let me declare doorways, corners, pursuit, let me say standing here in eyelashes, in invisible breasts, in the shrinking lake in the tiny shops of untrue recollections, the brittle gnawed life we live, I am held, and held —Dionne Brand, Thirsty (emphasis mine)
Cited in Chapter Three: “The Hold” inside, In The Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) by Christina Sharpe, pg. 68
Standing Here in Eyelashes
It’s pitch black. A darkness so total it doesn’t just threaten to swallow you, it promises you’ll disappear. I accept this might be home and patiently await my fate. I’m no longer waiting for the other shoe to drop because this is the bottom. I find comfort in this fact and allow the black to be a blanket. Just as I was starting to make a home inside the absence, a set of eyeballs appear against the backdrop of nothing. Suddenly, yet slowly. Before confusion can set in, another set of eyeballs appear with the same cream of milk as the first pair but this time, a slightly different eye shape. As I attempt to marry my gaze to the four portals, searching for answers…another set appears. This time the cream is heavy with a touch of redness and yet another diverging eye shape. This continues until I am confronted with a sea of eyes, in the pitch of black. The expanse feels like the scale and intimacy of the hold1. No faces, no features, no light, no shadow. Only a halftone bitmap of eyeballs — creamy portals dotting the darkness staring back at me. Then I wake up.
I had this recurring dream for years as I resisted the call of Seeda School. Before “Seeda” was even the name, before I was even clear on its purpose, this dream would arise from my collective subconscious every other night. It wasn’t until recently that I understood what it meant. 2020 and 2021 were some of the hardest. Have you ever received an assignment from spirit and do every possible thing you can imagine to ignore it? Move to a different city, entertain a relationship unworthy of you, start a job search for a position you don’t even want inside an industry that’s made it abundantly clear it doesn’t want you. Our imagination of self-sabotage is a crafty collaborator when we insist on running.
I spent what felt like entire decades running from the prospect of surrender. The free fall it invokes. The nakedness of the shedding. The faith it demands. To put it plainly, surrender didn’t feel like an option when survival hung in the balance. Don’t get me wrong, for most of my 20’s I was committed to my communal art practice. I published magazines, launched feminist t-shirt campaigns, organized events for my creative community, started a clothing line and participated in multiple art shows. But all those efforts were always the side story in my limited imagination. I always figured at some point I was going to have to get the “real job”, the one that guaranteed housing stability, health insurance and safety in retirement. So in 2018, I got the “real job” and that kept me distracted from the disorienting demands of surrender. I’d sprint through the day and the same dream would descend at night. This sprinting, dreaming sequence went on for years.
The Myth of Loneliness
All that running, until 2020 when I finally ran out of steam. Unhealthy work habits and a total lack of boundaries kept me distracted for years. In the absence of that distraction was nothing but the stillness, the silence, the darkness, the eyes patiently waiting for me to finally choose myself. On September 2nd, 2020 I submitted my letter of resignation and a 3 month sabbatical turned into two years. The season of surrender.
From 2018 to 2021 I’d never known a loneliness so complete, a darkness so total. Surrender felt impossible because I was running away from fear of abandonment. Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, 19th and 21st Surgeon General of the United States, declared an epidemic of loneliness and isolation in 2023 with studies showing it affected about 50% of US adults in recent years. I can’t help but resent the gaslighting of this 2023 white paper from the United States Department of Health and Human Services advocating for the “Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community” while simultaenously funding genocide. Loneliness isn’t a bug in neoliberalism and fascism, it’s a feature. A necessary design mandate. Who benefits from us believing we are lonely? That we haven’t done enough to “earn” care? That social security is impossible without the state? That inside the free fall of surrender there will be no one there to catch us?
Our Divine Assignment
“My assignment is to be a conduit of radical self-love and then to practice that inside myself and then to share that practice with the collective. That’s what I do.”
— Sonya Renee Taylor, “Living the Why in Yoga” (December 2023) conversation with Junauda Petrus at the Kripalu Center
It’s 2023 and now I have so much gratitude for that dream. Those faceless eyes in the darkness, reminding me that no matter where I go, no matter how far I run, I am never truly alone. In my darkest hours I believe I was looking into the eyes of my ancestors, looking into the eyes of future generations, looking into the eyes of you.
In what ways is your spirit calling you into a season of surrender? In what ways is your body begging your mind to consent to collapsing inside of community and trusting the people to catch you? Maybe this moment, like my 2020 moment, is bringing you to your knees. Maybe you, like me, have a divine assignment that just won’t leave you alone. A creative offer sitting on your chest that feels like a weight but is really a light.
In 2022, I gathered myself up off the floor of fear and I finally turned on the light. Eventually, the darkness no longer felt like a blanket of safety. Eventually the darkness no longer felt like home. I opened the doors to Seeda School and the eyes turned into faces. Suddenly, I could see you because I finally allowed you to see me. In what ways is your creative spirit asking you to fall into the safety of relation? What creative offer is on the path of your faith walk? I created “The Creative Offer Questionnaire to Oneself” to support you in finding out.
Tune into the latest For the Worldbuilders podcast episode for an additional layer of support in working through the questionnaire.
Yes. It’s true, many of us have never conceptualized relation and sociality without the intermediary of the state. This is why it might feel difficult to engage in the immediacy of Palestinian liberation and today’s call to action of a Global Strike. There is a severance of imagination that the state must inspire to continue its mandate of violence. As someone who has made “imagining otherwise” their full time job, I’m here to tell you another world is not only possible…it’s already right here inside our collective divestment. It’s not something we promise to future generations, it’s a promise we keep to each other right now and everyday.
Here is a spell I want to offer as we stand in physical and spiritual solidarity with Palestinian liberation inside today’s strike: Pray you trust the sovereignty of your liberatory imagination. Pray you answer the call of your divine assignment. Pray you poetically refuse the myth of safety inside fascism. Pray you grant us the pleasure of holding you instead. Pray you turn on the light and remember, you are not alone.
In solidarity,
Ayana
“What is terrifying partakes of the abyss, three times linked to the unknown. First, the time you fell into the belly of the boat. For, in your poetic vision, a boat has no belly; a boat does not swallow up, a boat does not devour; a boat is steered by open skies. Yet, the belly of this boat dissolves you, precipitates you into a nonworld from which you cry out. This boat is a womb, a womb abyss. It generates the clamor of your protests; it also produces all coming unanimity. Although you are alone in this suffering, you share in the unknown with others whom you have yet to know. This boat is your womb, a matrix, and yet it expels you. This boat: pregnant with as many dead as living under the sentence of death.” —Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation. Cited in Chapter Three: “The Hold” inside, In The Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) by Christina Sharpe, pg. 73
beautifully written. i never would have considered loneliness to be a narrative that the state would exploit to prevent us from surrendering to our true selves. 👏🏽