I still think of Miss Sandy’s voice giving a long, slow, beauuuuutiful at the release of a held position. How comforting it was to hear this kind of affirmation over your body sliding back into place, at exhale, even if you had the position wrong the whole time. To celebrate a return of natural give. It would fall over us like a quiet tide, a room of small girls taking deep breaths, hunched over the barre now letting their bodies succumb. And she gave us permission, in a kind voice and in grace. I’d smile big tucking back into fifth position, shoulders back, ballet fingers just so, the same way I smile now, allowing my limbs to hang soft after long strain, and telling them they’re beautiful in letting go. When the world and ballet are congruent in rigidity and constraint, I think of beautiful draped over an exhaled sigh, that long, slow exaltation over a long-withstanding release. That a return of things is beauty, as well as strength and survival.
Slow, slow, slow. That is how healing and answers come. I would force them into a precipitous inertia if time were an animal I could wrangle with my hands; if energy were their acquisition, I would be completely spent instead of running for the sake of escapism. I would like to believe that uncertainty and anguish are the exodus toward (instead of the promise of) wholeness and truth. That they are a hunger to be rid of instead of the manna that sustains. It is impossibly redundant for time to be such an avenue for healing and perspective and yet could there be another way to assuage the agony of patience? If I am so quick to forget (as my humanity ensures), let healing and answers take their time.
When pine begins to feel the warmth of sun’s pressing body against spring, it emits a sweet incense not unlike your skin does after playing outside. So these rocks are so inclined, too, to spring and its intruding sun. They lay exposed completely and with no shame, as sun undresses them so exquisitely. No matter that they have lived underwater these thousand years; as basalt grows so artfully in the chaos of lava, so also do river rocks become shaped by a ferocious river. Can I become as unapologetic as elements who are brave in their art? Can I become as forgiving as the canvasses on which they draw? And the river—even as forceful as she is, she does not make her own path or her color. She is tethered to gravity, and that by the moon, and reflects colors by the sun. Are we all, then, so powerless if even the mighty rock has no say in its becoming? And the pine, who unfolds so willingly to heat—does it become the soil by its own accord? How can you say, then, what is your path? Does the river so drown you by its own desire? So I lay upon the rock and let myself be still, jagged stone cutting into my spine and elbows, an awkward being and her book finding a place among the ancients, and I let the wind dance and crawl over me like a child would, tangling my hair and tumbling around my limbs.
It was the first of November but nothing felt new. With Election Day two days away and the world heavy in ongoing grief, the prospect of an eleventh month only added to its collective groaning. I dragged myself to go buy groceries, only a scant list scribbled on my hand but enough for an excuse to occupy my mind. It was as I shifted into fourth gear that they started to come: opposite my direction, heading downtown, a long line of cars and trucks proudly waving flags from their tailgates. Red and blue, five letters in bold type parading the elect of our current president. Proud, from minivans of homeschool moms and lifted trucks of young, handsome men. They kept coming, an endless snake of jovial nationalists, and all I could think in my head was the number 545. I didn’t know I’d become so grieved that sadness was bordering anger. “Are you mad, too?” I asked God. Could he watch? Proudly, they rally the streets, making righteousness a binary thing, evangelizing a political agenda. Can God bear his children touting ego in his name? So I asked him what to do. I reminded myself to love them, first of all; they are my family still. As far as action steps, I’d already felt gross about voting; I had hardly wanted to. I wasn’t assuaged by my right to vote in a dichotomized democracy. I asked him how I could be light, here and now. Not on the third of the month, not in the next presidential reign. Here, as I drive to the store. Then there was Cory, cross-legged on the pavement outside of a Dollar Tree. I was walking into Natural Grocers next door. He looked almost content sitting there, and well-dressed in a polo and khakis despite a shaggy beard. I said hello and asked how he was. He said he’d been better. I said same here. I told him I was heading into the store to grab a couple groceries, and could I grab him lunch, too? He looked up to think for a moment. “Could I come with you and pick it out?” “If you have a mask, sure,” I answered. He whipped one out of his pocket and stood up. We exchanged names and small talk. He was from Iowa but didn’t miss it. I told him to pick out whatever he wanted. “Could I just grab some salami and pickles?” he asked. I thought that was adorable and said of course. I made a joke about charcuterie that I don’t think quite registered and told him to meet me in line for checkout when he was ready. After collecting an avocado and turmeric I found him lost in his pickle search. We asked a clerk where to find them, and quickly found his kosher dills. While waiting in line his pants began slipping to his knees; I let him know without trying to embarrass him, but he didn’t seem to care. He let me hold his things while he hiked them up again. I suddenly felt like my mom. Cory was grateful and made sure it was okay I bought his salami and pickles. I assured him I was happy to. When I left him at his pavement corner outside of Dollar Tree I still felt heavy and not new; not how the first of a month should feel. I still had 545 kids separated from their families on my mind, and wondering what that mom in a minivan I passed earlier might be feeling about the issue. Does she know? I still felt defensive about the God I know, and hurting for him. How does it feel to have a nation represent you so erroneously? I can’t change the world and God doesn’t tell me to. But there are so many Corys outside grocery stores in town. If I can tend to Cory I can tend to a nation. If I can love this stranger I can love the parade of them, too. Not from the light I am but the Light I know. I hope they begin to know too.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Matthew 5:8 hangs on a plaque in the dining room of my aunt and uncle’s new home. They built it a couple years ago, in the wealthy part of town, in our city that is 85% white. They are retired now from his career as a dentist. My aunt is warm and giving; she will cup your face in her hands and say God bless you. She nods slow and prays for you. My uncle, too, will pray, and will open his bible to know exact references. A good, stalwart, hardworking man, enjoying the fruits of his lifelong toil. Their fridge magnets color their kitchen with photos of Black children they sponsor, among other pamphlets from church, family photos and Christmas cards. My graduation announcement hangs there, too, my red sash bright against the black of my robes. I am a gleaming picture of privilege, purity, opportunity. My uncle, like my dad, watches Fox News every evening, and as he barbecues our dinner they tirade over the latest scandal the liberals are insinuating. My aunt pours my mother and I another glass of wine; as she does so she reminds me, nodding along to her husband’s lecture, not to concern myself with the socialist affairs (outright communist, she notes) the young people are touting these days. A sensible girl like me surely couldn’t be one of them. And I have believed my whole life that they are pure in heart. My whole family, to be certain. My dad and his brothers—good, conservative family men—are every patriarch an American family could hope for. They married wives who look up to them the same way, God-fearing women, who have raised their daughters to be submissive and to think and opinion themselves accordingly. It is in the dining room with the plaque of Jesus’ words that my uncle tells a story from his elementary school days. We listen and laugh, and as he rounds an important piece of the story concerning a teacher of his, he makes the offhanded note so nonchalantly it rocks every belief I once held of my God-fearing uncle. “She was good-looking, you know, for a Black lady,” is all he says of her. And no one else could have noticed. And why would they, when such a fact is as unimportant as truth, and a note so habitual? Its prosaic detail could only add to the story its goodness, and purity, that an elementary memory could serve. A goodness and purity unaccustomed white people must be reminded of toward Black people. And maybe in part it is the second glass of wine, but without anyone noticing I begin to quietly weep. I weep for my brothers and sisters for whom such offhanded clarifications must be made, in order to excuse their existence. I weep for this teacher, this woman, whose nurturing of my boy uncle could only serve in his reflection as her beauty being exception. If she sees the face of God now, I wonder if he weeps too. What does purity serve if only in the clean fairness of Swedish-descent skin? I weep in the wealth of a home that my family reaped of privilege, of a prosperity my family gives their life to, but at the unknowing taxation of darker shades, of those who are on the other side of our city, red-lined, around tables telling other stories where they don’t have to say if a white person is good-looking by exception because in a city so full of them, in their 2% population, they already know who gets to make the comments about generational exceptions, and where mourning at a laughing table is as overlooked as their agony, centuries-old, spilling out onto the streets and seeping into every evening news that the privileged will call riots rather than injustice, where their anguish can be a conversation we politicize over too much wine rather than live it.
Along the crease of my folded body, agony splits itself among my organs and spreads across my torso. I don’t know what it’s like to be a mother but I do know how our muscles push and succumb to the forces of biology rapidly; and biology alone is not the culprit of pain and push but a mother, our own until one we may become (I say “may” because I am exhausted of assumption, based on my biology) knows what it is like to be played by more than our bodies. Beyond biology, her trials are practiced by sociology, and the human condition; by her lovers, and those who are supposed to protect her; by her own kind, who tell her what she is to be known by: her beauty, her body, and not her brilliance.