STOP TALKING IN CIRCLES Part 6: A Thing

For the final part of this series I asked for engagement from those around me to answer one of three prompts pertaining to: place, dreams, and being yourself.

Thank you immensely to all those who took the time to answer.

A PLACE

Only my body’s eyes and nose crested above the jostling waves, the rest treaded loosely among the calm drifting currents. Yearning for more time at home, resentment and tranquility both melted away in that ocean. A rainbow sherbert sun set into the sweetest saltwater. I desired more, then the light of the horizon line vanished with my entitlement of time.

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A place where I’ve felt my most authentic self is a looming reality that sits within my subconscious. I see it as a series of ideas and expressions that are able to take a stronghold in reality and are understood by my peers. The closest reality I have to this place has been Chicago or New York where individuals are able to come together and share their beautiful ideas & express themselves without the care of judgment from those around them.

Los Angeles Raves. I’ve felt my most comfortable in that space. I always say that during the raves is where people’s ultimate characters come out to play.

My mom doesn’t like how messy my room gets in the short period of time I visit home. She doesn’t understand that it’s in that place, with its open floor plan and sky high ceilings, with its echo-y sunroom and white and blue and modern and new den, there, where our bedrooms are on different floors in different corners, where I feel the most myself.

Inside here is everything. im talking about my heart and yours, and yours, and yours. 

A DREAM

My eyes do not jolt open; I do not open and awake immediately. Shifting and swaying with the tides some mornings, or in the depth of the night I just lay– my eyes tracking around my skull attempting to focus on the expansive abyss of hallucinogenic spectrums I think I see.

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Dream, to travel often and visit every continent; observing and learning about the different cultures globally.

My dream is to be a fixer. Less Olivia Pope and more Robin Hood-esque. I want the means to feed the hungry, house the unhoused, provide resources for wellness. I want to really give back to the people.

To believe I can make and have made the right decisions. Or the best ones.

I dream of forever expanding the ways in which I can express myself through art with no financial confines. My current aspiration is to express myself through film and television, ultimately as a means to engage, entertain and influences the minds of people all over the world to help them understand human nature better, especially the nature of those who appear to be most unlike them.

A BEING

At the crown of the head is the “Sahasrara," the crown chakra some call it, cognition and being converge. Our highest bodily point, the vertex of the parabola, the break of waves. I experience it as airy, light, hazy, uncrisp–not so sharp, blunted, unclear in so many ways, softer than I desire it to be. 

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I’m in a tug of war: it’s my curiosity and ambition vs my hesitation and worry for disappointment.

a (pretty grounded) being defined by the choices I made in life. a being that is wondering if those choices, as much as most of the time comfortable and leading to basic comfort, really helped me reach my potential. I feel like I could achieve more and I feel like I might've wasted my personal resources. I am mostly peaceful and happy tho so I think I'm good. Right?

Not really sure where I'm standing lately, although it's weird not being afraid of uncertainty. After some good and bad decisions I have reached the point of knowing that the only thing that is certain is my troubled conscience. I accept that knowing that time equals wisdom and trauma, and it is inevitable.

I am a phenomenal woman today, rejecting narrow societal beauty standards, and insisting that the real beauty comes from my place of self-confidence and self acceptance. I have no reason to bow my head, however, many…. to hold it up high! 

A THING

In scenes that we witness ours and others, We must take our sovereignty—that is the power of beauty and teachings of the scenes. The noise creates an air of deception (man, silence) that misdirects, distractions from the wonder of teachings accessible in every moment. Yet there’s also a seething, salivation at the mouth of the present time. In scenes there are those hallucinogenic waves, all of them discombobulating. In here, in there, the work will never leave you alone. It will slither through your synapses and form symbiosis with your neurons. 

The most substantial growth of the plant happened in this stage, it makes leaves and stems and branches, it takes a deep breath to become what it intends to be. Eventually, it will make flowers and fruits and seeds, but first establishing is crucial. My okro plants became so big that I couldn’t pull them out of the soil, not even with both hands. I think my own unfurling will be like that, old roots running deep, a steadiness that cannot be shifted, but right now, I have become my own thing. ¹

We labor—Critically think. Our psyche, the wheels in our head steady spinnin’, let them spin. Imagine discipline as real as you desire it to be and it might spin out of your head. It will splatter into mine and others and, so collectively it will conjure into something tangible. We’re often so scared, so silent because of the potential to conjure but! Nonetheless, we can make it be. It can be a thing.

In some ways, we are evaded being humans and citizens of the world once seeing the antithesis to the Whiteness conjured here. Alas, There is process and discipline, and these may be predictable as subjugated beings but they can also be serendipitous when you’re chasing life— the chasing is what I’d identify as an undisciplining action. Process and discipline are: to act in the present, planting yourself in space, aware and partaking in death’s unraveling. Consciousness of this is rare but it does not have to be. We’ll change that. The place, the dream, the being is the work. And, I don’t really think those ships are headed for charted lands, or at least not headed for lands we’ve conceived of.

Now, We’re here in the ocean saltwater. We’re familiar with this dense abyss and its currents. It is both a cycle and the break of such repetition. It is reiteration and ideation in the service of being unreasonable, affirming the us. The thing is bashing and fortifying those who process and discipline as we exist in the present. All of these responses are the thing. Be critical of them and speak. They are our nutrients on this vessel. Talk about these things. 

When we speak 

consider the noise

[ask] was it critical because Man said so

[know] there must’ve been a way to be yourself.

Tell me about that thing.  

   

1.  Akwake Emezi, Dear Senthuran, 2021, 229.