Dear Community: Yet the sunrise is beautiful.
“Meditation means being aware of what is going on - in our bodies, in our feelings, in our minds, and in the world. Each day thousands of children die of hunger. Plant and animal species are going extinct every day. Yet the sunrise is beautiful, and the rose that bloomed this morning along the wall is a miracle. Life is both dreadful and wonderful. To practice meditation is to be in touch with both aspects of life.”
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Dear Community,
Years ago when I was in graduate school I had a moment of clarity about my own complicity in our colonized, racialized world. I was reading choreographer and author Ralph Lemon’s memoir Come Home Charley Patton and a section titled An Incomplete Chronology, a historical timeline that pairs seminal moments in American modern dance with socio-political events that were happening in the country—situating the civil rights movement, Black lynchings, the Freedom Bus Rides of the 1960s, political assassinations alongside art that was being produced during that period.
I was struck by the dissonance of post-modern choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s seminal Trio A (1966) on the line just above the death of Ben Chester White, a black man who worked his entire life as a caretaker on a plantation and was murdered by the Klu Klux Klan in Mississippi; Merce Cunningham’s Rainforest premiered a month before Martin Luther King Jr,’s assasination in 1968.
“Revolutionary” white artists were working inside of a “movement” deconstructing dance and abstracting art, attempting to democratize modern dance with aesthetics and concepts, while Black people and Black artists were deep inside another movement, one fighting for the right to exist.
Was the art being made actually radical?
Was it affecting real change culturally?
Who was the art radical for?
Who was included in the revolution?
A couple of decades later I had assimilated within an industry of mostly white dance artists, creating choreography with an all white cast and excusing this with the belief that these were the dancers that showed up to my audition.
I was complicit inside of a segregated industry, waiting for someone else to change it. Waiting for the revolution.
A few days ago I was toggling between my two Instagram accounts. Like many small business owners I have a personal account and a second one dedicated to my Pilates studio. I found myself suspended between two radically different realities—
On one side of the algorithm I was confronted with the atrocities of a real-time genocide—
Images and videos of dead and dying Palestinians being dragged from the rubble, of starving Palestinian men, women, and children crying for slain family members, lining up en masse for something to eat, streets that were once neighborhoods decimated by the Israeli-American military and their weapons of destruction.
On the other side of the algorithm
I saw fit bodies in spandex working out, advertising leanness and athleticism as aspiration; boasting thin bodies, not as a sign of starvation but superiority, achievement.
And yes, I am complicit in this too.
One month ago, the spoken word artist and activist Andrea Gibson died at age 49. They had an exquisite ability to share their profoundly poetic stories and ideas about the human condition, weaving their terminal cancer diagnosis with LGBTQ+ activism, creating belonging and community through vulnerability and art-making, connecting their intense love for their dogs and for their wife into a boundless love for all life. They successfully alchemized their most tender and painful moments into deep hope for humanity.
“Even when the truth isn’t hopeful the telling of it is. That idea has guided my writing forever. I have a responsibility as an artist to tell the truth. But over the last years I’ve tapped into another responsibility which to me feels equally important and that is to imagine what the world could be, to imagine a more just, loving, and compassionate world and speak and write about that world in detail because we humans most often can only bring into fruition what we have first imagined. We can only create what we have first imagined. So we need the truth right now I think more than ever. But we also need to speak about what is possible. We need to imagine what has never been imagined before until it takes root in our hearts and in the hearts of others.”
- Andrea Gibson
A few days ago five Al Jazeera journalists and one freelance journalist were assassinated by an Israeli airstrike that targeted 28-year-old Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif in Gaza. Posting first-hand accounts of the brutal genocide in Gaza City, Al-Sharif had a social media following of about 2 million people. Below is a translated excerpt of al-Sharif’s final words, a statement published posthumously on his media accounts:
“This is my will and my final message. If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice.
First, peace be upon you and Allah’s mercy and blessings. Allah knows I gave every effort and all my strength to be a support and a voice for my people, ever since I opened my eyes to life in the alleys and streets of the Jabaliya refugee camp. My hope was that Allah would extend my life so I could return with my family and loved ones to our original town of occupied Asqalan (al-Majdal). But Allah’s will came first, and His decree is final.
I have lived through pain in all its details, tasted suffering and loss many times, yet I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification – so that Allah may bear witness against those who stayed silent, those who accepted our killing, those who choked our breath, and whose hearts were unmoved by the scattered remains of our children and women, doing nothing to stop the massacre that our people have faced for more than a year and a half.”
I want to write about the beauty that Andrea Gibson wrote about through their lens of life and death. I want to inspire and aspire. I want to live a life filled with peace and joy, but today I cannot ignore the grim atrocities of a genocide that we all have access to.
Is the split-screen of life—one world where there is perpetual suffering and another with manufactured inspiration— our unfortunate reality?
Which side contains the revolution?
A few weeks ago I began using goggles when I swim. Seeing clearly underwater has become my portal into a truer, more beautiful experience of water. I linger here inside this hyper-reality, in awe of the magic of this moment. With my breath suspended, I swim towards the sunlight prisms my eyes perceive as real. An accidental kaleidoscope that only occurs on this side of water.
When I’m underwater my mind stills.
There is only one reality.