Three Dollars and Six Dimes

Siblings, how y'all feeling?

Siblings, y'all alright? I'm grateful for the shares and responses from my last letter to you. I find we are meeting each other in a needed moment and time, and I'm grateful for your companionship on the path.

As I sat in an ecumenical gathering for engaged spirituality, I heard the comment, "What kind of country do we want to leave for our children?" We all know this inquiry. It invites us to wonder: what must we do now to make the future tenable, livable, and lovable for those coming after us? This notion of the malleability of a place-based future is one that I both believe in and often find myself curious about. I'm realizing it is because we have the tendency to position place ("country") outside of ourselves - territory, boundaries, perimeters. I found myself wondering at that moment: how might we become country to each other?

Perhaps it flows through the waterways drawn in the image of the crafter within ourselves, reaching to meet and be met by one another. By doing so, we might actually negate the necessity of territory. I wonder if this is really what we want to call in for future-making? Admittedly, this feels very tough for me.

As I write, I sit proximate to a family member that breaks my heart every time I am in their presence. What is the practice for a million splinters from a heart with a million breaks? I find it tough to be "place" to this being. But I still wonder.

Knowing where we are (and whose we are, and are not) seems to be an inevitable quality of making place. All around us, new lines of place - electoral, dialectical, relational - are forming. The lines of what is human, what is action, what is reality, what is possible, are swirling, twirling, and taking us for a spin along with them. All around us there remains a pressing in. Pressing on. Pressing down. Pressing forward. On and on.

Where do we locate ourselves in these moments? Where do these moments, which are traces, breadcrumbs, and mappings of the inevitable formation of place - past, present, and future - locate us?

Kennedi Carter's recent photography collection feeds these inquiries. In this collection she tells a story of the Gullah-Geechee's relationship with land and water. I learned through this collection of a Gullah-Geechee proverb: "The water bring we, the water wanna take we back."

And take us back it will.

I've been sensing in my own and the collective body a ring of fire pressing around the heart. On Tuesday, as I felt the pressing, I heard the message: Come to the water. Come to the water. So I submerged myself.

I ran my bath water and, with the blessed bigness of this body, descended into a tight tub of tepidness. I lowered my head back, held my breath, and re-emerged. I lowered my face, held my breath, then re-emerged. I went on for nearly an hour with this baptismal. On and on, and on and on. What is it that Erykah says in her liberation song?

I was born under water

With three dollars and six dimes

Yeah, you might laugh

'Cause you did not do your math

A full 3.60. Perhaps the answers for these moments require this baptismal of us, to submerge and rise through 360° renewal. An illumined renewal of existence which orients our steps. Maybe we need to allow ourselves to be completely covered by the land and water, as Kennedi Carter shared:

The water brought we-it brought us here. And the water is what can also connect us back to our cosmologies.

Here, as the body surrenders to waterways, we are bound together. Erykah continues to gather us when saying:

Too much to see

The world keeps turning

Oh what a day, what a day, what a day

We are seeing much at this time. We are consuming much at this time. We are filling with much at this time. And, all around us, in fields filled with every infinitesimal curve of conditions woven through place and time, we can find each other. And when we can't discern, the waters will be there, always to take us back.

We give thanks, friend. We give thanks.

For your inquiry:

• What are the qualities of future you seek to cultivate? How does this draw from the qualities of presence you allow yourself to exist within?

• What desires cooling warmth in your current conditions? How might you allow yourself to be healed by this?

• What desires to be renewed within your communities? What will be required of your heart to meet that renewal?

I'm listening to what comes up for you.

Until we meet again.