I know by heart
a gentle landing through Lucille Clifton's words
Hello gentle-people,
Some of you may remember this past summer I started the “new bones” fund associated with the various fellowship/cohort journeys I’ve been on. One of the opportunities I am taking part in is a fellowship through Emory University’s Rose Library. I will be studying the Lucille Clifton papers this coming month!
I invite you to tip my scholarship if you’ve been blessed by something I’ve shared on here, or beyond here. Funds will go towards Uber/Lyft and breakfast/lunch on my study days.
Preparing for my trip mentally, spiritually, and physically has taken up a lot of my spare time as of late. I have decided that I will enter another season of intentional rest from publishing when I return from my trip so I can process what I’ve learned and just incubate for awhile.
But for today, I wanted to share some special moments from my camera roll and from my time on Substack connected to my life as a Lucille Clifton scholar. To begin, it is important to know that I study her poetry slow and remembering them by heart tends to happen because I revisit her poems over and over. When I sit and ponder their meaning in my life, I find myself on the path to becoming more human. Her words help ground me and draw out new ways for me to appreciate being in the world as a disabled queer Black woman.
This past Sunday, I attended the Black Contemplative Prayer Summit and heard Josue Perea call this “literature-as-divina.” Someone in the Zoom chat also offered the term “poetica divina,” which I appreciate. Lectio Divina also works if you’re willing to embrace texts outside of traditonal religious texts as sacred. Having language to describe this way of engaging in Clifton’s work has felt so deeply affirming.
It has got me thinking about the phrase “I know (it) by heart.” It is amazing to me that when we talk about words that we’ve memorized, we say this phrase. Not “I know it by mind,” or “I have it in my brain.”
Words we know deeply live in the heart.
The rest of this post is compiled to help you tap into that same beautiful spiritual practice. My thoughts will be shared in the footnotes so you may reference them if you are curious but let this gallery of quotes and pictures guide you to the words that you most want to sit with.
You do not have to take everything in. Read the same thing as many times as you want, letting the words wash over you. Pick out phrases you like and say them out loud or write them in a stylized way. I choose calligraphy but doodling letters or creating a Canva post works, too. Whatever helps you slow down and take the words in.
I hope you find something you want to know by heart.
“My mission is to heal Lucille, if I can, as much as I can. What I know is that I am not the only one who has felt the things I feel. And so, if what I write helps to heal others, that’s excellent, but my main thing is for me not to fall into despair, which I have done on occasion and could do at any time.”
— Lucille Clifton, “I’d Like Not to Be a Stranger in the World”
the light that came to lucille clifton
came in a shift of knowing
when even her fondest sureties
faded away. it was the summer
she understood that she had not understood
and was not mistress even
of her own off eye, then
the man escaped throwing away his tie and
the children grew legs and started walking and
she could see the peril of an
unexamined life.
she closed her eyes, afraid to look for her
authenticity
but the light insists on itself in the world;
a voice from the nondead past started talking,
she closed her ears and it spelled out in her hand
“you might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.”
Gentle people,
This was a different kind of post for me but I like it. I have been wanting to write meditations on here and experiment with new formats. Let me know how this one works.
Wishing you a gentle landing!
This was beautiful, thank you for sharing!!