Dear Becoming Ones: Yesterday, I had a 1:1 session with a writer with whom you may or may not be familiar! alexis pauline gumbs is the authorized biographer of audre lorde. The time I spent with alexis was magical, and she encouraged me to spend my prayer time and then try to write.
So, I am writing today.
I’ve decided to write to you, dear ones, because I cannot not write. Bearing witness to the atrocities of our world have undone me, and I am wondering how we learn to re-mem-ber ourselves?
One of the things I did yesterday with alexis is I breathed.
In.
Out.
Then, I chanted: “remember us.”
Franz Kafka wrote once that writing is a form of prayer. I’d like to think about my writing as a form of hoping wakefulness and prayer. A kind of both / and approach to making meaning in today’s fright world.
I’m waking up from a lifetime of inherited trauma that has been accelerated by the different ecologies I’ve been a part of: my family system is one ecology that I’ve endured trauma; my religion is another ecology that has perpetuated harm against me; my entire educational journey conditioned me to be just as violent as people who are issuing bombs to be dropped on innocent people.
I am compromised. That has been sobering.
Waking up to re-mem-ber myself is something I learned about in my 20s when I was in seminary. It was Gloria Anzaldúa who uses Coyolxauhqui—the moon goddess dismembered in the Mexica story—as a figure for the ways trauma, colonization, and exclusion can scatter a person or community.
I wasn’t awake or aware enough to begin to put myself back together while also being ripped apart.
The weekend after I defended my PhD dissertation, I scheduled tattoo medicine and had Coyolxauhqui tattoo’d onto my arm. That was the beginning of me using tattoo medicine as a way to move energy and to put myself back together. I continue that path, as do many others.
I’ve always been sensitive to the Lunar Cycles. The recent eclipse has been amazing for me. Were they for you?
No one can hand you your epiphanies, my teacher, Michael McRay says, which is why we must put ourselves by together in a story rich manner.
So, today, as I write to(ward) you, may you re-mem-ber yourself in all the ways you can imagine and then lean into the magic of the radical interconnectedness of all things to suture your wounds. I’m doing that work in real time!
Paz, —RCE+
I have always liked to reflect on the word 're-membering'. It seems to be a way to reflect on belonging. Thank you for this reflection/ prayer.
I pray our paths cross again soon.