The Free List : Vol. 1, No. 7
A MORE PRIMAL GOSPEL
đź“Ť
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You know that point where you get tired of explaining yourself? When you realize that no one has asked you to, so why are you doing it?
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I’m at that point.
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Since the veils thinned and the air crisped and the leaves bloodied and fell, I am coming to know death in various ways.
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I am dying to myself. Leaves fall inward and compost in my intestinal tract. What they become is yet undetermined. Absorbed?
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A couple of weeks ago, I said to my playwriting students, “I don’t know who or where I am right now, but I feel ok with that, because I know I’ll bring back new forms. Eventually?, on the other side.”
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This may be true.
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In a recent dream, I was in Canada on a large body of water.
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I walked toward the edge of the water and a lifeguard with sunglasses beckoned me in. He didn’t speak at all, but he invited me.
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I got into the water and started swimming alongside him. Swimming, swimming. Me and the lifeguard, the same rhythm. When I turned to look back to the land, the wooden path I had walked to get to the water was rapidly disappearing under the surface. It was being sucked Underneath by an ancestral force.
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Although I felt perfectly safe in the water, was swimming fine, and had a lifeguard synchronized and adjacent to my body, I panicked when I saw the path disappear.
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Shortly after that, I woke up.
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Everyday that I’ve been awake since, I have swum farther and farther without the path. I know that’s the ask. I know that’s the medicine.
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In the last several weeks {in ascending order},
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I bought a copy of Tony Kushner’s, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes—which it turns out I already owned—and a copy of Ayi Kwei Armah’s, The Healers. I bought them just to have them close to my head when I sleep, not necessarily to read them. (Let’s say reading can happen in a myriad of ways).
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I watched two white people with a tractor and some makeshift rubber pulleys lower a beloved friend into the ground. As the casket descended into the fresh hole and I walked away, I pinned the location of my loss of innocence on my phone. I can return to the coordinates or play with their numerology to decipher some understanding, but I think that is not the point.
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I’ve recreated the sea in my mouth; gargling cup after cup of salt-filled water to ease a raw throat that is dying to its old speech. A more primal gospel emerges as the only thing that makes sense.
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There is one more issue of The Free List this Pope Gregory calendar year. (Ethiopians, by the way, still observe their traditional calendar in which there are 13 months).
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I’ll see you in the next one, whoever and wherever we are at that point.
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All of the work here is brought to you by the gifts of our Ancestors; seen and unseen, known and unknown. May we remember our rising, may we light the shadows. May we all together thrive.
