Uproar – a quote every Wednesday

471: “No One Knows It All” (Paulo Freire)

                “Humility helps us to understand this obvious truth: No one knows it all; no one is ignorant of everything.” -Paulo Freire, “On the Indispensable Qualities of Progressive Teachers for Their Better Performance”

                Twelve days ago, when my love and I got married, we didn’t have an officiant. We welcomed people and exchanged vows ourselves. Most of the ceremony itself (before the tamales!) was our family group of 22 sitting in a circle beneath the redwoods. Each person shared a thought or a celebration or a wish, or something else they wanted to say. I loved listening. I loved the branching, rooting, connecting of our voices.
                I love living Freire’s humility and obvious truth, too. It feels so right. At the same time, when I hear someone say “no one knows everything,” there’s usually a kind of sting to the thought. Like it’s embarrassing, or like the statement itself is barbed. I get why. So many of the cultures I live in value a kind of performative knowing and devalue uncertainty, confusion, complexity. I spend a lot of time at a university, and it’s amazing how many professors won’t admit what they don’t know. When I talk to my friends in tech or finance or law or medicine or…well, you get it, and my friends in those spaces say something similar. The not-knowing can be portrayed as a threat. A failure. A weakness.
                I loved that, with our joined families at our wedding, not knowing anywhere close to everything just felt like a celebration. Of course these wonderful people had insights to share that were different from others’ insights. Of course some of them saw things I didn’t see. Sometimes their voices brushed past my thoughts, our worldviews interweaving like roots below the ground, and sometimes our branches reached off in different directions, and all of it was wonderful to share.

by Azlan

470: Receptive Language, & Listening (Alexis Pauline Gumbs)

                “What I want to say to you requires a more nuanced field of receptive language than I have ever spoken. It requires me to reshape my forehead, my lungs. It requires me to redistribute my dependence on visual information. So I will close my eyes and say it: Here. Here I am. Here I am with you. Here is all of me. And here we are.” -Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

                I’m writing this from an airplane. Billowing white clouds outside. The jets thrumming through the wall where I rest my head.
                Last week my beloved and I got married. As part of the ceremony we read Alexis Pauline Gumbs out loud, including the lines above. Gumbs is thinking about the way marine mammals speak and listen across oceans. How the shape of their bodies collects sound, connects songs. Resonates. Now, as we travel back home, I’m practicing listening. A long, slow, lovely practice. I hear my partner chatting with our sweet seat mate. I hear our seat mate’s baby, discovering fingers and red grapes. I hear all the little sounds of people shifting and talking. I hear breathing. I hear keystrokes. All around I hear the wind, threaded through with the jet’s thrum, and I think about the sky as an ocean of air that we all swim through. How precious every breath. How precious the chance to share them. How delightful, my love, to listen, to practice that close-eyed receptive language that sings through oceans. That sings here we are.

by Azlan

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

468: “After A Time” (Katherine Addison)

                “After a time, he felt a deeper rhythm, the rhythm of the stone and water, not the rhythm of his words and heartbeat. He breathed into this deeper rhythm, let it teach him a new mantra, a wordless mantra that waxed and waned, ebbed and flowed, moon and stars and clouds, river and sun, the wordless singing of the earth beneath it all like the world’s own heartbeat.”
                -Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor, p. 138

                Yesterday over dinner we talked about words, and how words open the space for new kinds of understanding. For example, two years ago I didn’t know what poison hemlock looks like. Then someone taught me, gave me a name for what I was seeing, and now I notice it along streets in Illinois or behind the sand dunes in California. And this evening, sitting beneath a big oak, I heard a squirrel scurrying. Saw the bobbing grass. Listened to the bark against my hand. The pauses in between my partner and I talking, and the touch, as we sat closer, of earth to root to sap to bark to skin to air to leaf to squirrel.
                I almost forgot to post to Uproar today. I forgot because I was outside, looking at a bright star, wondering if it was a planet. Because the night felt so cool after the hot day. One of my favorite parts of Uproar is the rhythm of it, the practice of turning towards a quote that means a lot to me, and sitting with those words. And tonight in the almost-forgetting I’m delighted by losing track of Wednesdays. By listening to sunset, tasting the day’s heat melt into coolness, and breathing towards these rhythms. Sometimes words help me get ‘there,’ but often the words themselves are not where I’m going.

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

466: A Riddle (Richard Wilbur)

“Long daughter of the forest, swift of pace.
In whom old neighbors join as beam and brace,
I speed on many paths, yet leave no trace.”
-Richard Wilbur’s “Navis,” which is a translation of a riddle by Symphosius

                I’ve been going through boxes in my mom’s garage. Some of them I packed ten years ago, or twenty. Some my mom packed when I was small, and a few have envelopes or little boxes my grandma collected when my mom was small. Today we found my grandma’s birth certificate and coins she saved, complete with a handwritten note to my mom explaining that these would be valuable and they were “for the grandkids.”
                A few days before that I found my college copy of Richard Wilbur. The poem I quoted is from a series of riddle poems. I’m trying not to give away the answer. That way you can go walk around with i if you want. (The implied question in this series is always, What am I? And Wilbur uses the answer, in its original Latin, as a title). Leafing through this book, fifteen years later, I recognize so many of the poems. Looking through these documents and pictures, so many years later, I recognize so many of the moments. I’ve forgotten or never knew so many more. So many of us, joining to brace each other. So quick the way our lives wash through each other. I like how the poem and old handwriting and the act of remembering are all riddles, or could be. Are all inviting me to sit for a moment, or walk along with the image, listening to its hints.

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

464: a home is “active, emergent, in relation” (Sarah Keeton)

                “…we do not initially come to learning, to being, to knowing, as passive recipients, absorbing the gift of the expertise or “teachers” around us (Freire), but rather we come to knowledge, active, emergent, in relation, co-constructing our reality (LeMaster “Fostering,” Sprague “Expanding,” Toyosaki “Praxis-Oriented”), like my niece, my sister-in-law, and my brother, finding ways to communicate within our respective realities.” -Sarah Keeton, “Tracing the Past to (Re)imagine the Future: A Black Queer Pedagogy of Becoming” 

                My partner and I sometimes tell each other, “You’re my home.” (I like that more than lots of the short descriptions for love that I hear in songs and TV shows: you’re my world, you’re the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, and all like that). A home isn’t where we spend all our time. A home, the kind I want, is part of a wider community of collaborating, of coming and going, of walking to work in nearby gardens and having friends over to tell stories all together. And I suppose, in that community, the home I want to help build is a refuge and a delight, a kitchen for cooking food we share, a couch for resting, a table for laying out games and questions and conversations. A home is where I can invite you to spend a few nights next time you’re nearby.
                Today my partner and I are starting the process of moving into a house that will become our home. And I’m thinking about homes as something we learn: a way of being around each other, caring for each other, laughing with each other and noticing what our different laughters and quiets and pauses mean. I’m thinking about homes as something that absorb the time and energy and intent they help shelter. The wood alive with voices just as it’s alive with the sun’s voice. I’m thinking about homes as emergent, alive in the breath of our interaction, a collaboration between builders and painters, neighbors and squirrels, trees and moths, families and friends. A touchpoint between so many lives..

by Azlan

463: “Research is my saving grace” (Shelby Criswell)

                “Research is my saving grace, and it led me to every person who inspires me in this book.” -Shelby Criswell, Queer as all Get Out: 10 People Who’ve Inspired Me

                Sometimes I think about the many different things research can be.
                Most of the undergraduate students I teach don’t like “it.” Research papers feel like a threat. Or maybe I’m projecting, because for me, “research papers” often felt like a threat. There was a right way to do it, though people wouldn’t tell you—they’d just tell you what you did wrong. There was a place you were supposed to find in the pile of encyclopedias, library books, search engines, online journal databases. It was like trying to find the right grain of sand on the beach.
                In my classes I’ve started playing two games. The first is a common wikipedia game, the one where you start with some page (this one, for instance) and try to get to a common page (this one, for instance) in as few clicks as possible. (Or as quickly as possible). Then you can play around by talking to people about the different “paths” people took through information. The second is starting with some random page and then clicking along until you find your way to something that interests you. I like hearing people describe their experiences with these two games. Some people say the first is fun, because someone wins: there’s a goal, a finish line, and in a group someone does it the fastest. That gives the game momentum. Some people say the second is fun because there isn’t a goal, a finish line, and in a group no one has to do it the fastest. I get both. And I wonder about what I mean by research, or rather, the many things I could mean, and all the different ways to walk into or excavate or link or challenge or weave together or build with or sing along to the so many ideas washing around us. 
                So it’s fun to stumble across perspectives like Shelby Criswell’s. There are plenty of times I still don’t like “research.” Times I feel intimidated by it, or frustrated by what voices the research-assigner counts as “legitimate” or not, or realize I’m more interested in some question besides the one I’m “supposed” to be focused on. And sometimes I love it. Or even find my way to love through it.

by Azlan

462: “The Height of My Ambition” (Katherine Addison)

                “The height of my ambition at the moment is to make it into bed.” -Katherine Addison, The Angel of the Crows

                I read somewhere that snoozing in the morning doesn’t actually help you get up more rested. I can’t remember the source (probably somewhere I wandered online, and probably not reliable), but the idea was that slipping in and out of sleep doesn’t bring you into REM for that deep rest. So I set out to stop snoozing in the morning. To get up as soon as I woke up. A few years later that changing habit came up in a conversation with my therapist, who said, “Well, but I love that time in the morning. Especially with my partner.” And I was like, huh. I love that time too. The warmth. The skin. The half-awake togetherness, dreams messing around nearby like kids who know it’s time to stop playing but also know it’s still time for playing.
                So I like Katherine Addison’s play with ambition. The ambition to make it into bed. To stay there for a good long time. My to-do list for tomorrow is long-ish, and today’s was long-ish, but maybe I’ll add in a “height of ambition” that’s playing veo veo with my partner (“I spy with my little eye,” in Spanish) or saying hello to the bushes I hurried by today. Touching their textures. Ambitions of a moment, an hour, an afternoon. Some friends and I once spent several years compiling a list of words that are animals and actions (fly, of course, and badger, ferret, duck, ram, wolf—horse if you allow “horse around,” and we disagreed on “shark”). We could’ve googled it but that’s cheating. What a lovely ambition of the moment that was.

by Azlan