What Are Our Collective Ceremonies?

The practices that help us remember the world we need is the world we have.

Photo from: Jamaica Has Never Had Olympic Synchronized Swimmers. These Girls Want to Change That. Written by Malin Fezehai and published by the New York Times on Jan. 29, 2018.

This time last year I took stock of my ceremonies and held myself accountable to maintaining personal practices that water my faith in the present moment, heavy and wet with need and want, dripping with desires already met. What are my ceremonies? They are practices that help me remember I am already inside an answered prayer — the practices of writing to reflect, walking to tune in, jogging to endure, meditating to expand, soaking in water to remember, making to learn and documenting to return.

While grateful for these ceremonies, I now recognize their primary purpose was to fill my cup so I can sustainably show up whole inside community. Today I am dripping with desire to take these lessons and liquid ways of working, creating, and being into communal ceremonies. What are our forms of synchronized swimming in the wake¹? In 2022, I was taken to the edges of myself and that brought me to your shore. In 2023, what are our collective ceremonies? What do we need to practice together? What are our agreements? What choreographies do we need to rehearse? What do we need to become skilled at? What do we need to let go of? What do we need to fight about? What do we need to share? What do we need to keep?

Every birthday I write a letter to myself while soaking in a steaming soup of liquid memory, coconut oil, and lavender oil for the length of Alice Coltrane’s Transcendence album. This year, what came up is the realization that I am more skilled than last year at tending to the garden of my internal and eternal possibility — no longer a captive to external validation — I have cultivated practices that return me to myself, my body, and my values again and again. What also came up in this letter is the realization that I am craving more practice inside collective ceremonies that require somatic engagement both online and off (if there is a such thing as “offline”). In the next few newsletters I am looking forward to swimming underneath the question, How might software (in)form somatic practices of collective ceremony that deepen belonging? Heavy and wet with need and want, dripping with desires already met. What are our collective ceremonies? Maybe they have something to do with the practices that help us remember the world we need is the world we have.

1. “If, as I have so far suggested, we think the metaphor of the wake in the entirety of its meanings (the keeping watch with the dead, the path of a ship, a consequence of something, in the line of flight and/or sight, awakening, and consciousness) and we join the wake with work in order that we might make the wake and wake work our analytic, we might continue to imagine new ways to live in the wake of slavery, in slavery’s afterlives, to survive (and more) the afterlife of property. In short, I mean wake work to be a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives. With that analytic we might imagine otherwise from what we know now in the wake of slavery.” — Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, pg. 17-18