Tag: love

469: “Here In My Heart” (Moana)

“I will carry you here in my heart, you remind me
That come what may—I know the way—”
                –Moana

                Tomorrow I’m getting married!
                Tonight I just finished watching Moana with my partner, my siblings, my nieces, and my mom. This morning uncles and cousins and friends and family came together in a park to chat and meet and celebrate. (And eat delicious food). As one of my cousins was leaving, we paused in the parking lot, talking just a little more. I commented that when I moved away—to Massachusetts for college, at seventeen, then to India and Oklahoma and Illinois for work—I didn’t quite understand that moving meant all my people back here would be relationships I had to visit from far away. Of course I knew that. But I didn’t understand. 
                My cousin laughed and said something casual about here we were, though, chatting. Still connected.
                Tonight, one of my favorite parts of the movie is Moana running to hug her grandmother’s spirit. In lots of movies, the animators might depict the spirit as incorporeal—Moana’s hands could pass right through. A spirit could become a light to guide or talk but not to touch. Instead Moana throws herself forward and her grandmother’s spirit catches her. Holds her. The two leaning together. I love how real we are to each other, across whatever seas. I love how we love.

by Azlan

465: A “Photo of my Grandma” (Alexis Pauline Gumbs)

                “I found this yearbook photo of my grandma when she was sixteen yesterday and I can’t stop looking in her eyes. I am so grateful and proud to be in the lineage of this fierce black indigenous woman who would grow up to face her fear of flying, and all her other fears, participate in revolutions, found countless organizations, work in solidarity with women all over the world and speak destiny into her granddaughter’s ear. I love every version of you.💜”
                -Alexis Pauline Gumbs on her instagram

                I love every version of you.
                Going through boxes, today, finding photographs of my grandparents ten years younger than I am now, my great grandmother younger than I am now, I feel a kind of tickling glee. An excitement, almost mischievous, like sneaking downstairs at nine years old to taste the cookies I’m not supposed to eat and finding them something I can’t name. Ginger and cayenne pepper, maybe, and delicious. 
                And then I feel a kind of distance. All my grandparents have passed away. Looking into their eyes I wish I’d learned more from them. Sat more often with them. Stood or knelt at their elbow to work in the garden or play a game or plan a local meeting for one of the associations/clubs they joined/led. And I feel a kind of depth. It’s so easy, with instagram, with the press of a hustle culture and the fears of an expansion economy, to think that now is somehow more real than then. Today I held hair my great grandmother trimmed from my grandmother’s head. A little icky, honestly, and a lot sweet, and packed neatly in tissue paper. Today I held an award my grandparents’ won in a bridge tournament, and some of the cards they played with, and spare dice stored meticulously in my grandfather’s pill bottle. (My mom says I get my love of dice and card games from them). Today I stepped into the oceans of their wild, vibrant, chance, eclectic, chaotic lives. And those lives felt close. And those lives felt far away. And that everyday habit of pretending my life is somehow more real than theirs seemed so laughable. And Gumbs suggested one way through the distance and the closeness is gratitude and love for every version of you.

by Azlan

459: A Relationship Between Writer and Reader (John Duffy)

                “To say writing involves ethical choices is to say that when creating a text, the writer addresses others. And that, in turn, initiates a relationship between writer and readers […].” -John Duffy, “Writing Involves Making Ethical Choices,” Naming What We Know p. 31

                As a freshman in undergrad, I took Professor Kim Townsend’s class called “Friendship.” I think I picked it because I liked the reading list, and stayed with it because I really liked him. But I was surprised to see that title. At the time I might’ve thought something like, what’s there to study about friendship?
                Although maybe that’s not quite fair to my young me. Two years earlier, my Spanish teacher Bill Churchill commented there was something strange in how people from the USA used the phrase “my best friend.” He said something like, “You’ll ask them, and they’ll say, ‘Oh my best friend lives in Colorado, my best friend moved to New York, I see them once a year.’ But when I say mejor amigo I usually mean someone I see or talk to every day.” Listening, sixteen year old me wasn’t sure what to make of this. I thought about all the different connections that could be understood as “friends.” I was just starting to think about how the USA’s specific cultural setups made space (or did not make space) for adult friends who see each other.
                Today, reading John Duffy, I’m thinking about all the different ways I suggest a relationship between people. So many of them are written (in texts, in emails) or recorded (in the YouTuber’s “Like, comment, subscribe!” or my “It’s been too long!” on a voicemail, suggesting we might get back in touch). So many of them are in person—the different variations of my “let’s go for a walk” (where Dusty and I pose friendship as meandering punctuated by trees, by squirrels) and Ishita’s “I’ll bring eye pens!” (where Ishita and I pose friendship as a play of colors, lines, makeup) and my “I just want to lie on the floor” (where Dani and I pose friendship as an exhausted quietness, side by side as semester’s end shuffles by). I’m glad young me didn’t know all the things friendship might be. That I felt a quiet wow at the possibilities, like looking down into deep water, and still feel that sometimes, before I write or walk or sit down with the eye pens or lie on the floor, hush, lets listen, sinking into hardwood, together.

by Azlan

458: “There Will Be A Name” (Marcelo Hernandez Castillo)

                “Because the bird flew before / there was a word / for flight / years from now / there will be a name / for what you and I are doing.”
                -Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, from “Cenzóntle,” Queer Poets of Color

                The birds have been singing in my neighborhood, and I love it. And I know, yes, that’s the kind of thing that people say is cliché—the birds are singing—but it’s delightful to let myself be delighted with all these things that are sometimes called clichés.
                Marcelo Hernandez Castillo helps me here. I love how Castillo (and poetry, and love, and Castillo’s loving poetry) plays back and forth with the meaning of things, and for me, the rhythm of that play washes me at least two different ways. There is the idea I read: how there was flight before the word “flight,” how what we do will become a linguistic possibility because we’ve done it. What you and I are doing becomes a word, a thing we can say. We name we’ve taken up to live with.
                And another way. I can say “the birds are singing,” that old cliché, but the cliché isn’t the specific birds who are right now outside my window. The birds who might be the same ones who sang to my friend and I yesterday evening, as we lay in the grass outside. Those good neighbors. Or maybe they’re new birds, new neighbors. And though I say “the grass outside” don’t think it was only grass, or don’t think grass is simple (a mistake I sometimes make), because as we lay there we noticed so many different leaves, so many different shades of green, so many growing joys in what I could simply call a “field.” There is so much more abundance, so much more life, than my simple namings. And while there will be a name for what we do, another side of that same thought, for me, is that the name for what we do will be part of our doing—maybe a celebration of it, or a reminder, or an invitation—without being all of our doing. Without being the birds or the songs that they’re singing. Which is lovely, isn’t it?

by Azlan