I wish children didn’t die.
I wish they would be temporarily
elevated to the skies until the war ends.
Then they would return home safe,
and when their parents would ask them:
"where were you?", they would say:
"we were playing in the clouds."
Palestinian poet, Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972)
This morning, I sat down to do my weekly practice of creating art prompted by Liberatory Imagination and this poem came swirling to the surface. The first time I read it in October, it altered my brain chemistry. Since that day, it has been traveling in my system occasionally coming up for new air.
As I started painting with my old watercolors I stuck in a plastic bag, the blues and the purples felt dreamy and somber like I was being pulled into a daydream of an alternate reality where we didn’t really lose all the Palestinian children to colonial violence…and where all those children didn’t lose their arms and legs…and where they didn’t have to endure surgery without anesthesia. The longing of that timeline is so painful. And I’m not their parent, grandparent, uncle, aunt, sister, or neighbor. How I long for this alternative timeline where they could escape this nightmare.
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There’s this passage from Holding Space by adrienne maree brown where they quote from The Prophet by Khalil Gibran: “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
I bring up that quote, because the dissonance of my joy and sorrow is maddening. In one day, I can feel such deep sadness and also such deep joy. I hate it! The rollercoaster between the highs, lows, and normalcy is overwhelming. I can and will mention Ismatu Gwendolyn everyday - the first essay I read from her is titled “There is no revolution without madness.” To be for the Revolution is to be mad. To dream of another world is to be mad. To cope with the reality of this world requires us to be mad.
Today I’m really digesting that. I want to be more in acceptance of that and fight against it less. Being back from my rest sabbatical for only two weeks, I’m already feeling myself slide back into a state of mental and physical sickness. So instead of fighting so hard to snap myself out of it, maybe I need to let it be. While I have a wonderful set of somatic techniques, tinctures, recipes, and relationships that are supportive (very thankful for all of it), it can only go so far in this reality. And maybe that’s ok.
Going back to painting, it felt really nice to be attuned to a physical piece of paper and physical paint and physical water and physical paint brushes and a physical pen. The amount of screen time I have per day makes me want to throw up. Note to self: less screen time. There’s something I can’t put my finger on…something about timelines, portals, physical realm, time, and liberatory imagination.
To close every post:
What does Liberatory Imagination spark in me today?
Hues of blues. The relationship and overlap of sorrow and joy. Palestinian, Congolese, Sudanese children naive of pain, loss, or violence. Creating a portal to a world free from white supremacy, empires, and colonialism.
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