Tag: life

484: “Your Strangest and Funniest Friend” (Dave Eggers & Amanda Uhle)

                “Find your strangest and funniest friend. Have that strange friend find their funniest and strangest friend.” -Dave Eggers & Amanda Uhle, Introducing Unnecessarily Beautiful Spaces for Young Minds on Fire

                This is going to be a little all over the place, because you know when a child comes running up to you because there’s a cat outside and the cat was climbing a tree and my friend climbs trees and we love plums and did I tell you we’re building a spaceship that might be a garden? Were you that kid, sometimes? Are you still?
                Today my friend Jackie and I were sitting at a table, enjoying the breath of a gentle breeze and squinting through bright electric lights, and trying to work. It happens sometimes. She was working on an application for funding, which would help make possible some of her wildly cool research. I was trying to read Aja Martinez’s Counterstory, also wildly cool, and important for a journal article I’m revising. It’s all work we believe in. And we just didn’t want to do it. Our snacks had helped, fueling a few more keystrokes, but all the snacks were gone.
                So Jackie showed me Nael’s “The Tiger.” You might’ve seen it before—a spark of a little poem, and it jumped through all sorts of social media a couple years ago. The author’s a child. The poem’s full of a wild, brave, world-making excitement. “The Tiger” was published in a collection edited by 826DC, a very cool place that I’m definitely not reading more about (instead of doing my other work). I didn’t know this strange friend but I immediately recognized them as friends with 826 Valencia—a very cool someone, if you haven’t met them, and probably worth some not-reading of your own. And we do love plums. And there is a cat outside. And sometimes in learning from children (of all ages, 6 and 25 and 92) I remember that I’m a strange friend who loves my strange friends and that together we’re definitely making something.

by Azlan

467: “The Scale of Breathing” (Alexis Pauline Gumbs)

                “What is the scale of breathing? You put your hand on your individual chest as it rises and falters all day. But is that the scale of breathing? You share air and chemical exchange with everyone in the room, everyone you pass today. Is the scale of breathing within one species? All animals participate in this exchange of release for continued life. But not without the plants. The plants in their inverse process, release what we need, take what we give without being asked. And the planet, wrapped in ocean breathing, breathing into sky. What is the scale of breathing? You are part of it now. You are not alone.”-Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, p. 1

                The other day I was walking after a conversation that left me feeling unbalanced, unsafe. Through beautiful hills, I should add: sundrenched gold grass and oaks holding up the tiny ocean depths of their deep shade. Woodpeckers on the branches. Deer resting. But that conversation had me feeling scared, so I imagined some of the people I’m closest to walking with me. Their feet in these hills. Then I realized they weren’t just walking: one of them was wearing gold pants and dancing. One twirled their fingers, chunky rings glinting in the sun. Some were laughing. Some sad. Some transforming. And all of us were breathing.
                All this has me thinking about Gumbs and the scales of breathing. Because after I started imagining these friends and teachers and guides with me, I felt so much more grounded. So much more possible. My breath possible. My fear possible, too, but not as an ending: as thorny brambles in these sunwashed hills. And then as I pay more attention to these people dancing along with me, I feel how we’re dancing along with the gold grass (dry, now, and shining, and green again when the rains come) and the trees (their roots digging into the earth in a way that teaches holding, while at the same time they tickle and are tickled by sky). And I remember Gumbs. You are part of it now. Breathing and breathed along as skies inhale ocean, exhale summer breeze.

by Azlan