Plan Be
I say do not choose
for it is chosen.
Do not believe
what is not your highest good.
Don’t walk in shadows
when light is available,
and it is always available
for you to choose,
but do not choose,
let the choice be made for you,
the Universe has your coordinates
pre-programmed into the GPS,
just follow the directions.
It’s okay if you arrive at a dead end.
That is simply an illusion,
turn around and try again,
pay attention this time,
make the better choice
by not choosing to go that way
this time.
I once wrote a reflection paper for a class on Practitioner Inquiry. It was a course all about research and formulating questions and theoretical frameworks. I didn’t understand it at all. That is the synopsis of my paper. In response the Professor wrote across the top of the paper “This is great! I’m glad you are getting comfortable with ambiguity!”
For the record, I am not particularly comfortable with ambiguity. In fact I find ambiguity to be mostly very uncomfortable. I think one of the appealing features about Religious Science is the clarity. I grew up in the Episcopal Church, which was actually a very lovely place to grow up. I liked the smell of the incense, the glow of candles, the way the words from the Book of Common Prayer echoed through the chapel, but there came a time when I outgrew it. I still loved the liturgy and the community, but I had more questions than they had answers and after a while I stopped wanting to go.
Fast forward to about 2006, a friend invited me to CSL. It was a prayer service and one of the first things that struck me was how different their version of prayer was. I grew up thinking of prayer as a kind of letter to the Santa of the sky. It was a one way letter, not a correspondence. And it was good to add in promises as incentive for God…I promise to be a better person if you just make me physically healthy again…that kind of thing, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, but overall the process felt about as powerful as wearing lucky socks to a soccer game.
This prayer was different. This Emma-like passionate demanding of things as though we were entitled to them…well it was very different. And then there was this whole concept of personal responsibility. I was used to the idea of taking your troubles and giving them to Jesus. I don’t know what he was supposed to do with them exactly, but that was standard protocol and then you were free to keep crying rather than try to fix anything yourself. So here I was, not only responsible for my life, but this God presented to me seemed like some cosmic vending machine, and there was Kathianne handing me quarters and saying: You can have what you want. You deserve it. Now choose.
This is where things get complicated. I have to say I never really understood why God would have given us free choice, especially after centuries of humanity proving itself unequal to the task of making good choices. This has been one of my biggest struggles. What kind of life should I choose? Central to this overarching choice is the conundrum of my divine right employment.
“We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choices of his daily craft and profession,” wrote Emerson. As I read this passage, I felt annoyed by the reoccurrence of old ambiguities. So we can choose, but we are pre-disposed to our choices. While this is true…I can tell you I am definitely not pre-disposed to take up any trade requiring math or science, these natural delimitations are only useful informational tidbits, they don’t make the decision for us.
“There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in a river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one,” Emerson continued.
Maybe my river is wide and with a swirly multi-directional current. I feel pulls, rip tides and undercurrents that pull me first one way and then another. And the only clarity throughout this process is that I could do these things and make a difference. I can and have been a teacher, a writer, an artist, a box loader, a Program director, a study abroad coordinator, and community organizer. And at times these things have made my heart sing, but I still have no idea what will make it sing consistently. Or more honestly, I don’t know how to combine the pieces to make a sustainable career. Say I do become a novelist and make hella money, will I miss working with kids? Will I miss being an activist? “Has he not a calling in his character?” Emerson asks, to which I respond. YES. Many callings. But do I have to choose?!
I will leave you as Emerson left me, with no perfect conclusion, but instead with some more insight to what I am thinking. The first poem will appear in my next book Love and Guatemala. I wrote it during one of the other classes I took at CSL (can’t remember which one) but it’s pretty applicable to this experience as well and speaks to me relationship with what I should know vs. what my mind recognizes. I wrote the second poem a few days ago as a response to the ugliness that happened during the Oscars, but the more I read it, the more it seems like both a love poem to myself and an instruction manual on how to be myself.
Through my poetry I am attempting to map this river that Emerson is talking about. I’m not sure how great of a cartographer I will prove to be, maybe only time will tell, but this is where I am with it so far.
Consciousness
The irony is in forgetting,
in having these ground breaking moments
and then not remembering what shifted,
only the end results,
only the here and now of what is
and who I am
and everyday even that is erasing itself.
I try to write it down,
take a picture,
but truth isn’t digital,
clarity is un-photographable,
un-reproducible,
just like love is simply
a four letter word
that never really says what I want it to,
because what I mean is so much more.
How I feel is a puzzle of missing pieces
and what I wanted to tell you about me,
what would have made it all come together,
I can’t quite remember.
Yes, the irony is in forgetting.
I sit in meditation
to know what I once knew,
to remember the secrets
God whispered to me
before pushing me through the womb
into this backwards
carnival of illusions.
In my heart of hearts
I am a foreigner in my own world,
blinded by the trappings
of skin and bone,
this time and place,
this incarnation.
But in the stillness,
or in the blur of
colors,
the blare of music
and spinning
and spinning
and too much rum,
when you are standing too close
and I am holding on too tight
and letting go
all at once,
there are higher truths all around me
like a rain of shooting stars
blinding in their brilliance,
perfect in their moment
and gone in a blink.
And I know that it’s all in there
somewhere woven into the spaces between what I think
and what I feel,
the knot of gray matter.
It’s the truth that rests
on the tip of my tongue,
the dream just beyond the reach
of my cognitive abilities.
And sometimes it comes to me.
And sometimes it’s gone
and I’m just trying to remember.
On Being Black And A Butterfly
Even our cocoons must be Kevlar.
No spindly feelers breech the bud,
no filmy wings, slick and paper thin
greet this dawn.
We emerge fully present to our
enduring capacity to remain unbroken.
Our wings are boned in titanium
framed with panes of
shatterproof stained glass.
No wild summer breeze,
nor gale force hurricane
will set us to flit and flutter.
Us with wings of leaden gold,
us with wings like eternity
improbably heavy,
must create our own currents,
raise ourselves sturdy and skyward
to take flight by surprise.
We must fall in love
with our own industrial beauty,
never expect to be recognized
for the glorious celestial beings we are,
learn to swat daggers with every wing flap,
learn to embrace wholeness
the way Vampires learn to love
the curse of immortality,
those cuts will never kill us,
might sting, might bleed,
but we will remain unbroken.
We must learn to love and
understand the gift of our
impenetrable vulnerability.
We must learn to be held
and to hold others,
but know it is only
in the cradle of our own arms
that freedom is really free,
only in the understanding and sweet embrace
of our own souls
that love is fully expressed.
It is up to us to be:
Be the butterfly,
Be you, be me.
Be the night sky,
Be the stars,
Be the Universe,
Be the traveler unafraid of new adventures
Be the road that wraps back around on itself,
Be the song sung by a child when no one is awake to hear her,
Be the humming wings of quick moving birds,
Be the steady pulse of the mountain,
Be the river arching out to ride the wind across the desert sands,
Be the rain that makes love to each grain of rice in the fields,
Be whatever and whoever we dare to be,
Be the fulfillment of a universal promise,
Be the butterfly,
Be the little black girl arms and smile outstretched with no fear of poison daggers,
Be the little black girl with nothing to lose and the whole world on a yo-yo string already in her back pocket,
Be the Kevlar butterfly, bulletproof and daggerproof and wordproof and poisonproof.
Be the proof that black girls can fly.
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