I continue to sob, to shake, to storm, to strive, and to seek justice.
And I share these questions in hopes that they may be helpful to others, especially white folks, christian folks, men folks, folks for whom disengagement is an option, at this time.
During graduate school, there were many weeks of being so overloaded by assigned reading that I couldn’t do it all and felt constantly behind. I recognized that the goal was to learn to skim and to put my hands on more and more research, even if I couldn’t savor many pieces. The trouble was that the more I couldn’t savor what I was reading, the more I associated reading itself with feelings of being overwhelmed and behind.
When I shared with a mentor how stressful reading had become, she smiled knowingly and related her own experience of knowing that there will always be more to read than time to read it. More than her sympathy, though, I remember what she shared about choosing to read for inspiration:
“Yes, I read for my research (to answer burning questions), but I also read for inspiration (to keep the questions alive). Be sure that you’re reading what inspires you, what fires you up.”
For too long (in my faculty position), I read primarily for work: for courses I was teaching, for articles I was submitting, and for committees I was serving. I could feel the excitement when reading an article or book that really spoke to me, and increasingly, I read blog posts and sought out podcasts as sources of inspiration. Still, I wanted to prioritize “reading for fun,” especially books that could light my imagination and help me imagine more just worlds, more equitable relations.
Now that I’m creating new habits and work priorities, I’m reading again. I’m reading for research, for fun, and especially for inspiration. I’m reading books and audiobooks as well as continuing to learn from blogs, podcasts, essays, and articles. Now, instead of stress, I’m experiencing joy that there will always be more to read.
I’m certainly not the quickest reader, nor is that my goal.
I’m certainly not the most focused or studious or careful reader, nor are those my goals.
Instead, I’m reading to learn and love and light up with inspiration.
I’m choosing to read—a little each week—and it’s adding up to reading new books.
In what’s been some tough days—from feeling beyond messy and upside down to grieving and raging at outright injustice—these books are helping me see beyond this moment and into movement space. They’re keeping me inspired for the long haul, toward building and sustaining momentum. They’re helping me tap into my embodied self and the histories, emotions, and trauma it carries, while imagining ways forward—pathways to healing.
I plan to keep reading, not because I have to but because I want to. I choose reading, and I choose it for the future.
Still, if I’m being honest with myself, the past few weeks have felt messier than I’d like to admit. I’ve had a piece of a broken ceramic bowl in my foot, a mostly mild but sometimes excruciatingly painful attention-getter. My podiatrist tells me to be patient and let my body release the piece naturally. Yet, I’m impatient and complaining about this regular reminder that I’ve got broken pieces within myself to heal and release before moving forward.
What I’m realizing, as I work the healing process that requires patience with pain, is that I’m in the midst of chrysalis, or the gruesome transformation caterpillars undergo to become butterflies.
In the past year, as I’ve announced career changes, moved cross-country, and continue to reflect on and refashion my identity, I’ve been seeing many caterpillars and butterflies and excited to think of myself as “in transformation.” Now that I’m fully in it—in the midst of big changes—I’m remembering that caterpillars essentially digest themselves, dissolving their past bodies while creating new ones. They transform into another being that moves so differently, eats so differently, and experiences life so differently that they aren’t recognized as the same being. How much disintegration, discomfort, and dis-ease must be involved in that transformation?
I have my friend Briana to thank for first alerting me to the gruesome chrysalis process when I was recovering from a concussion earlier this year. More recently, astrologer Chani Nicholas posted about how butterflies are “horrific creatures when you catch them mid-metamorphosis”—just the reminder I need to be patient with myself.
So, what does chrysalis (this time of mess, mess, and more mess) look like for me?
More days that I’d like to admit …
I’m spending many hours in one place, curled on the couch.
I’m eating irregularly.
I’m waking from vivid and sometimes-scary dreams.
I’m crying often and at unexpected times.
I’m all over the place, teeter-tottering as I walk, carefully balancing on my injured foot, and yet feeling completely off balance.
I’m creating art and climbing and falling and calling friends and seeing a counselor and writing, writing, writing—all toward processing big changes and even bigger legacies of personal, family, and social trauma and wrongdoing and lingering hurts.
I don’t know yet who I’ll be when I emerge from the messy and often-painful chrysalis, but here are two embodied experiences from inside it:
Experience #1: On a day of bingeing sugar and TV, I find myself pulled into a documentary on hooking up via dating apps, which highlights rape culture, sexual violence, and the ways in which systemic racism and intersectional oppression manifest in technological innovation and intimate relations alike. It’s not until a headache gets me to turn off the TV that I recognize that my body is incredibly tense. I’m physically holding onto, remembering, and witnessing anew this violence. I need to hold myself, quiet my mind, and notice my body’s wisdom before I can process my own experiences and reactions to what’s surely shared (collective) tension.
Because I can’t look at another screen when my head is pounding, I walk around the block and meet a postal worker who acts with such gentle kindness that I find myself crying. In the exchange of mailing a package, I feel energetically how the person before me holds hope and good will in the words, “Have a bless day.” I’m lifted by human connection, and I’m blabbering about the beauty of this brief loving interaction, as I’m still releasing through tears the heartache of how much we, as humans, hurt one another.
Experience #2: I find myself fidgeting and biting my cuticles as I struggle to find words to write about complicity within systemic violence. I’m remembering several recently painful interactions in which I see myself contributing to harm (scenes for another blog post), and I’m turning that harm inward while writing. It’s not until I draw blood that I realize that I’m literally making myself bleed from my fingers—the instruments of writing expression.
Again, my body offers such a clear message about the relationship between personal (internal, self) and collective (systemic, shared) harm. My counselor uses language that’s familiar to me after years of writing about the relationship between the micro and macro. She tells me that processing my own lived experiences involves looking at broader family and community dynamics as well as social-cultural-historical conditioning.
What this means is that binge-eating sugar and binge-watching TV, as two examples, aren’t only about my actions. These “bingeing” experiences are also about cultural scripts that make “sweets” and “favorite TV shows” soothing salves for a harsh world. Sweets and shows stand in for or serve as reminders of good memories, loving relationships, special occasions, self-care, and much more. Streaming services like Amazon and Netflix start next episodes before previous ones have finished. The examples go on and on, pointing to the need for personal healing in the context of larger collective healing. For changing personal habits in the context of changing current conditions and cultural scripts.
Within the chrysalis—when experiencing headaches and bleeding fingers—I am lifted by human connection and the possibilities for personal, ancestral, and collective healing. And being lifted, inspired, and guided matters.
Grounding matters, too, which is why I suspect my foot has manifested the consistent, not-easily-forgotten reminder to keep releasing broken pieces. Pieces internalized and unseen. Pieces under the surface and buried deep. Pieces asking to be released if I’m to be transformed.
I suspect I’m not alone in facing the gruesome reality of the chrysalis, as there’s so much work to be done in reckoning with broken-and-brutal injustice and envisioning a more just world. May I brave the chrysalis, readying myself for this work. May we brave the chrysalis together, readying ourselves for transformations to come.
This summer, as I’ve been working to change my relationship with sugar, I’ve also been trying to eat more greens. I’m preparing lots of green smoothies; growing basil and mint indoors; and learning to make sauces from spinach, kale, and chard.
Many of these sauces are adaptations of pesto, thinned with water to make more of a dressing or dip than the typically thick and oily spread. I call this “adaptable pesto sauce,” because there are many ways to prepare it and because I’ve come to this recipe through studying variations on vegan pesto.
The idea is to combine the following ingredients (all of which can be adapted to what’s on hand) in a Vitamix or another high-powered blender.
Ingredients:
Greens—approx. 5 cups of any combination of basil, spinach, kale, swiss chard, or the tops of carrots or beets
Walnuts— 1/2 cup
Water—1/3 cup
Olive oil—1/3 cup
Lemon—juice of 1 small lemon (~2 to 3 tablespoons)
Garlic—6 bulbs (more or less, depending on how much you like garlic :-))
Salt—1+ teaspoon (to taste)
Pepper—1/3 to 1/2 teaspoon (to taste)
I appreciate that this recipe is simple, taking no more than 10 minutes to gather and combine ingredients. I appreciate that it helps with achieving my goal of eating veggies as at least half of every meal. I appreciate, too, that I can eat a single batch for several days.
To illustrate, with the serving shown here, I ended up with three distinct meals:
(1) Adaptable pesto sauce became the focus on this dinner with roasted mushrooms, carrots, potatoes, crackers, and sliced peaches all as options for dipping.
(2) The next day I served the sauce with carrot and celery sticks and two veggie burgers topped with slices of avocado.
(3) What remained I used in a pasta casserole, drizzling the sauce over a layer of kale and textured vegetable protein (TVP), which topped a layer of gluten-free rotini (spiral pasta). After repeating these layers, I topped the casserole with Follow Your Heart vegan cheeze and baked for approximately an hour at 400 degrees.
These three meals are only a few I’ve created with this adaptable pesto sauce, as it’s becoming a familiar friend.
Adaptable pesto sauce isn’t a cure-all, but may it bring about more healing. May it help with building healthy relationships with food and with linking creativity and commitment.
I hold this advice close because I’m so often scared, and recently I’ve been looking deeper into fears and noticing how much they influence (and limit) my life.
One example involves a recent hike in which I had an amazing experience walking on my own through twilight into dark. I strolled more than hiked, paying attention to my breath, senses, and the scenes around me.
I noticed, for example, how sound changes along the trail, especially when walking next to bushes alive with insects and crossing from one side of the mountain to the other. I could feel the ground—packed dirt, flat stones, and jagged rocks—and how each traveled up my body: from feet to ankles to knees to hips to my back. I experienced day turn to night—witnessing not only the sunset but also the twilight and darkening of night. My eyes adjusted, my perceptions changed, and the moon became more and more pronounced.
Truly, I love being outdoors at night and in the wilderness on my own, but I so rarely allow myself either experience because fears are driving more than back-seat riding. For a number of reasons, this evening was different.
To begin, I’d already thrown caution to the wind: riding across Phoenix to get to the trailhead during rush hour traffic. On a typical day, I’d give up hiking to avoid a car ride. Perhaps being out of my routine helped me open to what I too-often restrict.
The conditions also helped me feel secure. Though hiking in 105-degree heat, the trail was crowded with hikers every few feet, so I felt sure that rattlesnakes would stay far away. I had companions on the trail—people I knew were walking slower and faster than me, making me feel that I wasn’t out “on my own.” I had water and a cell phone, too. Sturdy boots and a hat helped me feel prepared.
As I strolled, I witnessed the beauty of the moment, wanting to soak it all in and linger in the possibilities. I found myself thinking about fear and its partner, trust. What if I trust not only snakes but also myself? What if I trust my feet to be sure-footed? What if I trust that I’m prepared to speak, write, and stand UP when action is needed? What if I trust that I’ll learn and recover from the riskiness, hurts, and whatever else fear is warning me about?
These “what ifs” remind me that building trust involves practice: doing what scares me even when it scares me. Especially when it scares me.
To open my heart and trust more boldly and bravely, I’ll need to do it scared. In this time of vast injustice and needed resistance, Docta E’s advice is what I need to hear and to say to myself time and time again.
These past few weeks I’ve been focused on moving and settling into a new home. The move has called attention to all sorts of stuff, habits, and emotional swings—things I’d like to keep and release, to shore up and tear down. This process has reminded me, too, of the contemplative practices that contribute to a sense of grounding: grounding needed to stand TALL for justice.
One of these practices is spell-casting, which I learned from activist-writer-healer adrienne maree brown. In Episode 10 of the Healing Justice podcast “New Years Practice: Cast a Spell with adrienne maree brown,” brown shares what I’ve similarly come to believe from my experiences writing, teaching writing, and researching writing. That is:
(1) Words have power.
(2) We can channel this power through writing.
(3) Writing mantras and other wishes-desires-intentions helps bring them into reality.
In other words, writing supports manifestation. To put these beliefs into action, I write what I want to manifest in life.
As I did back in January, when recovering from a concussion, I’ve written a spell of mantras to help ease the shifts (the letting go and calling in) that I’d like to experience in my new space. This spell now lives under my bed and again taped to my bathroom mirror.
I share this spell here as an accountability practice—holding its potential not only in physical space but also in digital/online space. I hope it might motivate others to write. I can already see that it’s inspiring me toward further writing to make commitments to justice actionable in everyday life.
A New Spell for a New Space
I detangle my self-worth from my productivity, release goals of perfection and positivity associated with white womanhood, and believe instead that “I am enough” (neither better-than nor lesser-than)—affirming my own and others’ humanity.
I release the pattern of “butt in seat” to get work done and instead allow myself to write-work-play-move wherever I am called, including curled on the couch and sitting alongside the bouldering wall.
I embrace play: swimming, hiking, climbing, and moving my body regularly toward shaking up/off what I’ve internalized and still hold within my body as trauma, as pain, as injustice.
I make decisions based on my “strong YES,” asking regularly which way brings me closer to my divine purpose, listening for what’s next, and engaging in discernment, even/especially when the answers don’t seem to make sense.
I look for direction in everyday life, slowing down to practice divination as a meaningful, woven-through-the-day contemplative practice.
I keep talking with my future self and my ancestors, working to heal backward and forward in time.
I get comfortable working on my own and enjoying my own company, while noticing who shows up as accomplices, companions, and guides in the work for social justice.
I read “for fun,” and I learn through reading-listening-witnessing how to amplify the voices of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), especially feminists and womanists of color.
I nourish my physical, emotional, and spiritual self: heart, head, and hands. In doing so, I invest in my relationship with food, building a relationship that’s full of integrity, consistency, forgiveness, appreciation, and love. I absorb nutrients and release inflammation. I show love to myself through the foods I take into my body.
I learn more about what it means to show up as my authentic self, getting to know Beth.
I treat myself gently, with tenderness and humility. I open my heart to forgiveness and peace. I allow myself to receive and give love.
My cross-country move from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Washington, D.C. has stretched over weeks turned into months. From traveling to find an apartment to now unpacking boxes, I’ve upturned almost every aspect of life. In the past weeks, I’ve sold my furniture, driven hundreds of miles, lost and found items shipped through Amtrak, lived out of suitcases in a temporary residence, and now moved into the apartment-to-be-home (hopefully for some time to come).
From Wisconsin to Washington, I’m still seeing red Ws in every direction I turn.
From Wisconsin to Washington, I’m still seeing red Ws in every direction I turn.
This moving process has offered numerous life lessons. Among them are the importance of qualities like humility and humor and the beauty of loving relations that keep me laughing even when crying.
In the midst of these lessons, I’ve been noticing again the function of both/and thinking for preventing a single story or flat understanding of lived experience. The more I hold onto the framework of “yes … and …,” the more I am able to think creatively beyond the lies of internalized superiority and inferiority. Both/and thinking helps to prevent the traps of either-or, this-or-that, divide-and-conquer, and conquer-to-divide, which enable injustice.
In the case of my move, the traps are too clear: I readily focus on pain without noticing pleasure. Likewise, I share stories of pleasure without noting the pain. Truly, life is richly textured in dialectical tensions (seeming contractions) that, together, get closer to truth. Toward truth-telling, here are some of these tensions I’m recognizing now, while moving:
1. Stuff brings both pain and pleasure. Despite downsizing significantly in recent years, I’m still amazed by the bulk of my possessions. I’ve found myself complaining: “How can we have this much stuff? I can’t possible carry another box.” Moments later, I’m unpacking and hugging Larry, the teddy bear who accompanied me to summer camp in my youth, and I’m delighted and grateful for keeping at least some impractical stuff. The speed with which I’m complaining and delighting over “stuff” is a sure sign that it’s both: both painful and pleasurable.
2. Habits are both hurtful and helpful. Moving creates the conditions for reviewing routines and patterns of living. While it’s easy to abandon all habits (the good and the bad), it’s also possible to assess which work and which don’t. When something as simple as taking daily vitamins falls away, I’m noticing how my body responds. On the one hand, my belly begins churning, reminding me not to forget the heating pad and probiotics. On the other hand, adding back in vitamins one at a time allows me to figure out which hasn’t been sitting quite right and to create a new nutritional plan.
Similarly, a new neighborhood leads to discovering new foods, activities, relations, and embodied experiences. The move has me asking: Which habits are serving me now, and which are asking to be released? What do I want my days to be like? What habits are (mis)aligned with my commitments?
3. Emotional swings are both flattening and fun. Dialectic tensions like pain and pleasure, hurting and helping also lead to emotional swings: from downtrodden to upbeat—from falling on the floor in exhaustion to frantically cleaning in bursts of energy. Such emotional swings remind me of the presence of sadness alongside joy, disgust alongside delight, effort alongside excitement. They remind me why emotional literacies help with valuing the full spectrum of emotions, which convey important information.
The move has me experiencing a wide range of emotions and really trying to recognize them as messengers: not blocking any emotions, but asking what each has to teach me. This process, I hope, will funnel back into decisions about which “stuff” and habits to keep and which to release.
As I continue unpacking, I hope these reflections highlight again the value of a both/and approach to life, activism, and more. And if you’re in or near or visiting DC, please know that I’d love to connect and build community, as I make a new home.
