eclipsing vocations: the path of totality

alt. title "look-a there, look-a there, look-a there now" (ft. a poem by Lucille Clifton)

Hello gentle-people,

Did you know it is National Poetry Month? I tend not to pay attention to these things. I often cannot keep up—especially if it involves a writing challenge.¹

But I am still a poet. I am still amazed by what poetry can do (and does). I am still thinking of the poems that have changed my life. Who would I be, if not for the "night vision" of Lucille Clifton?

I am coming upon a trauma anniversary around this time of year. Also, as I write, it is Eclipse Day, and I am festively adorned in these wide-legged sun and moon pants I thrifted.

I am amazed at the quality of the joy I am finding in this season, even as I am a year away from the scariest season I’ve experienced so far in life—

—I am still trying to “build something human.”

From behind a window, a Black woman into out to see the sun eclipsed by a bar, the image is cast in shades of teal, black, and white.

"night vision" by Lucille Clifton

the girl fits her body in
 to the space between the bed
 and the wall. she is a stalk,
 exhausted. she will do some
 thing with this. she will
 surround these bones with flesh,
 she will cultivate night vision.
 she will train her tongue
 to lie still in her mouth and listen.
 the girl slips into sleep.
 her dream is red and raging.
 she will remember
 to build something human with it.

a shifting tongue

I was recently in a room with incredible poets, in a strange old library full of books by revered dead white men. In that room, a Native American and Black American poet recited their words, in front of a mostly white audience. When I went up to get my book signed by one of the poets highlighted, I ran into the organizer, a local Black woman poet who is quite well-known. I stumbled through my introduction of myself when she so kindly asked me about my work. I even forgot my work email address when I went to write it down. I walked away thinking to myself, “She’s never going to reach out to me. She was just being nice.”

Truth is, most of my experience in that room was deeply awkward. I am not an unpublished poet, if this newsletter counts…if self-published devotional collections count. But in that room, I was aware of a world where other things count that I have yet to discover for myself. Being a poet is a vocation I can live into without being published anywhere noteworthy, for sure. But there are ways I long to be in conversation and community with other poets.²

I once felt a similar longing theologically—like I was left out of a conversation that was about my life and the key to being a part of it was developing a particular vocabulary. During my two seminary degrees, I found that the bricks being laid were being set on a slippery foundation. I followed the slipperiness into a place that led me back into the arms of poetry.

I felt like I kept looking up at this tower everyone was trying to protect and build upward and all I could see was an imminent fall. A fall I wanted to both mourn and celebrate, as we co-facilitated our way into communities that would help us build “something human” instead.

(So) I found some home in the misfitted-ness of theopoetics,³ even if that home also involves some kind of revolution from me and those who look like me.⁴ By revolution, I mean what Remica Bingham-Risher describes here:

“Revolution is the rate of a working engine, but also reincarnation or epoch; life's wheel, turning. In geology, it is when a region, a mass, a mountain occurs. Are we a mountain? Us, here – the new working, living, Black women, poets? Yes, of course, we have been made out of some shifting (emphasis mine).”

—Remica Bingham-Risher, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and the Questions that Grew Me Up

Friendships with poets are different. As I say it, I cannot quite explain fully what I mean…but I consider real moments in my life with poet friends. Those who overhear our conversations will wonder what planet we are from because we are discussing that very question ourselves. We can meet at the most vulnerable sights of our becoming, traversing each other’s vast emotional landscapes and still forget (or never know) each others’ last names, birthdays, and what we do for work. So when my poet-friend who also attended this event held space for me to name this hybridity, I felt seen and heard.

I admitted to him, “My poetry feels too spiritual in some places, and yet I feel too poetic in theological spaces.”⁵ This feels like just one of the hybridities that I am forging. But I also wish to express how often I wish I could be clothed and protected from its occasional shame.

But I know there is a shift(-ing) happening, a revolution on its way because I am again asking for “night vision.”

Though, to be honest, Lucille—

I wonder if I have trained my tongue to “lie still in [my] mouth and listen” a bit too well. Lucille, tell me, is it time yet to get loud?

not an eclipse, but a path that is open somewhere, leading out into a sunset reflected on the waters. maybe we can go there..maybe we’re just meant to enjoy it from here.

a shifting volume

“For colored girls who listened to grunge, punk, and alt rock growing up because it was the only safe way to channel eldest daughter rage.”

— me, on Threads

We are all holding multiple vocations, or at least, we should if our lives have multiple dimensions (read: they do). We have communal vocations, we have seasonal vocations, we have vocations that enter our lives as we forge new relationships— and yet we love singularity. Many of us are actively seeking out simple ways of naming ourselves.

I picked up this book called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein.⁶ Epstein frames the importance of generalists in what he calls “the wicked world,” one where the simple rules of achievement (mapped out by simple games/standards) come up against a world of complicated variables. The idea of the world being wicked feels like the kind of cynicism I am trying not to live within. Desperately. I want to see the world as fertile soil, possibly muddy but certainly full of potential to nourish new living things.

But to take Epstein’s offering lightly, I am a generalist—out of necessity and from the worn-out desire to “become all things to men that I might win a few,” as the Apostle Paul says. The world was wicked to me when I was born first of nine, in a patriarchal culture that demanded so many sacrifices from me. Embedded in this anti-Black world, I am also actively resisting narratives in this wicked world that would have me writhing in silent pain yet smiling.⁷ My holiness, as I once understood it, was measured by how much pain I could take without breaking. Silence and suffering went hand in hand.⁸

What Epstein offers in this book, in some way, is an affirmation for those of us who are Jacks-, Jills-, and Jaimes-of-all-trades. In some ways, what I am searching for in books like Range is an affirmation for those of us who could not sit still because we knew it betrayed some kind of urge in us to move. Move away from harm or move away into a different kind of light.

What if, I reached for all of these things to grasp for a freedom in the writhing?

I wrestle with what Paul says of his freedom in 1 Corinthians 9. He was expressing a sense of aliveness that arises from hope in the good news (gospel). What I reached for, in becoming weak or strong, was not for the good news. I was writhing in a wicked world, putting on whatever power I could to save my life. What I often found was a narrow space defined by the kind of exhaustion Black women know when we meet each other’s eyes in the narrow spaces, shake our heads, sigh, and say, “Girl.”

Thus I raise my discontentment to save my life, on multiple levels. I will risk being called a bitch to bitch about the things that reach out to bind me in ways that make me a resource to be drained. Loud Black women are not well-loved in this world but neither are silent ones.

We, the formerly silent, are learning how to embrace our loudness. The truth is, for many of us, voicing the tenderness our lives demand necessitates getting loud. It is often the labor pains of our frustrations that birth new movements of freedom, expansiveness, and aliveness.

I am reminded by ebonyjanice, in her book All the Black Girls Are Activists,⁹ that seeking loudness is a (fourth wave) womanist pursuit, defying the confines of respectability culture.¹⁰ In her chapter, “In Pursuit of Loudness,” she names the importance of getting loud about what you don’t like, what is harmful towards you, and what is suppressing your humanity. “The freedom to be loud is revolutionary,” she writes. I agree with ebonyjanice, since I have been bearing witness to this truths in a number of ways:

1. I remember Kimberly Jones, stating profoundly, the importance of Black rage in the movement for Black lives, especially when she gets into the explanation of how “the social contract has been broken,” over the course of 400+ years for Black people. She ends, with the profound statement: “White people are lucky all Black people want is equality and not revenge.”

2. I also consider the anger of Cole Arthur Riley, leading her to form the Instagram page “Black Liturgies (@blackliturgies).” In response to the shifting ground of anti-Blackness, erupting into protests in the streets, her inner revolution led her to create a platform that affirms Black people’s liturgical expressions.

Cole’s second book, Black Liturgies, continues the wonderful work of centering Black stories and expressions of humanity as divine.

3. I consider the anger of another woman who reached for all the genres she wanted to, to show off the fullness of who she is—Beyoncé Knowles Carter:

   “Used to say I spoke too country
   And the rejection came, said I wasn't country 'nough.”

Out of her writhing, a shifting into aliveness brought her to a revolution we are all now witnessing in music today. This is good news for so many Black artists who were pigeonholed into genres that did not embrace their fullness or erased from genres they have historically started. She stands before us an eclipse, we must see her through the Black lens. Some of us are creating the lens we need to enjoy this album and see more of its radiance in the days to come.¹¹

4. I now reach for all the things I know I can be and all the things I know I am to create space for the parts of me in this season that are learning to be loud. Publically and privately, I am singing my loudest, under the silly (& serious) moniker Eldest Dawtah Rage.¹²

Lucille,

As I lay with my “dreams red and raging,” I am seething in my ambitions:

Oooo they are gonna know I was here, that I was alive! That I was, in the words of Porsha Olayiwola “pissed the f**k off!” That something did not sit right with me. And so I shifted. Oh, yup! I’m gonna tell them how that shift saved my life.

Isn’t that good news?

eclipsing vocations: in search of totality

I graduated from seminary in January and received a couple of certificates along with my degree. As part of a colloquium for completing one of the certificates, I shared a bit on my vocational journey and how deeply important embracing “rest as vocation” has been. How it opened up a window for me to do the work I have done these last few years. I keep coming back to this tension, found in the labor of softness. I wrote a bit about it here:

making it work: on a vocation of softness

How will I hold it all?

People have been asking me this question for a long time. How do I make time to do all the things I do? How do I find “time” to rest?

I understand softness to be one of eclipsing vocations and I can understand why some have a hard time seeing it…they haven’t put on a Black lens. They haven’t seen how many of us need to hold multiple things as we endeavor to “build something human.” They don’t get understand that this is a matter of totality for some of us. We are seeking alignment.

The “space between the bed and the wall,” is an eclipse, isn’t it? Thurman would say our backs are against the wall, aren’t they? And yet so many of us long for the restful, gentle, landing the bed promises. Some of us can sleep standing up, some with one eye open….but all of us are jealous of the small children who can fall asleep in the church service, sweating in their 3-piece suits.¹³

I am making peace with the misfitedness found in this space, and how it points to my need for a shift or a revolution. An eclipse that can only be viewed through a particular lens by those willing to understand what good news it is to finally come into alignment….even briefly.

(But) must I keep writhing? (This a question for Christ and Clifton.)

What stress will my bones release as I shift into the narrow spaces I am allowed? Once there, will the truth of my aliveness remain a secret to the world and to me?

Will I know the freedom that comes with telling a story so good, that it requires me to pull close all these seemly disparate parts of myself?

Am I telling that story now?

Is this human enough…or too desperately human?

Lucille—

I am still building, though the ground still shifts every time I think I can trust a foundation.

But I think, I am remembering how to take a fall. I think I am finding some good places to land.

a shifting weight: the path of totality

I cannot be a whole mountain, but perhaps, as Black woman poet, I can be a part of a gathering together that becomes one. As Bingham-Risher tells me and as I know—I am being made out of a shifting. I know I found my people when I see them shifting, too. They don’t trust these foundations either.

(So) we hold the weight together.

me in my eclipse pants, posture communicating that I am ready to be amazed

Back to the eclipse—I am sitting in my sun and moon pants, with the yellow Converses I don’t wear often because hello sensible shoe era. I am taking little sneak peaks outside to see the eclipse. I am giddy. My dad calls to say “give me a report, we are watching it from inside the house on TV.” I now feel a sense of duty added to the moment: I have shifted from another norm in my own family and I must now bear witness and testify to where the shift has led me.

I have spent a lot of time “cultivating night vision,” so I am unafraid with my Black frames on, filtering out what will harm me so I can take this all in. This is a moment and I feel the weight of it as I prepare for whatever will shift in me. I know I am watching this sight alongside many people—some who have made the trips to key places along its route where they will see a total eclipse, the path of totality. I know that I am not on it, it least for the cosmic event that was April 8, 2024.

But I am shifting and writhing. Getting loud and getting free. I feel like a personal eclipse is just beginning, as the seemingly disparate parts of me come together. I cannot tell you get how to appreciate it, where and when it will appear.¹⁴

But I am writing to lay a new foundation and as far as I can tell you, we must keep the layers light, since what I am building is human—I don’t want to bury her breath. I am aware of how much pain comes in carrying so much... So I will lay the words I find into the communal work that can hold them. I want her to have the space to lay down, stand up, or decide “now is the time to chase the wind, or something.”¹⁵

Landing Tracks

1. Come Celebrate with Me:¹⁶ As I said, I am coming upon a year, one revolution of the sun, around some events in my life that led me into the deepest trust fall of my life. I am thankful for the community that held me during that time and the community I still have now. I want to especially thank and remember the “night vision” cohort for the flowers that were waiting for me in the new home I made after the fall out. I want to thank my closest friends and family, who covered me in love. I want to thank the professors who saw my well-being as more important than a grade and allowed me all the space I needed to finish my program well. “…come celebrate with me, that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed.”

2. Name a Revolution in You: What is shifting for you, gentle-human, as you read these words today? Though they will land for you days after the eclipse, what eclipsing vocations can you name? What lens must we dawn to bear witness to you properly?

3. For You, Holding All the Things: If so, where is it safe to fall? Where can you go to explore the possibility of building something human? Who can come alongside you in the work of reshaping you after a/the fall?

4. For You, Seeking a Writing Community: I’ve teamed up with some great people to host a writing group called Locked In a weekly virtual writing session for Black, Indigenous, & Writers of Color, and writers of the global majority. We write together every Friday at 9:00 AM ET. If you’re looking for some community around writing, please tap in.

1. I tried two years ago to write a poem every day in April…tried and failed.

2. This is not to disregard the beautiful ways I am already in community with poets. Perhaps, what I am seeking is my place at an event like the one I attended.

3. Shoutout to the friend who introduced me to

Callid

, which felt like a re-learning and re-assembling of truths of ways I already was. Along the way, I have met and fellowshipped with others who respond these ways of seeing the world.

4. A revolution is happening—and some cool scholars in the field assembled to write this book that is on my TBR list, called Theopoetics in Color.

5. To say more, I keep wanting poets who are speaking in ways that aren’t immediately clocked as spiritual to be in conversation with theologians who do not realize they are offering something poetic. As an interdisciplinary-whatever-I-am, I feel like I am walking while holding hands with seperated parents—As I seek to understand them and they are misunderstanding each other and me. But the story of this estrangement is lifetimes older than me.

6. I try to read a few popular self-help books when I find time or have interest. I don’t often consume them whole—I will shave off the pieces that make sense and leave the rest for the compost bin. So don’t take this as a recommendation.

7. Zora Neale Hurston said, “If you are silent about your pain, they will kill you and say you enjoyed it.”

8. I recently explored a bit of this in my last newsletter:

9. This is an affiliate link.

10. I loved this definition ebonyjanice provided on respectability: “Respectability politics are defined as a set of beliefs, holding that conformity to prescribe main screen standard to the appearance and behavior will protect a person who is part of a marginalized group, especially black person, from prejudice and systemic injustices. The politics of respectability is a form of moralistic discourse used by certain people and – usually elders, public and prominent figures, leaders, and scholars and – who are members of those various marginalized groups, asserting, that to book, act, behave, dress, and present a certain way is to ensure safety inside of an anti-black capitalist society.” (All the Black Girls Are Activists, 17)

11. Let me be clear: I fell into the #BeyHive quite late (Renaissance made me this way). I love it here and am content to stay. *affectionately rubs new membership card*

12. There’s no telling what will happen with this and I love that for now. If you plan to cast any visions here, do so lightly. It is simply a big deal to me in this season that I want to be found singing. I don’t need anyone to tell me how far they want it to go. I really just sing to be here.

13. Pause here if this is visceral for you. I remember super long church services…and as the oldest child, I was never able to just fall asleep without being chastised later. So I would watch as those younger and more carefree than me could let their heads fall onto my shoulder, then my lap. The occasional toss and turn would reveal pools of sweat (and/or drool), the yawning masked only by the loudness of the service. When I say jealousy has a long memory.

14. If you need to know anything about me, its that I both love a Calendly link and hate having to tell anyone what time I am going to be anywhere.

15. Again, Beyonce’s “American Requiem.” Also another great Lucille Clifton poem, “blessing the boats,” holds the words “may you kiss the wind then turn from it, certain that it will love your back.” Perhaps I need to write a post on Lucille Clifton and Cowboy Carter. Comment if you agree!

16. Yet another Clifton poem you should know by now, “won’t you celebrate with me.”