#tuesdayafternoons

The young women I work with on Tuesday afternoons are stunning.

Today, we sit in a circle after they have just done an Image Theater scene. The scene entailed 4 of them in stilled expressions--someone's head is bowed with a piece of paper in her hand. Someone is reaching their arm out from the other side of the room to the person holding the paper and two others are standing a few feet away. One is holding back the other who's arm is raised in the air. The other women sitting in their chairs must guess what is going on in this scene.

I have them playing out a domestic violence incident in the home where one parent is crossing the line of discipline and entering into physical abuse of their child over making poor grades. A grandparent is reaching out their arm in the background to comfort the child.

The image of the parent lifting their hand high in the air ready to strike caused four stories from their own lives to pour out.

"Can we talk about this?"

"I'm here. Go for it." I say.

"I hate my living situation. I hate my home life. That fist in the air you see, that's my house all the time."

"My aunt and uncle, I hate them. You don't understand, I dream of killing them and then I wake up in the morning and look them in the eye and I'm thinking like, 'do you know I just killed you in my dream'?"

They tell me of faces slammed repeatedly against radiators and young, pregnant mothers kicked out of the house.

I tell them, "I hear you. I understand. I used to hate my mother. When I talk about these memories I feel like I'm going to turn into Incredible Hulk!"

"Don't even talk to me about Incredible Hulk," one of them says to me. "My little brother scares me. I think he hatched out of something off of a branch. I'm like scared to see him angry."

I listen and re-live 11903 Ivahar Street where all the blood and ambulances and police and fist-busted walls let me know I was home.

They speak their memories as we go around this circle and I feel waves of heat and tenderness all over my body as their images make me think of my own. I am teaching them how to do this--find an image, tell a memory moment, and finally influence the memory by having an intentional relationship with it, so that it is not controlling you.

But we haven't gotten to the finally part yet. In this moment, I am wondering how we will. Right now I am scared of my own brother who can punch his fist through a wall, dares to race drivers who piss him off and has to be escorted out of night clubs for not backing down to men who claim they have guns in the trunks of their cars. I am scared though he is four states away and none of these moments have happened in a few years. But when I re-imagine them no one can tell me that they are not happening right now. Me and three of the young women are rubbing our knees and straining the veins in our necks as we tell our stories. We are entangled, and yet I know this is the very kind of entanglement that will lead to us being set free.

#messageforghosts,"i'm going to Guinea!"

Lupe Fiasco has much to say in his records, but at 3:32pm today sitting on my couch watching his video he made this Taurean break her mold and write a post about the clip now, though i'm supposed to wait until tomorrow to see if this moment "stays with me". But we don't always have tomorrow, Lupe has reminded me. I watch him lift his arm to wipe his tears and tell Swift from MTV that he is crying "because some of them dudes is dead."

Go here to for the video: http://www.mtv.com/videos/news/819012/lupe-fiasco-breaks-down-over-the-ghosts-from-his-block.jhtml


I don't wait to write my post after watching the full 9:12 clip. By the seventh minute my brother and my brother's brothers are flashing through my mind on their street corners, standing in doorways of clubs, daring other brothers to step to them, with big teddybear hearts inside. I'm watching the project buildings on Madison and Chicago Ave where Lupe grew up and remembering the ones I grew up in. My mother kept us in nice homes by the time we were old enough to identify home as who you are. "Your parents were right. You got to get out."

Lupe watches the "ghosts" in his old video, the men who are no longer there standing next to the men who "will die there too". "I got out. I didn't like the hood. Dat shit aint cute." I think about this story being the same story for many black families and many people of any race--surprising our ghosts. Telling them I will be more than what I see around me--I will be what I want for me, what I see in my mind.

"Hey ghosts," I say. "I'm going to Guinea!" Telling my ghosts officially today that I am confirmed to go to Equatorial Guinea for 5 days to represent my work on transformational storytelling at a youth summit in August. Ashe.

#manifestingisbeautiful

Today was one long beautiful moment. It was a microcosm of my life.

Jullien and I rode our bikes around to friends' homes to hand them our wedding favors.

"You keep manifesting" he tells me after I say I need air for my tires, the saxophonist Chelsea Barret rides past us at Fort Tryon Park, and I ride past an open fire hydrant.

I spoke "I'm going to use another pump" when we left our house when he mentioned my tires were low. I dropped Chelsea's flyer from off my dresser before leaving and remembered how well she did at the Jam session at the BK museum the other day. I realized I needed water after we were riding. After finding myself standing at a traffic light at Lafayette and Bedford Ave with splashes of water all over me from the hydrant we ran into once Chelsea Barret past us it was clear this was a manifesting day. A day I like to define as beautiful. Manifesting is beautiful. 


We went on to run into people on our list who said we would have to drop off our package another day since at the time we called them they were no where near their home. Two hours later our bike route had us choosing streets and paths that had us run into them.

As my grateful moment calendar alert went off later that night, what first came to me was "I'm grateful for this beautiful day." Then I heard, "My life is a microcosm of this day. My life is beautiful." I meditated on this and was humbled by taking a moment to repeat "my life is a microcosm of this beautiful day." In my mind, the rest of my life spread out like a flat earth as I repeated this phrase and it laid over the entire earth helping me see this is what is, my life as a beautiful day.

#bodiesandtime

I'm riding the A train. There is an empty seat next to me. Across from me an Asian man wearing a green t-shirt with a goatee and baggy jeans sits down and cocks his head to one side. There is an empty seat adjacent to him. A woman has rushed over to two empty seats and taken the one in the corner by the window and another woman has come right behind her and sat in the empty seat next to her. The woman next to the window huffs, tightens her knees together and hugs her purse then stares straight ahead. I open my legs to stretch out and let my shoulders fall.

There are lots of other empty spaces on this train ride. I rest my spine against my seat. It's 2:30pm. I am on time to where I have to go. I look inside of the spaces to see they are filled with pause and silence. The schedules we are holding to dissolve in this pause and silence. "We have forever right now," my spirit tells me. 


In between these bodies is time and time is forever whether I am here in it or not but right now I am. So for 10 minutes I enjoy forever before we reach my stop. 

#stayingalive

#stayingalive

545pm On Rochester Avenue in Brooklyn.

I coast down the steep hill on my bike. I zip past pieces of broken glass and blots of oil spills. The flutter of pigeon wings, bits of rocks, and passing comments like 'she's serious' are the dust of my tracks. I am really on the Tour de France and the only black woman to come this close to winning. The families and couples I fly past are supporters, and their cell phones are paper cups filled with water they're handing me. I am attempting to break the record of fastest time not only from Grand Army Plaza library to my house on Fulton and Utica streets, but the fastest 3.5 mile bike ride in history. 


But the shards of glass I zoom past could get caught in one or both of my tires, and like the millions of times Wiley the Coyote, Daffy Duck, or Elmer Fudd's plans were foiled due to a flattened tire that sent them soaring in the air and crashing on concrete, my wheels could spin out of turn and skirt my face along the tar of the street. Or an oil spill could spin me into a frenzy and I collide against a Mack truck at any one of the busy intersections on St. John's Place, Bergen street or Atlantic avenue. 


"What the f*** is she doing?!!" 
A woman yells from a passenger seat in a black Ford Explorer as I screech my brakes. 


"Oops. I didn't know there wasn't a STOP sign." I say aloud, hoping I can be heard by the older woman moseying behind me, or the woman clutching her gray purse waiting on the corner with poise and staring ahead. I ease up the hill, then begin to zoom down, peddling with the wind. What if someone runs a red light? A fiery red car and its dare devil driver want to make the light but it turns just as red as the car is, then the driver pumps up speed just as I'm peeking out to get ahead of the cars behind me, as my light turns green--SPLAT!--it could happen. 


STOP. 


I pull the brakes at my next red light. I place one foot on the ground and hear, "What is. See what is, Pam." 


I am riding my bike down the street. I have peddled fast. Cars are driving around me. I stop at red lights and I ride at green ones. Broken glass is in the street, but it has remained there. Puddles of oil spill sit at ever other traffic light, but I have rode around them. I almost ran into traffic and I made a woman mad that was in the car I was nearing. I caught myself and turned my front wheel towards the curb. I have not been hit by a Mack truck, I have not spun and flew into the air. I am not on the Tour de France. I am two blocks away from home and riding fast because I stayed at the library longer than I planned to and I want to start dinner for my husband, making pizza as a surprise since we never eat it because I'm allergic to cheese.


My imagination is thrilling many times because it places me so close to death. Being present keeps me alive. Alive to the moment. Being with the ride I am on. Sometimes it is not as loud or as colorful as my mind but it gets me home, where I always want to end up.  

#aroomtoplayin

I'm on the phone last night around 11pm. The house has just been cleared of two families--4 adults, three kids + me and my new husband who have just cleaned up the place after hosting a dinner party. It is a day and a half after he and I have returned from our honeymoon. I'm in my 'Jewish girl skirt', black, cotton, and flowing down to my knees with black fuzz balls. My legs are sprawled out on our sandy colored couch and I'm wearing my ear piece listening to Shirley.

"Pam, I know its only been a week, but would you say anything has changed, I mean any significant difference in you that you can notice since the wedding?"

Shirley is moving to Austin, Texas in two weeks. We held each other at my wedding for a long time, then stood side by side with my hand on the tip of her elbow.

I see a room with a door that is open. I am standing in the center of the room as the door shuts. All of the walls are white and sun is subtly filling one corner of the room.

I tell Shirley this is what I see.

"I think I am in a home that belongs to me and Jullien but I am in my own room in that home. Before the wedding I was standing in a room with all these walls but there was a gap in one of them because the door was open, like there were still options, other people I could engage, other paths to love. Now I'm saying he is the only one I want to go down the paths to love with and that in it self feels like something solidifying. Not that the wedding made it solid, but we did the wedding because we were solid in that choice. Then for me as an individual it was a solid choice I made. Now I'm in this room and I can do whatever I want to all these walls, color them, mount stuff, now that they are all available to me with that door being closed."

I was choosing who I wanted to invite over for dinner on the final days of our honeymoon cruise. The next day I watched recipe videos and went to the grocery store to buy ingredients for garlic shrimp, mozzarella pizza, and fruity curried chicken salad. I would top everything off with my first homemade Iced-Tea. This is a decoration of one of the walls I started to apply. The next one is this blog.

This is my first entry to a blog on moments and meaning. It is my belief that every moment has in it a meaning. I am posting moments that I remember the next day because they stayed with me. These moments will be about Relationships, Self, and Vision. Enjoy the reads!