of composted branches full of data in the American South narrate this story. All that was a blessing, but the biggest gift was remembering practice brought me here. Showing up to the studio with more questions than answers, showing up to the altar of the keyboard with nothing to say but typing anyways, showing up inside meditation trusting the abundance inside slowing down, noticing the anxiety roll in and picking up the pen to transmute the worry into wayfinding, drawing the bath and trusting the water to do things I can’t name. So much is uncertain, thank goodness, but I promise you this: the words, the painting, the song, the recipes shows up when you do. Practice creates the clearing and from inside the clearing whatever world we’re dreaming up is already there.
“The grammar of black feminist futurity that I propose here is a grammar of possibility that moves beyond a simple definition of the future tense as what will be in the future. It moves beyond the future perfect tense of that which will have happened prior to a reference point in the future. It strives for the tense of possibility that grammarians refer to as the future real conditional or that which will have had to happen. The grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn’t yet happened but must.”
— Campt, Tina M. “Quiet Soundings: The Grammar of Black Futurity.” Listening to Images, Duke University Press, Durham, C., 2017, p. 17.
I adore this so thoroughly and am SO excited to read the novel
🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰